When Earth crossed a comet’s tail

The 1896 account says Earth passed through a tail of the Great Comet of 1861 and was wholly immersed for about four hours. It reports no perceptible effect on the weather^[1]. To the book’s author, that startling lack of effect suggested that cometary material was “some millions of times rarer than our atmosphere”, a period inference rather than a claim about current scientific consensus^[2].