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AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."
AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."
"I am not inclined to conclude that man had no existence at all before the epoch of the great revolutions of the earth. He might have inhabited certain districts of no great extent, whence, after these terrible events, he repeopled the world. Perhaps, also, the spots where he abode were swallowed up, and the bones lie buried under the beds of the present seas."--CUVIER. [1883] ### THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE DRIFT....
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THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.
THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.
READER,--Let us reason together:-- What do we dwell on? The earth. What part of the earth? The latest formations, of course. We live upon the top of a mighty series of stratified rocks, laid down in the water of ancient seas and lakes, during incalculable ages, said, by geologists, to be from ten to twenty miles in thickness . Think of that! Rock piled over rock, from the primeval granite upward, to a height four times greater than our highest mountains , and every rock stratified like the leave
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CHAPTER I. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DRIFT.
CHAPTER I. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DRIFT.
What is it? Go out with me where yonder men are digging a well. Let us observe the material they are casting out. First they penetrate through a few inches or a foot or two of surface soil; then they enter a vast deposit of sand, gravel, and clay. It may be fifty, one hundred, five hundred, eight hundred feet, before they reach the stratified rocks on which this drift rests. It covers whole continents. It is our earth. It makes the basis of our soils; our railroads cut their way through it; our
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CHAPTER II. THE ORIGIN OF THE DRIFT NOT KNOWN.
CHAPTER II. THE ORIGIN OF THE DRIFT NOT KNOWN.
WHILE several different origins have been assigned for the phenomena known as "the Drift," and while one or two of these have been widely accepted and taught in our schools as established truths, yet it is not too much to say that no one of them meets all the requirements of the case, or is assented to by the profoundest thinkers of our day. Says one authority: "The origin of the unstratified drift is a question which has been much controverted."[1] Louis Figuier says,[2] after considering one o
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CHAPTER III. THE ACTION OF WAVES.
CHAPTER III. THE ACTION OF WAVES.
WHEN men began, for the first time, to study the drift deposits, they believed that they found in them the results of the Noachic Deluge; and hence the Drift was called the Diluvium, and the period of time in which it was laid down was entitled the Diluvial age. It was supposed that-- "Somehow and somewhere in the far north a series of gigantic waves was mysteriously propagated. These waves were supposed to have precipitated themselves upon the land, and then swept madly over mountain and valley
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CHAPTER IV. WAS IT CAUSED BY ICEBERGS?
CHAPTER IV. WAS IT CAUSED BY ICEBERGS?
WE come now to a much more reasonable hypothesis, and one not without numerous advocates even to this day, to wit: that the drift-deposits were caused by icebergs floating down in deep water over the sunken land, loaded with débris from the Arctic shores, which they shed as they melted in the warmer seas of the south. This hypothesis explains the carriage of enormous blocks weighing hundreds of tons from their original site to where they are now found; but it is open to many unanswerable objecti
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CHAPTER V. WAS IT CAUSED BY GLACIERS?
CHAPTER V. WAS IT CAUSED BY GLACIERS?
WHAT is a glacier? It is a river of ice, crowded by the weight of mountain-ice down into some valley, along which it descends by a slow, almost imperceptible motion, due to a power of the ice, under the force of gravity, to rearrange its molecules. It is fed by the mountains and melted by the sun. The glaciers are local in character, and comparatively few in number; they are confined to valleys having some general slope downward. The whole Alpine mass does not move down upon the plain. The movem
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CHAPTER VI. WAS IT CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS?
CHAPTER VI. WAS IT CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS?
WE, come now to the theory which is at present most generally accepted: It being apparent that glaciers were not adequate to produce the results which we find, the glacialists have fallen back upon an extraordinary hypothesis--to wit, that the whole north and south regions of the globe, extending from the poles to 35° or 40° of north and south latitude, were, in the Drift age, covered with enormous, continuous sheets of ice, from one mile thick at its southern margin, to three or five miles thic
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CHAPTER VII. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE.
CHAPTER VII. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE.
IN the first place, the Drift fell upon a fair and lovely world, a world far better adapted to give happiness to its inhabitants than this storm-tossed planet on which we now live, with its endless battle between heat and cold, between sun and ice. The pre-glacial world was a garden, a paradise; not excessively warm at the equator, and yet with so mild and equable a climate that the plants we now call tropical flourished within the present Arctic Circle. If some future daring navigator reaches t
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CHAPTER VIII. GREAT HEAT A PREREQUISITE.
CHAPTER VIII. GREAT HEAT A PREREQUISITE.
