Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

BIELA’S COMET, 423

nation; and as they jumped pell-mell into wells, so we haye seen them in Job clambering down ropes into the narrow-mouthed, bottomless pit.

Who shall say how often the characteristics of our atmosphere have been affected by accessions from extraterrestrial sources, resulting in conflagrations or pestilences, in failures of crops, and in famines? Who shall say how far great revolutions and wars and other perturbations of humanity have been due to similar modifications? There is a world of philosophy in that curious story, “Dr. Ox’s Hobby,” wherein we are told how he changed the mental traits of a village of Hollanders by increasing the amount of oxygen in the air they breathed.