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 highest respect.
I do not think it is necessary, for the triumph of truth, that it
should lacerate the feelings even of the humblest. It should come,
like Quetzalcoatl, advancing with shining, smiling face, its hands
full of fruits and flowers, bringing only blessings and kindliness to
the multitude; and should that multitude, for a time, drive the
prophet away, beyond the seas, with curses, be assured they will
eventually return to set up his altars.
He who follows the gigantic Mississippi upward from the Gulf of
Mexico to its head-waters on the high plateau of Minnesota, will not
scorn even the tiniest rivulet among the grass which helps to create
its first fountain. So he who considers the vastness for good of this
great force, Christianity, which pervades the world down the long
course of so many ages, aiding, relieving, encouraging, cheering,
purifying, sanctifying humanity, can not afford
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to ridicule even these the petty fountains, the head-waters, the
first springs from which it starts on its world-covering and
age-traversing course.
If we will but remember the endless array of asylums, hospitals, and
orphanages; the houses for the poor, the sick, the young, the old,
the unfortunate, the helpless, and the sinful, with which
Christianity has literally sprinkled the world; when we remember the
uncountable millions whom its ministrations have restrained from
bestiality, and have directed to purer lives and holier deaths, he
indeed is not to be envied who can find it in his heart, with
malice-aforethought, to mock or ridicule it.
At the same time, few, I think, even of the orthodox, while bating no
jot of their respect for the sacred volume, or their faith in the
great current of inspired purpose and meaning which streams through
it, from cover to cover, hold to-day that every line and word is
literally accurate beyond a shadow of question. The direct
contradictions which occur in the text itself show that the errors of
man have crept into the compilation or composition of the volume.
The assaults of the skeptical have been largely directed against the
opening chapters of Genesis:
"What!" it has been said, "you pretend in the first chapter that the
animated creation was made in six days; and then in the second
chapter (verses 4 and 5) you say that the heavens and the earth and
all the vegetation were made in one day. Again: you tell us that
there was light shining on the earth on the first day; and that there
was night too; for 'God divided the light from the darkness'; and
there was morning and evening on the first, second, and third days,
while the sun, moon, and stars, we are told, were not created until
the fourth day; and grass and fruit-trees were made before the sun."
{p. 318}
"How," it is asked, "could there be night and day and vegetation
without a sun?"
And to this assault religion has had no answer.
Now, I can not but regard these opening chapters as a Mosaic work of
ancient legends, dovetailed together in such wise that the true
chronological arrangement has been departed from and lost.
It is conceded that in some of the verses of these chapters God is
spoken of as Elohim, while in the remaining verses he is called
Jehovah Elohim. This is very much as if a book were discovered to-day
in part of which God was referred to as Jove, and in the rest as
Jehovah-Jove. The conclusion would be very strong that the first part
was written by one who know the Deity only as Jove, while the other
portion was written by one who had come under Hebraic influences. And
this state of facts in Genesis indicates that it was not the work of
one inspired mind, faultless and free from error; but the work of two
minds, relating facts, it is true, but jumbling them together in an
incongruous order.
I propose, therefore, with all reverence, to attempt a re-arrangement
of the verses of the opening chapters of the book of Genesis, which
will, I hope, place it in such shape that it will be beyond future
attack from the results of scientific research; by restoring the
fragments to the position they really occupied before their last
compilation. Whether or not I present a reasonably probable case, it
is for the reader to judge.
If we were to find, under the _débris_ of Pompeii, a grand
tessellated pavement, representing one of the scenes of the "Iliad,"
but shattered by an earthquake, its fragments dislocated and piled
one upon the top of another, it would be our duty and our pleasure to
seek, by following the clew of the picture, to re-arrange the
fragments so as
{p. 319}
to do justice to the great design of its author; and to silence, at
the same time, the cavils of those who could see in its shocked and
broken form nothing but a subject for mirth and ridicule.
