Just at the close of the seventeenth century the Jesuit Reinzer, professor at Linz, put forth his Meteorologia Philosophico-Politica, in which all natural phenomena received both a physical and a moral interpretation.

It was profusely and elaborately illustrated, and on account of its instructive contents was in 1712 translated into German for the unlearned reader.
The comet receives, of course, great attention.

"It appears," says Reinzer, "only then in the heavens when the latter punish the earth, and through it (the comet) not only predict but bring to pass all sorts of calamity....

And, to that end, its tail serves for a rod, its hair for weapons and arrows, its light for a threat, and its heat for a sign of anger and vengeance." Its warnings are threefold: (1) "Comets, generated in the air, betoken NATURALLY drought, wind, earthquake, famine, and pestilence." (2) "Comets can indirectly, in view of their material, betoken wars, tumults, and the death of princes; for, being hot and dry, they bring the moistnesses (Feuchtigkeiten) in the human body to an extraordinary heat and dryness, increasing the gall; and, since the emotions depend on the temperament and condition of the body, men are through this change driven to violent deeds, quarrels, disputes, and finally to arms: especially is this the result with princes, who are more delicate and also more arrogant than other men, and whose moistnesses are more liable to inflammation of this sort, inasmuch as they live in luxury and seldom restrain themselves from those things which in such a dry state of the heavens are especially injurious." (3) "All comets, whatever prophetic significance they may have naturally in and of themselves, are yet principally, according to the Divine pleasure, heralds of the death of great princes, of war, and of other such great calamities; and this is known and proved, first of all, from the words of Christ himself: 'Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.'"(108) (108) See Reinzer, Meteorologica Philosophico-Politica (edition of Augsburg, 1712), pp.

101-103.
While such pains was taken to keep the more highly educated classes in the "paths of scriptural science and sound learning;" at the universities, equal efforts were made to preserve the cometary orthodoxy of the people at large by means of the pulpits.