Now, it will be observed that the principal theories assigned for the Drift go upon the hypothesis that it was produced by extraordinary masses of ice--ice as icebergs, ice as glaciers, or ice in continental sheets. The scientists admit that immediately preceding this Glacial age the climate was mild and equable, and these great formations of ice did not exist. But none of them pretend to say how the ice came or what caused it. Even Agassiz, the great apostle of the ice-origin of Drift, is force
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CHAPTER I. A COMET CAUSED THE DRIFT.
CHAPTER I. A COMET CAUSED THE DRIFT.
Thirdly, we are to find something which brought to the planet vast, incalculable masses of clay and gravel, which did not contain any of the earth's fossils; which, like the witches of Macbeth, Look not like th' inhabitants of earth, And yet are on it; " which are marked after a fashion which can not be found anywhere else on earth; produced in a laboratory which has not yet been discovered on the planet. Fourthly, we are to find something that would produce cyclonic convulsions upon a scale for
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CHAPTER II. WHAT IS A COMET?
CHAPTER II. WHAT IS A COMET?
IN the first place, are comets composed of solid, liquid, or gaseous substances? Are they something, or the next thing to nothing? It has been supposed by some that they are made of the most attenuated gases, so imponderable that if the earth were to pass through one of them we would be unconscious of the contact. Others have imagined them to be mere smoke-wreaths, faint mists, so rarefied that the substance of one a hundred million miles long could, like the genie in the Arabian story, be inclo
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CHAPTER III. COULD A COMET STRIKE THE EARTH?
CHAPTER III. COULD A COMET STRIKE THE EARTH?
READER, the evidence I am about to present will satisfy you, not only that a comet might have struck the earth in the remote past, but, that the marvel is that the earth escapes collision for a single century, I had almost said for a single year. How many comets do you suppose there are within the limits of the solar system (and remember that the solar system occupies but an insignificant portion of universal space)? Half a dozen-fifty-a hundred-you will answer. Let us put the astronomers on the
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CHAPTER IV. THE CONSEQUENCES TO THE EARTH.
CHAPTER IV. THE CONSEQUENCES TO THE EARTH.
IN this chapter I shall try to show what effect the contact of a comet must have had upon the earth and its inhabitants. I shall ask the reader to follow the argument closely first, that he may see whether any part of the theory is inconsistent with the well-established principles of natural philosophy; and, secondly, that he may bear the several steps in his memory, as he will find, as we proceed, that every detail of the mighty catastrophe has been preserved in the legends of mankind , and pre
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CHAPTER I. THE NATURE OF MYTHS.
CHAPTER I. THE NATURE OF MYTHS.
There come bursts of creative force in history, when great thoughts are born, and then again Brahma, as the Hindoos say, goes to sleep for ages. But, when the fever of creation comes, the poet, the inventor, or the philosopher can no more arrest the development of his own thoughts than the female bird, by her will-power, can stop the growth of the ova within her, or arrest the fever in the blood which forces her to incubation. The man who wrote the Shakespeare plays recognized this involuntary o
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CHAPTER II. DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT?
CHAPTER II. DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT?
FIRST, let us ask ourselves this question, Did man exist before the Drift? If he did, he must have survived it; and he could hardly have passed through it without some remembrance of such a terrible event surviving in the traditions of the race. If he did not exist before the Drift, of course, no myths descriptive of it could have come down to us. This preliminary question must, then, be settled by testimony. Let us call our witnesses "The palæolithic hunter of the mid and late Pleistocene river
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CHAPTER III. LEGENDS OF THE COMING OF THE COMET.
CHAPTER III. LEGENDS OF THE COMING OF THE COMET.
WE turn now to the legends of mankind. I shall try to divide them, so as to represent, in their order, the several stages of the great event. This, of course, will be difficult to do, for the same legend may detail several different parts of the same common story; and hence there may be more or less repetition; they will more or less overlap each other. And, first, I shall present one or two legends that most clearly represent the first coming of the monster, the dragon, the serpent, the wolf, t
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CHAPTER IV. RAGNAROK
CHAPTER IV. RAGNAROK
THERE is in the legends of the Scandinavians a marvelous record of the coming of the Comet. It has been repeated generation after generation, translated into all languages, commented on, criticised, but never understood. It has been regarded as a wild, unmeaning rhapsody of words, or as a premonition of some future earth catastrophe. But look at it! The very name is significant. According to Professor Anderson's etymology of the word, it means "the darkness of the gods"; from regin , gods, and r
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CHAPTER V. THE CONFLAGRATION OF PHAËTON
CHAPTER V. THE CONFLAGRATION OF PHAËTON
Now let us turn to the mythology of the Latins, as preserved in the pages of Ovid, one of the greatest of the poets of ancient Rome.[1] Here we have the burning of the world involved in the myth of Phaëton, son of Phœbus--Apollo--the Sun--who drives the chariot of his father; he can not control the horses of the Sun, they run away with him; they come so near the earth as to set it on fire, and Phaëton is at last killed by Jove, as he killed Typhon in the Greek legends, to save heaven and earth f
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CHAPTER VI. OTHER LEGENDS OF THE CONFLAGRATION.
