Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

136 THE LEGENDS.

their course side by side. When the great comet of 1811 appeared, another of almost equal magnitude followed it. Seneca informs us that Ephoras, a Greek writer of the fourth century before Christ, had recorded the singular fact of a comet’s separation into two parts.

“This statement was deemed incredible by the Roman

philosopher. More recent observations of similar phenomena leave no room to question the historian’s veracity.” *

The Chinese annals record the appearance of three comets—one large and two smaller ones—at the same time, in the year 896 of our era.

“They traveled together for three days. The little ones disappeared first and then the large one.”

And again :

“On June 27th, a. p. 416, two comets appeared in the constellation Hercules, and pursued nearly the same path.” f

If mere proximity to the earth served to split Biela’s comet into two fragments, why might not a comet, which came near enough to strike the earth, be broken into several separate forms ?

So that there is nothing improbable in Hesiod’s description of two or three aérial monsters appearing at or about the same time, or of one being the apparent offspring of the other, since a large comet may, like Biela’s, have broken in two before the eyes of the people.

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 gaye 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.

* Kirkwood, ‘Comets and Meteors,” p. 50. + Ibid., p. 51.