which has attracted so much attention in the last half-century (chapter xiii., § 301).
146. The treatise on Comets (1619) contained an account of a comet seen in 1607, afterwards famous as Halley's comet (chapter x., § 200), and of three comets seen in 1618. Following Tycho, Kepler held firmly the view that comets were celestial not terrestrial bodies, and accounted for their appearance and disappearance by supposing that they moved in straight lines, and therefore after having once passed near the earth receded indefinitely into space; he does not appear to have made any serious attempt to test this theory by comparison with observation, being evidently of opinion that the path of a body which would never reappear was not a suitable object for serious study. He agreed with the observation made by Fracastor and Apian (chapter iii., § 69) that comets' tails point away from the sun, and explained this by the supposition that the tail is formed by rays of the sun which penetrate the body of the comet and carry away with them some portion of its substance, a theory which, allowance being made for the change in our views as to the nature of light, is a curiously correct anticipation of modern theories of comets' tails (chapter xiii., § 304).
In a book intended to have a popular sale it was necessary to make the most of the "meaning" of the appearance of a comet, and of its influence on human affairs, and as Kepler was writing when the Thirty Years' War had just begun, while religious persecutions and wars had been going on in Europe almost without interruption during his lifetime, it was not difficult to find sensational events which had happened soon after or shortly before the appearance of the comets referred to. Kepler himself was evidently not inclined to attach much importance to such coincidences; he thought that possibly actual contact with a comet's tail might produce pestilence, but beyond that was not prepared to do more than endorse the pious if somewhat neutral opinion that one of the uses of a comet is to remind us that we are mortal. His belief that comets are very numerous is expressed in the curious form: "There are as many arguments to prove the annual motion of the earth round the sun as there are comets in the heavens."
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