CHAPTER VI. OTHER LEGENDS OF THE CONFLAGRATION.
THE first of these, and the most remarkable of all, is the legend of one of the Central American nations, preserved not by tradition alone, but committed to writing at some time in the remote past. In the "Codex Chimalpopoca," one of the sacred books of the Toltecs, the author, speaking of the destruction which took place by fire, says: "The third sun" (or era) "is called Quia-Tonatiuh , sun of rain, because there fell a rain of fire; all which existed burned; and there fell a rain of gravel ."
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CHAPTER VII. LEGENDS OF THE CAVE-LIFE.
CHAPTER VII. LEGENDS OF THE CAVE-LIFE.
I HAVE shown that man could only have escaped the fire, the poisonous gases, and the falling stones and clay-dust, by taking refuge in the water or in the deep caves of the earth. And hence everywhere in the ancient legends we find the races claiming that they came up out of the earth. Man was earth-born. The Toltecs and Aztecs traced back their origin to "the seven caves." We have seen the ancestors of the Peruvians emerging from the primeval cave, Pacarin-Tampu ; and the Aztec Nanahuatzin taki
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CHAPTER VIII. LEGENDS OF THE AGE OF DARKNESS.
CHAPTER VIII. LEGENDS OF THE AGE OF DARKNESS.
ALL the cosmogonies begin with an Age of Darkness; a damp, cold, rainy, dismal time. Hesiod tells us, speaking of the beginning of things "In truth, then, foremost sprung Chaos . . . . But from Chaos were born Erebus and black Night; and from Night again sprang forth Æther and Day, whom she bare after having conceived by union with Erebus ." Aristophanes, in his "Aves," says:[1] " Chaos and Night and black Erebus and wide Tartarus first existed ."[2] Orpheus says: " From the beginning the gloomy
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CHAPTER IX. THE TRIUMPH OF THE SUN.
CHAPTER IX. THE TRIUMPH OF THE SUN.
A GREAT solar-myth underlies all the ancient mythologies. It commemorates the death and resurrection of the sun. It signifies the destruction of the light by the clouds, the darkness, and the eventual return of the great luminary of the world. The Syrian Adonis, the sun-god, the Hebrew Tamheur, and the Assyrian Du-Zu, all suffered a sudden and violent death, disappeared for a time from the sight of men, and were at last raised from the dead. The myth is the primeval form of the resurrection. All
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CHAPTER X. THE FALL OF THE CLAY AND GRAVEL.
CHAPTER X. THE FALL OF THE CLAY AND GRAVEL.
I TRUST that the reader, who has followed me thus far in this argument, is satisfied that the legends of mankind point unmistakably to the fact that the earth, in some remote age--before the Polynesians, Red-men, Europeans, and Asiatics had separated, or been developed as varieties out of one family--met with a tremendous catastrophe; that a conflagration raged over parts of its surface; that mankind took refuge in the caves of the earth, whence they afterward emerged to wander for a long time,
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CHAPTER XI. THE ARABIAN MYTHS.
CHAPTER XI. THE ARABIAN MYTHS.
AND when we turn to the Arabian tales, we not only see, by their identity with the Hindoo and Slavonic legends, that they are of great antiquity, dating back to the time when these widely diverse races, Aryan and Semitic, were one, but we find in them many allusions to the battle between good and evil, between God and the serpent. Abou Mohammed the Lazy, who is a very great magician, with power over the forces of the air and the Afrites, beholds a battle between two great snakes, one tawny-color
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CHAPTER XII. THE BOOK OF JOB.
CHAPTER XII. THE BOOK OF JOB.
WE are told in the Bible (Job, i, 16)-- "While he [Job] was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The fire of God is fallen from heaven and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them , and I only am escaped alone to tell thee." And in verse 18 we are told-- "While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: "19. And behold, there came a great wind from the wildernes
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CHAPTER XIII. GENESIS READ BY THE LIGHT OF THE COMET.