In the same way, following the clew afforded by the legends of
mankind and the revelations of science, I shall suggest a
reconstruction of this venerable and most ancient work. If the reader
does not accept my conclusions, he will, at least, I trust,
appreciate the motives with which I make the attempt.
I commence with that which is, and should be, the first verse of the
first chapter, the sublime sentence:
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
Let us pause here: "God created the heavens and the earth _in the
beginning_";--that is, before any other of the events narrated in the
chapter. Why should we refuse to accept this statement? _In the
beginning_, says the Bible, at the very first, God created the
heavens and the earth. He did not make them in six days, he made them
_in the beginning_; the words "six days" refer, as we shall see, to
something that occurred long afterward. He did not attempt to create
them, he created them; he did not partially create them, he created
them altogether. The work was finished; the earth was made, the
heavens were made, the clouds, the atmosphere, the rocks, the waters;
and the sun, moon, and stars; all were completed.
What next? Is there anything else in this dislocated text that refers
to this first creation? Yes; we go forward to the next chapter; here
we have it:
Chap. ii, v. 1. "_Thus_ the heavens and the earth were finished, and
all the host of them."
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And then follows:
Chap. ii, v. 4. "These are the generations of the heavens and of the
earth, _when they were created_, IN THE DAY that the Lord God made
the earth and the heavens.
Chap. ii, v. 5. "And every plant of the field before it was in the
earth, and every herb of the field before it grew; for the Lord God
_had not caused it to rain upon the earth_, and there was not a man
to till the ground."
Here we have a consecutive statement--God made the heavens and the
earth in the beginning, and thus they were _finished_, and all the
host of them. They were not made in six days, but "_in the day_," to
wit, in that period of remote time called "The Beginning." And God
made also all the herbs of the field, all vegetation. And he made
every plant of the field before it was cultivated in that particular
part of the world called "The Earth," for, as we have seen, Ovid
draws a distinction between "The Earth" and the rest of the globe;
and Job draws one between "the island of the innocent" and the other
countries of the world.
And here I would call the reader's attention particularly to this
remarkable statement:
Chap. ii, verse 5. "For the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon
the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.
Verse 6. "But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the
whole face of the ground."
This is extraordinary: _there was no rain_.
A mere inventor of legends certainly had never dared make a statement
so utterly in conflict with the established order of things; there
was no necessity for him to do so; he would fear that it would throw
discredit on all the rest of his narrative; as if he should say, "at
that time the grass was not green," or, "the sky was not blue."
{p. 321}
A world without rain! Could it be possible? 'Did the writer of
Genesis invent an absurdity, or did he record an undoubted tradition?
Let us see:
Rain is the product of two things--heat which evaporates the waters
of the oceans, lakes, and rivers; and cold which condenses them again
into rain or snow. Both heat and cold are necessary, In the tropics
the water is sucked up by the heat of the sun; it rises to a cooler
stratum, and forms clouds; these clouds encounter the colder air
flowing in from the north and south, condensation follows,
accompanied probably by some peculiar electrical action, and then the
rain falls.
But when the lemon and the banana grew in Spitzbergen, as geology
assures us they did in pre-glacial days, where was the cold to come
from? The very poles must then have possessed a warm climate. There
were, therefore, at that time, no movements of cold air from the
poles to the equator; when the heat drew up the moisture it rose into
a vast body of heated atmosphere, surrounding the whole globe to a
great height; it would have to pass through this cloak of warm air,
and high up above the earth, even to the limits of the earth-warmth,
before it reached an atmosphere sufficiently cool to condense it, and
from that great height it would fall as a fine mist.
We find an illustration of this state of things on the coast of Peru,
from the river Loa to Cape Blanco,[1] where no rain ever falls, in
consequence of the heated air which ascends from the vast sand
wastes, and keeps the moisture of the air above the point of
condensation.
Or it would have to depend for its condensation on the difference of
temperature between night and day, settling
[1. "American Cyclopædia," vol. xiii, p. 387.]
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like a dew at night upon the earth, and so maintaining vegetation.
