by a comet would be naturally more injurious to them than to
common folk who live on coarser food." To this De Vigenere answers that
there are very many persons who live on food as delicate as that enjoyed
by princes and kings, and yet receive no harm from comets. He then goes
on to show that many of the greatest monarchs in history have met death
without any comet to herald it.

(115) For Scaliger, see p. 20 of Dudith's book, cited below.

In the same year thoughtful scepticism of a similar sort found an
advocate in another part of Europe. Thomas Erastus, the learned and
devout professor of medicine at Heidelberg, put forth a letter dealing
in the plainest terms with the superstition. He argued especially that
there could be no natural connection between the comet and pestilence,
since the burning of an exhalation must tend to purify rather than to
infect the air. In the following year the eloquent Hungarian divine
Dudith published a letter in which the theological theory was handled
even more shrewdly, for he argued that, if comets were caused by the
sins of mortals, they would never be absent from the sky. But these
utterances were for the time brushed aside by the theological leaders of
thought as shallow or impious.

In the seventeenth century able arguments against the superstition, on
general grounds, began to be multiplied. In Holland, Balthasar Bekker
opposed this, as he opposed the witchcraft delusion, on general
philosophic grounds; and Lubienitzky wrote in a compromising spirit to
prove that comets were as often followed by good as by evil events. In
France, Pierre Petit, formerly geographer of Louis XIII, and an intimate
friend of Descartes, addressed to the young Louis XIV a vehement protest
against the superstition, basing his arguments not on astronomy, but on
common sense. A very effective part of the little treatise was devoted
to answering the authority of the fathers of the early Church. To do
this, he simply reminded his readers that St. Augustine and St. John
Damascenus had also opposed the doctrine of the antipodes. The book
did good service in France, and was translated in Germany a few years
later.(116)

(116) For Blaise de Vigenere, see his Traite des Cometes, Paris, 1578.
For Dudith, see his De Cometarum Dignificatione, Basle, 1579, to which
the letter of Erastus is appended. Bekker's views may be found in
his Onderzoek van de Betekening der Cometen, Leeuwarden, 1683. For