Hesiod tells us that the Earth united with Night to do a terrible deed, by which the Heavens were much wronged.  The Earth prepared a large sickle of white iron, with jagged teeth, and gave it to her son Cronus, and stationed him in ambush, and when Heaven came, Cronus, his son, grasped at him, and with his “huge sickle, long and jagged-toothed,” cruelly wounded him.

[1.  Kirkwood, “Comets and Meteors,” p. 60.

2.  Ibid., p. 51.]

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Was this jagged, white, sickle-shaped object a comet?

“And Night bare also hateful Destiny, and black Fate, and Death, and Nemesis.”

And Hesiod tells us that “she,” probably Night—­

“Brought forth another monster, irresistible, nowise like to mortal man or immortal gods, in a hollow cavern; the divine, stubborn-hearted Echidna (half-nymph, with dark eyes and fair cheeks; and half, on the other hand, a serpent, huge and terrible and vast), speckled, and flesh-devouring, ’neath caves of sacred Earth. . . .  With her, they say that Typhaon (Typhon) associated in love, a terrible and lawless ravisher for the dark-eyed maid. . . .  But she (Echidna) bare Chimæra, breathing resistless fire, fierce and huge, fleet-footed as well as strong; this monster had three heads:  one, indeed, of a grim-visaged lion, one of a goat, and another of a serpent, a fierce dragon;

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COMET OF 1862.  Aspect of the head of the comet at nine in the
evening, the 23d August, and the 24th August at the same hour.

{p. 138}

in front a lion, a dragon behind, and in the midst a goat, breathing forth the dread strength of burning fire.  Her Pegasus slew and brave Bellerophon.”

The astronomical works show what weird, and fantastic, and goblin-like shapes the comets assume under the telescope.  Look at the representation on page 137, from Guillemin’s work,[1] of the appearance of the comet of 1862, giving the changes which took place in twenty-four hours.  If we will imagine one of these monsters close to the earth, we can readily suppose that the excited people, looking at “the dreadful spectacle,” (as the Hindoo legend calls it,) saw it taking the shapes of serpents, dragons, birds, and wolves.

And Hesiod proceeds to tell us something more about this fiery, serpent-like monster: 

“But when Jove had driven the Titans out from Heaven, huge Earth bare her youngest-born son, Typhœus (Typhaon, Typhœus, Typhon), by the embrace of Tartarus (Hell), through golden Aphrodite (Venus), whose hands, indeed, are apt for deeds on the score of strength, and untiring the feet of the strong god; and from his shoulders there were a hundred heads of a serpent, a fierce dragon playing with dusky tongues” (tongues of fire and smoke?), “and from the eyes in his wondrous heads are sparkled beneath the brows; whilst from all his heads