Page - 717 - in The Complete Aristotle

when exhalation of the right consistency rises from below and meets it. The kind of comet varies according to the shape which the exhalation happens to take. If it is diffused equally on every side the star is said to be fringed, if it stretches out in one direction it is called bearded. We have seen that when a fiery principle of this kind moves we seem to have a shooting-star: similarly when it stands still we seem to have a star standing still. We may compare these phenomena to a heap or mass of chaff into which a torch is thrust, or a spark thrown. That is what a shooting-star is like. The fuel is so inflammable that the fire runs through it quickly in a line. Now if this fire were to persist instead of running through the fuel and perishing away, its course through the fuel would stop at the point where the latter was densest, and then the whole might begin to move. Such is a comet-like a shooting-star that contains its beginning and end in itself. When the matter begins to gather in the lower region independently the comet appears by itself. But when the exhalation is constituted by one of the fixed stars or the planets, owing to their motion, one of them becomes a comet. The fringe is not close to the stars themselves. Just as haloes appear to follow the sun and the moon as they move, and encircle them, when the air is dense enough for them to form along under the sun’s course, so too the fringe. It stands in the relation of a halo to the stars, except that the colour of the halo is due to reflection, whereas in the case of comets the colour is something that appears actually on them. Now when this matter gathers in relation to a star the comet necessarily appears to follow the same course as the star. But when the comet is formed independently it falls behind the motion of the universe, like the rest of the terrestrial world. It is this fact, that a comet often forms independently, indeed oftener than round one of the regular stars, that makes it impossible to maintain that a comet is a sort of reflection, not indeed, as Hippocrates and his school say, to the sun, but to the very star it is alleged to accompany-in fact, a kind of halo in the pure fuel of fire. As for the halo we shall explain its cause later. The fact that comets when frequent foreshadow wind and drought must be taken as an indication of their fiery constitution. For their origin is plainly due to the plentiful supply of that secretion. Hence the air is necessarily drier and the moist evaporation is so dissolved and dissipated by the quantity of the hot exhalation as not readily to condense into water.-But this phenomenon too shall be explained more clearly later when the time comes to speak of the winds.-So when there are many comets and they are dense, it is as we say, and the years are clearly dry and windy. When they are fewer and fainter this effect does not appear in the same degree, though as a rule the is found to be 717