What a striking testimony is all this to the fact that these
traditions of Genesis reach back to the very infancy of human
history--to the age before the Drift!
After the creation of the herbs and plants, what came next? We go
back to the first chapter:
Verse 21. "And God created great whales, and every living creature
that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their
kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was
good."
Verse 22. "And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply,
and fill the waters in the seas, and let the fowl multiply in the
earth."
Verse 25. "And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and
cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth
after his kind: and God saw that it was good."
Verse 26. "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the
earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."
We come back to the second chapter:
Verse 7. "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a
living soul."
We return to the first chapter:
Verse 27. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God
created he him; male and female created he them."
We come back to the second chapter:
Verse 8. "And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and
there he put the man he had formed."
Verse 9. "And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree
that is pleasant to the sight and good
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for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the
tree of knowledge of good and evil."
Verse 10. "And a river went out of Eden to water the garden," etc.
Here follows a description of the garden; it is a picture of a
glorious world, of that age when the climate of the Bahamas extended
to Spitzbergen.
Verse 15. "And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden
of Eden to dress it and to keep it."
Here follows the injunction that "the man whom God had formed," (for
he is not yet called Adam--the Adami--the people of Ad,) should not
eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And then we have, (probably a later interpolation,) an account of
Adam, so called for the first time, naming the animals, and of the
creation of Eve from a rib of Adam.
And here is another evidence of the dislocation of the text, for we
have already been informed (chap. i, v. 27) that God had made Man,
"male and _female_"; and here we have him making woman over again
from man's rib.
Verse 25. "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were
not ashamed."
It was an age of primitive simplicity, the primeval world; free from
storms or ice or snow; an Edenic age; the Tertiary Age before the
Drift.
Then follows the appearance of the serpent. Although represented in
the text in a very humble capacity, he is undoubtedly the same great
creature which, in all the legends, brought ruin on the world--the
dragon, the apostate, the demon, the winding or crooked serpent of
Job, the leviathan, Satan, the devil. And as such he is regarded by
the theologians.
He obtains moral possession of the woman, just as we
{p. 324}
have seen, in the Hindoo legends, the demon Ravana carrying off Sita,
the representative of an agricultural civilization; just as we have
seen Ataguju, the Peruvian god, seducing the sister of certain
rayless ones, or Darklings. And the woman ate of the fruit of the
tree.
This is the same legend which we see appearing in so many places and
in so many forms. The apple of Paradise was one of the apples of the
Greek legends, intrusted to the Hesperides, but which they could not
resist the temptation to pluck and eat. The serpent Ladon watched the
tree.
It was one of the apples of Idun, in the Norse legends, the wife of
Brage, the god of poetry and eloquence. She keeps them in a box, and
when the gods feel the approach of old age they have only to taste
them and become young again. Loke, the evil-one, the Norse devil,
tempted Idun to come into a forest with her apples, to compare them
with some others, whereupon a giant called Thjasse, in the appearance
of an enormous eagle, flew down, seized Idun and her apples, and
carried them away, like Ravana, into the air. The gods compelled Loke
to bring her back, for they were the apples of the tree of life to
them; without them they were perishing. Loke stole Idun from Thjasse,
changed her into a nut, and fled with her, pursued by Thjasse. The
gods kindled _a great fire_, the eagle plumage of Thjasse caught the
flames, he _fell to the earth, and was slain by the gods_.[1]
But the serpent in Genesis ruins Eden, just as he did in all the
legends; just as the comet ruined the Tertiary Age. The fair world
disappears; cold and ice and snow come.
Adam and Eve, we have seen, were at first naked, and subsequently
clothe themselves, for modesty, with fig-leaves, (chap. iii, v. 7;)
but there comes a time, as in the
[1. Norse Mythology," pp. 275, 276.]
{p. 325}
North American legends, when the great cold compels them to cover
their shivering bodies with the skins of the wild beasts they have
slain.
A recent writer, commenting on the Glacial Age, says:
"Colder and colder grew the winds. The body could not be kept warm.
