Excerpt from Halley's Comet: An Evening Discourse to the British Association, at Their Meeting at Dublin, on Friday, September 4, 1908

The British Association is to meet next year at Winnipeg so that before it again assembles on this side of the Atlantic Halley's comet will have returned once more to perihelion. its last return was in 1835; and judging by the records of that time, it may be expected to be a fairly bright comet in May, 1910. But it will be by no means one of the brightest comets: it will probably not compare, for instance, with the great comet of 1858, which some of us remember, and which is associated with a famous vintage. The fame of Halley's comet is due to two causes almost independent of its bright ness: to its long history (which has now been carried back definitely, by the admirable work of Messrs. Cowell and Crommelin of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, to B. C. And to the circumstances under which it became associated with the name of Halley, who discovered, not the comet itself, but its periodic character. This dis covery - that the same comet might and actually did return to us again and again - followed as a natural consequence from Newton's great discovery of the Law of Gravitation and the story of Halley's comet thus forms an integral part of the most important event in the whole history of science. The Law of Gravitation was not realized in its complete form at a Single epoch: N ewton's work began in 1665, and was not matured until 1685: while Halley's deduction was dated twenty years later still But even forty years is a short period for the unrolling of that great revolution in scientific thought. We shall better understand the magni tude of the change if we first glance at a few records showing the state Of affairs immediately preceding.

In the very year 1665, in which Newton, driven from. Cambridge by the incipient Great Plague, first began to meditate on Gravitation, there was published the first number of the Philosophical Transactions of the recently established Royal Society of London. And in that first number is.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.