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.