Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel

s to my theory which have probably presen

it may

t have been such an ice-age as the glacialists affirm,

of Edinburgh; but we can not realize that any tropical or semitropical plant could have survived in Africa when a precipice of ice, five thousand feet high, frowned on the coast of Italy; or that any form of life could have survived on earth when the equator in South America was covered with a continental ice-she

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, it may

Drift; what right, then, has any one man to set up

ide, is a majority; and one man, with the

ce rested, solitary and

rn an acorn

ce a new idea without a surgical operation. He might have added that, when you had once forc

ike a colossal mountain-chain, chilling the atmosphere on both sides of it for a thousand miles. The Hannibal who would r

ere then positive that glaciers caused the Drift. But the glaciers were found to be inadequate for the emergency; and so the continents were lifted up fifteen hundred feet, and the ice-sheets were in

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hat they once marched over the land in this fashion fr

s universal. The voice of the people is only the voice of God in the

ays an

under the glaciers of to-day; theref

e been; therefore the glaciers did not cause the striations. "A short horse is soon curried." Supe

says

vering it with débris, is so stupendous, so out of

of the phenomena. The facts are a good deal more stupendous than the theory. Go out and look at the first Drift deposit; dig into it a hundred feet or more; follow it for a few hundred miles or more; then come back, and scratch your head, a

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e problem? If neither waves, nor icebergs, nor glaciers, nor ice-sheets,

the incontrovertible e

reat

den cata

ration of the

eat c

ds and snows and

human l

aces all these elements, and then, a

er wi

e Arabian tale, where no rain is said to have fallen for seven years; and in another place you t

be warm everywhere. There can be no clouds without condensation, no condensation without some degree of cooling. Where would the air cool first? Naturally at the points most remote from the equator, the poles. Hence, while the sun was

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uator, casting down continually increasing volumes of rain. Snow would begin to form near the poles, and it too would advance. We would finally have, down to say the thirty-fifth degree of north and south latitude, vast belts o

drizzling gusts and rain. But the south part of Ginungagap was lighted up by the glowing sparks that flew out of Muspelheim' (Africa?). Added Thride: 'As cold and all thing

er ma

m which the white, the yellow, and the brown races were differentiated, were saved

not, in either event, affect the question of the origin of the Drift. It is simply an opinion of my own, open

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dwelt in India at that time; some of the strange Hill-tribes of

f man's survival was in that Atlantic i

uring which the face of the earth was swept by horrible cyclones, born of the dreadful heat. As soon, however, as they could safely do so, the remnant of the people must have left the cave; the limited nature of their food-supplies would probably drive them out. Once outside, their condition was pitiable indeed. First, they encountered the great heat; the cooling of the atmosphere had not yet begun;

n came the clouds, the rains, the floods, the snows, the darkness; and still the people w

.

ly spread to Europe,

, "how long did

rs, centuries. The Toltec legends say that their ancesto

Given heat enough to raise this mass, given the cold caused by its evaporation, given the time necessary for the great battle between this heat and this condensation, given the time to restore this body of water to the ocean, not once but many times,--for, along the southern border of the floods, where Muspel

may b

that the Drift is found in Siberia and the res

pposed, strike the earth instantaneously, but that it continued to fall during twenty-four ho

.

they need not necessarily have r

her

d by the ridges radiating from Atlantis shutting off the Gulf Stream and preventin

their presence or absence, their elevation or depression; but on fuller investigation I find that they are inadequate to account for

y be

al of great blocks, weighing many tons, for

e will remember the excessive heat and the electrical derangements that must have accompanied the Drift Age, we can realize the tremendous winds spoken of in many of the legends. We have but to multiply the hurricane of

erican Cyclop?dia,

.

her

l does not resemble the usual a?rolites, which are commo

he sky are associated with comets, and are probably lost fragments of comet-tails, these meteoroids do not reach the earth, but are always burned out, far up in our atmosphere, by the friction produced by their motion. The iron a?rolite is of different origin. It

meteoroids, or shooting-stars, are very different from meteorites or a?rolites,

ange bodies, but the evidence now accumulated proves beyond reasonable

he train, and it appears, in like manner, that the second comet of 1862 (Swift's comet) is traveling in the orbit

e Bulletin," E. E.

