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New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 7057, 19 February 1910, Page 6

Of all the comets that have ever been, discovered. Halley's is the most important, because it is the most historical. It flashed upon the world when Egypt was young, and when Greece was a wilderness inhabited by savages. Perhaps it will continue to return when mankind is old and decrepit, and the earth is entering that last tragic stage of its exieter.ee when it will be reduced to a cold, dead, desolate world. Yet, ancient,as the comet is J its scientific history begins with the man whose name it bears and with Sir Isaac Newton. It was Edmund Halley who ur.qed noon Newton the necessity of publishing that famous manuscript in which the laws of gravitation-are laid-down; it was Halley who paid for the printincout of his own

pocket, althouah he was sorely reduced m circumstances; and it was Halley who dramaticallv drove heme the truth of Newton's immutable laws and became the prophet of gravitation, by plotting the orbit of a comet that had alarmed the world in 1531, 1507 and ICB2, and foretelling its j-eturn in 1755. A'man.of forty-nine when he boldlv proclaimed tthe comet's reappearance, he knew; that/' he would die before his prediction ooula be verified; and so he left behind .him a touching plea that reads: — " Wherefore, if, according to what we have already said, it should return again absut" the year 1758, candid posterity will not refuse to acknowledge that this was first discovered by an Englishman."- *