PERIHELION AND PESTILENCE.
If there is anything in “astrological etiology,” we are approaching one of the most pestilential periods in earth’s history. Since the commencement of the Christian era, the perihelia of the four great planets of the solar system—Jupiter, Uranus, Saturn, and Neptune have not been coincident. But this is about to occur, and, in the language of Dr. Knapp, who has traced the history of the greatest epidemics that ever afflicted the human race to the perihelia of these planets, there will soon be “lively times for the doctors.” The theory is that when one or more of the large planets is nearest to the sun, the temperature and condition of our atmosphere are so disturbed as to cause injurious vicissitudes, terrible rains, prolonged droughts, &c., resulting in the destruction of crops, and pestilences among human beings and domestic animals. Dr. Knapp has collected a mass of statistical data, all going to show that perihelion periods have been marked by unusual mortality, and that sickness and death have invariably corresponded with the number of planets in perihelion at the same time. The revolution of Jupiter around the sun is accomplished in a little less than twelve years, of Saturn in a little less than thirty, of Uranus in about eighty-four years, and of Neptune in about one hundred and sixty-four years. If it be true, therefore, that the perihelia of these planets occasion atmospheric conditions unfavorable to life, pestilential periods should occur once in a dozen years, and aggravated and still more wide-spread epidemics at longer intervals. In tracing the history of epidemics for more than two thousand years, Dr. Knapp finds the facts in all cases to validate the theory. Thus, in the sixth and again in the sixteenth centuries, three of these planets were coincident in perihelion, and those were the most pestilential times of the Christian era. But soon we are to have, for the first time in two thousand years, all four of these planets against us. They will be at their nearest approach to the sun in or soon after 1880, so that for a few years, say from 1880 to 1885, the vitality of every living thing will be put to a severe and trying ordeal. Some persons think they see, in the signs of the times, evidences of the great disasters in the immediate future. The excessive heat, the unexampled cold, the prevalence of flood and disasters at sea, the general failure of the potato crop, the wide-spread chill fever among human beings, and the equal prevalence of the epizootic among animals, are mentioned as among the premonitions of the rapidly approaching perihelion. Well, “to be forewarned is to be forearmed.” Accidents excepted, we know very well that persons of more vigorous constitutions and more hygienic habits will have the better chance to survive whatever adverse influence the extraordinary perihelia will occasion. It is well known to physicians that, in all pestilences, plague, typhus, small-pox, cholera, murrain, &c., the intemperate, the dissipated, and those whose sanitary conditions are bad, furnish the victims. We do not write to alarm any one, nor to make a sensation: we state the facts which all history attests. Readers can judge for themselves what importance to attach to the subject. That the conjoint perihelion of all the large planets of the solar system, one of which, Jupiter, is a thousand times as large as the earth, must disturb our atmosphere and temperature very considerably, is probable; that this disturbance must be injurious to health and life is certain; and that these periods have heretofore been pestilential, is a matter of record. How much we shall suffer during the next dozen or fifteen years, depends very much upon how nearly we live a life in accordance with the laws of life.—Science of Health.