Excerpt from The Action of Jupiter Upon Comet D, 1889 At present the comet is moving in a small seven years' ellipse. Mr. Chandler found that before the encounter with Jupiter the comet had been moving in a large ellipse, With a twenty-seven years period, whose perihelion was almost exactly the present aphelion distance. That is, the original orbit was not only much larger than the present one, but its position in space was different, the directions of the lines of apsides and nodes were nearly completely reversed, and the plane of the orbit was tilted a number of degrees. Again Mr. Chandler shows that, assuming the above changes to be substan tially correct, there could have been no previous close ap proach to any planet, sufficient to appreciably disturb the comet's orbit, back to the year 1779. But that in that year the comet again passed under the control of Jupiter and then experienced a radical change of orbit, and that, at the same point of longitude where Lexell%scomet underwent its notable disturbance in that year. Moreover the most probable ele ments of Lexell's comet subsequent to its disturbance and those of Comet d previous to 1886 show such a striking like ness, that one at once infers the identity of the two bodies. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.