Clothing must be had, and this must be furnished by the wild beasts.
Their hides must assist in protecting the life of men. . . . The
skins were removed and transferred to the bodies of men."[1]
Hence we read in chapter iii, verse 21:
"Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the Lord God make _coats of
skins and clothed them_."
This would not have been necessary during the warm climate of the
Tertiary Age. And as this took place, according to Genesis, before
Adam was driven out of Paradise, and while he still remained in the
garden, it is evident that some great change of climate had fallen
upon Eden. The Glacial Age had arrived; the Drift had come. It was a
rude, barbarous, cold age. Man must cover himself with skins; he
must, by the sweat of physical labor, wring a living out of the
ground which God had "cursed" with the Drift. Instead of the fair and
fertile world of the Tertiary Age, producing all fruits abundantly,
the soil is covered with stones and clay, as in Job's narrative, and
it brings forth, as we are told in Genesis,[2] only "thorns and
thistles"; and Adam, the human race, must satisfy its starving
stomach upon grass, "and thou shalt eat the herb of the field"; just
as in Job we are told:
Chap. xxx, verse 3. "For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing
into the wilderness in former time, desolate and solitary."
[1. Maclean's "Antiquity of Man," p. 65.
2. Chap. iii, verse 18.]
{p. 326}
Verse 4. "Who cut up mallows by the bushes and juniper-roots for
their food."
Verse 7. "Among the bushes they brayed, under the nettles were they
gathered together."
And God "_drove out the man_" from the fair Edenic world into the
post-glacial desolation; and Paradise was lost, and--
"At the east of the garden of Eden he placed cherubims and _a flaming
sword_, which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life."
This is the sword of the comet. The Norse legends say:
"Yet, before all things, there existed what we call Muspelheim. It is
a world luminous, glowing, not to be dwelt in by strangers, and
situate at the end of the earth. Surtur holds his empire there. _In
his hand there shines a flaming sword_."
There was a great conflagration between the by-gone Eden and the
present land of stones and thistles.
Is there any other allusion besides this to the fire which
accompanied the comet in Genesis?
Yes, but it is strangely out of place. It is a distinct description
of the pre-glacial wickedness of the world, the fire falling from
heaven, the cave-life, and the wide-spread destruction of humanity;
but the compiler of these antique legends has located it in a time
long subsequent to the Deluge of Noah, and in the midst of a densely
populated world. It is as if one were to represent the Noachic Deluge
as having occurred in the time of Nero, in a single province of the
Roman Empire, while the great world went on its course unchanged by
the catastrophe which must, if the statement were true, have
completely overwhelmed it. So we find the story of Lot and the
destruction of the cities of the plain brought down to the time
{p. 327}
of Abraham, when Egypt and Babylon were in the height of their glory.
And Lot's daughters believed that the whole human family, except
themselves, had been exterminated; while Abraham was quietly feeding
his flocks in an adjacent country.
For if Lot's story is located in its proper era, what became of
Abraham and the Jewish people, and all the then civilized nations, in
this great catastrophe? And if it occurred in that age, why do we
hear nothing more about so extraordinary an event in the history of
the Jews or of any other people?
Mr. Smith says:
"The conduct of Lot in the mountain whither he had retired scarcely
admits of explanation. It has been generally supposed that his
daughters believed that the whole of the human race were destroyed,
except their father and themselves. But how they could have thought
so, when they had previously tarried at Zoar, it is not easy to
conceive; and we can not but regard the entire case as one of those
problems which the Scriptures present as indeterminate, on account of
a deficiency of data on which to form any satisfactory conclusion."[1]
The theory of this book makes the whole story tangible, consistent,
and probable.
We have seen that, prior to the coming of the comet, the human race,
according to the legends, had abandoned itself to all wickedness. In
the Norse Sagas we read:
Brothers will fight together,
And become each other's bane;
Sisters' children
Their sib shall spoil;
Hard, is the world,
Sensual sins grow huge."
