Introduction of poisonous vapours into the terrestrial atmosphere–The end of the world and the imaginary comet of Edgar Poe; Conversation of Eiros and Charmion –Poetry and Science; impossibilities and contradictions.

We now come to that other cometary influence which we have already alluded to, an influence capable of changing the air we breathe by the introduction of foreign effluvia.

Nothing within the range of fact and observation, up to the present time, affords ground for belief in such an influence. But this hypothesis has had the fortune to be presented in a striking and practical form by a modern writer of powerful imagination. The American poet Edgar Poe, whose Extraordinary Histories are known to everyone, has placed in the mouth of a being who has suffered death, an account of the destruction of the world by the near approach of a comet. We subjoin the principal portion of this wonderful dream, in which Eiros relates to Charmion the circumstances which put an end to the world.

‘ The individual calamity was, as you say, entirely unanticipated, but analogous misfortunes had been long a subject of discussion with astronomers. I need scarce tell you, my friend, that, even when you left us, men had agreed to understand those passages in the most holy writings which speak of the final destruction of all things by fire as having reference to the orb of the earth alone.