CHAPTER XIII. GENESIS READ BY THE LIGHT OF THE COMET.
AND now, gathering into our hands all the light afforded by the foregoing facts and legends, let us address ourselves to this question: How far can the opening chapters of the book of Genesis be interpreted to conform to the theory of the contact of a comet with the earth in the Drift Age? It may appear to some of my readers irreverent to place any new meaning on any part of the sacred volume, and especially to attempt to transpose the position of any of its parts. For this feeling I have the hi
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CHAPTER I. WAS PRE-GLACIAL MAN CIVILIZED?
CHAPTER I. WAS PRE-GLACIAL MAN CIVILIZED?
In the first place, I shall refer to the legends of mankind, wherein they depict the condition of our race in the pre-glacial time. If these statements stood alone, we might dismiss them from consideration, for there would be a strong probability that later ages, in repeating the legends, would attribute to their remote ancestors the civilized advantages which they themselves enjoyed; but it will be seen that these statements are confirmed by the remains of man which have been dug out of the ear
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CHAPTER II. THE SCENE OF MAN'S SURVIVAL
CHAPTER II. THE SCENE OF MAN'S SURVIVAL
LET us pass to another speculation: The reader is not constrained to accept my conclusions. They will, I trust, provoke further discussion, which may tend to prove or disprove them. But I think I can see that many of these legends point to an island, east of America and west of Europe, that is to say in the Atlantic Ocean, as the scene where man, or at least our own portion of the human race, including the white, yellow, and brown races, survived the great cataclysm and renewed the civilization
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CHAPTER III. THE BRIDGE.
CHAPTER III. THE BRIDGE.
THE deep-sea soundings, made of late years in the Atlantic, reveal the fact that the Azores are the mountaintops of a colossal mass of sunken land; and that from this center one great ridge runs southward for some distance, and then, bifurcating, sends out one limb to the shores of Africa, and another to the shores of South America; while there are the evidences that a third great ridge formerly reached northward from the Azores to the British Islands. When these ridges--really the tops of long
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CHAPTER IV. OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED.
CHAPTER IV. OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED.
LET ME consider, briefly, those objections to my theory which have probably presented themsevles { sic } to some of my readers. First, it may be said: "We don't understand you. You argue that there could not have been such an ice-age as the glacialists affirm, and yet you speak of a period of cold and ice and snow." True: 'but there is a great difference between such a climate as that of Scotland, damp and cold, snowy and blowy, and a continental ice-sheet, a mile or two thick, reaching from Joh
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CHAPTER V. BIELA'S COMET.
CHAPTER V. BIELA'S COMET.
HUMBOLDT Says: "It is probable that the vapor of the tails of comets mingled with our atmosphere in the years 1819 and 1823."[1] There is reason to believe that the present generation has passed through the gaseous prolongation of a comet's tail, and that hundreds of human beings lost their lives, somewhat as they perished in the Age of Fire and Gravel, burned up and poisoned by its exhalations. And, although this catastrophe was upon an infinitely smaller scale than that of the old time, still
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CHAPTER VI. THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF OF MANKIND.
CHAPTER VI. THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF OF MANKIND.
THERE are some thoughts and opinions which we seem to take by inheritance; we imbibe them with our mothers' milk; they are in our blood; they are received insensibly in childhood. We have seen the folk-lore of the nations, passing through the endless and continuous generation of children, unchanged from the remotest ages. In the same way there is an untaught but universal feeling which makes all mankind regard comets with fear and trembling, and which unites all races of men in a universal belie
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CHAPTER VII. THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES.
CHAPTER VII. THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES.
IF the reader is satisfied, from my reasoning and the facts I have adduced, that the so-called Glacial Age really represents a collision of the earth with one of these wandering luminaries of space, the question can not but occur to him, Was this the first and only occasion, during all the thousands of millions of years that our planet has been revolving on its axis and circling around the sun, that such a catastrophe has occurred? The answer must be in the negative. We find that all through the
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CHAPTER VIII. THE AFTER-WORD.
CHAPTER VIII. THE AFTER-WORD.
WHEN that magnificent genius, Francis Bacon, sent forth one of his great works to the world, he wrote this prayer: "Thou, O Father, who gavest the visible light as the first-born of thy creatures, and didst pour into man the intellectual light as the top and consummation of thy workmanship, be pleased to protect and govern this work, which coming from thy goodness returneth to thy glory. . . . We humbly beg that this mind may be steadfastly in us; and that thou, by our hands and the hands of oth
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