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atmosphere others that they were ejected from terrestrial volcanoes. . . And at the present time the known facts, and all scientific thought, seem to point to the conclusion that the difference between them and ordinary shooting-stars is analogous to that between rain and mist, and, in addition to the reasons already given for connecting them with comets, may be

atisfactory manner, except by supposing that their constituents were originally in the state of vapor, as they now exist in the atmosphere of the sun; and, on the temperature becoming lower, condensed into these "ultimate cosmical particles." These afterward collected into larger masses, which have been variousl

and comets of the solar system were out-throwings from t

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ust such matter as our earth is made of. And hence, if a comet did strike the earth and deposited its ground-up and triturate

ays an

re reaching the earth by the friction of our atmosphere just as we have seen the meteoroids consumed; o

space; it comes within the tremendous attractive power of our globe; it has no parental attraction to restra

e is of the stones and dust of the earth flying to the comet. And the attractive power of the comet, great enough to bold its gigantic mass in place through the long reaches of the fields of space, and even close up to the burning eye of the awful sun itself, h

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ed and furrowed our poor earth's face, as shown in the crushed and striated rocks under the Dr

ked the earth out of position. It has already been suggested that the inclination of the axis of the earth may have been changed at the time of the Dr

other

not have fallen from a comet, because the tails of comets are composed o

ead of a deposit of a few hundred feet, we should have had one of hundreds of miles in thickness. We have seen, (page 94, ante,) that the tail of one comet was thirteen million miles broad; if the particles of dust composing that tail had been as minute as those of clay-dust, and i

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cept the light of the stars, and yet dense enough to reflect the light of the sun, even as a smoke-wreath reflects it, and you can readily see that, long before you reached the end of your journey, you would be buried alive under hundreds of feet of dust. To creatures like ourselves, measuring our stature by feet and inches, a Drift-deposit three hundred feet thick is an immense affair, even as a deposit a foot thick would

s' distance it, too, is dust; it runs in lines or streaks, widely separated; and

g through the

ay seems i

bore the beams

nothe

of the material of the comet are c

.

so likely to leave the earth in a wind-storm as the dust; and in the flight of the comet through space, at the rate o

that's heav

nt flies with

al of the comet falls so far behind that it loses it

her

ys they were certainly deposited in water, formed l

ey were not

r, they would be strati

f the water, fresh-water shells, sea-shells, bones of fish, r

ively from granite. Where are the continents to be foun

from pole to pole, and filled the whole Atlantic Ocean. And how could the washings of rivers hav

mes it that in some places they are red, in others blu

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terval of brackish water, during which the blue and yellow clays would have gradually shaded into each other? The transition from the yellow clay to the blue is as immediate and marked as if you were to lay a piece of yellow cloth across a piece of blue cloth. You can not take the salt out of a vast ocean, big enough to cover half a continent, in a day, a month, a year, or a century. And where were the bowl-like ridges of land that inclosed the continent, and kept out the salt water during the a

y be

you suppose the Drift Age to hold t

have shown, suppose the Drift to have come upon the ea

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ertain constellations. The Deluge of Noah probably occurred somewhere from eight to eleven thousand years ago. Hence, about twenty thousand years probably in

events agrees wi

from paradise, and the Deluge of Noah; and during this period mankind rose to c

ucalion, which many things prove to have been identical with the

e great Deluge of Ogyges

kind have been many times de

may b

at man first rose to civilizat

, the shattered fragments of pre-glacial civilization, and hence becoming to the post-glacial ancient world the center and appar

.

h American Continent civilization was first born, and that it wa

remarkable that the Bible tel

n eastward, in Eden; and there he

dust of the ground," and then he move

was driven out of Eden, and the cherubims guarded the eastern extremity of the garden, to prevent man's return from (we will say) the shore

e moved eastward. In the age of

ion west of the garden, to wit, in America; and here he may have first developed the civilization of which we

ch upon the question of where

bly in some region now under the ocean, as Professor Winchell has sugg

ONCLU

new forms. It showed its influence by developing mammalian life in one direction into the monstrous forms of the mammoth and th

purpose; God's way and God's intent. Neither alone will solve the problem. These are the two limbs of the right angle

e theory of evolution? To know the path by wh

n up out of chance, out of the accident

in the Talmud and the Koran than that t

A flash of light th

ls are engraved, (blurred and obscured,) on the many pages of the vast geological volume, up to this intellectual, charitable, m

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to him who submits to murder for the love of man, who can doubt that the Cain-l

g perpetual praises to that vast atmosphere, ocean, universe of spirituality, out of which matter has been born, of which matter is but a condensation; t

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