[1. "The Patriarchal Age," vol. i, p. 388.]
{p. 328}
In the legends of the British Druids we are told that it was "the
profligacy of mankind" that caused God to send the great disaster.
So, in the Bible narrative, we read that, in Lot's time, God resolved
on the destruction of "the cities of the plain," Sodom, (Od, Ad,) and
Gomorrah, (Go-Meru,) because of the wickedness of mankind:
Chap. xviii, verse 20. "And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom
and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous"--
therefore he determined to destroy them. When the angels came to
Sodom, the people showed the most villainous and depraved appetites.
The angels warned Lot to flee. Blindness (darkness?) came upon the
people of the city, so that they could not find the doors of the
houses. The angels took Lot and his wife and two daughters by the
hands, and led or dragged them away, and told them to fly "to the
mountain, lest they be consumed."
There is an interlude here, an inconsistent interpolation probably,
where Lot stays at Zoar, and persuades the Lord to spare Zoar; but
soon after we find all the cities of the plain destroyed, and Lot and
his family hiding in a cave in the mountain; so that Lot's
intercession seems to have been of no avail:
Verse 24. "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah
_brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven_."
Verse 25. "And he overthrew those cities, and _all the cities of the
plain_, and all the _inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew
upon the ground_."
It was a complete destruction of all living things in that locality;
and Lot "_dwell in a cave_, he and his two daughters."
And the daughters were convinced that they were the
{p. 329}
last of the human race left alive on the face of the earth,
notwithstanding the fact that the Lord had promised (chap. iii, verse
21), "I will not overthrow this city," Zoar; but Zoar evidently _was_
overthrown. And the daughters, rather than see the human race perish,
committed incest with their father, and became the mothers of two
great and extensive tribes or races of men, the Moabites and the
Ammonites.
This, also, looks very much as if they were indeed repeopling an
empty and desolated world..
To recapitulate, we have here, in due chronological order:
1. The creation of the heavens and the earth, and all the host of
them.
2. The creation of the plants, animals, and man.
3. The fair and lovely age of the Pliocene, the summer-land, when the
people went naked, or clothed themselves in the leaves of trees; it
was the fertile land where Nature provided abundantly everything for
her children.
4. The serpent appears and overthrows this Eden.
5. Fire falls from heaven and destroys a large part of the human race.
6. A remnant take refuge in a cave.
7. Man is driven out of the Edenic land, and a blazing sword, a
conflagration, waves between him and Paradise, between Niflheim and
Muspelheim.
What next?
We return now to the first chapter of this dislocated text:
Verse 2. "And the earth _was without form, and void_."
That is to say, chaos had come in the train of the comet. Otherwise,
how can we understand how God, as stated in the preceding verse, has
just made the heavens
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and the earth? How could his work have been so imperfect?
"_And darkness was upon the face of the deep_."
This is the primeval night referred to in all the legends; the long
age of darkness upon the earth.
"And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
The word for _spirit_, in Hebrew, as in Latin, originally meant
_wind_; and this passage might be rendered, "a mighty wind swept the
face of the waters." This wind represents, I take it, the great
cyclones of the Drift Age.
Verse 3. "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."
The sun and moon had not yet appeared, but the dense mass of clouds,
pouring their waters upon the earth, had gradually, as Job expresses
it, "wearied" themselves,--they had grown thin; and the light began
to appear, at least sufficiently to mark the distinction between day
and night.
Verse 4. "And God saw the light: that it was good; and God divided
the light from the darkness."
Verse 5. "And God called the light day, and the darkness be called
night. And the evening and the morning were the first day."
That is to say, in subdividing the phenomena of this dark period,
when there was neither moon nor sun to mark the time, mankind drew
the first line of subdivision, very naturally, at that point of time,
(it may have been weeks, or months, or years,) when first the
distinction between night and day became faintly discernible, and men
could again begin to count time.
But this gain of light had been at the expense of the
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clouds; they had given down their moisture in immense and perpetual
rains; the low-lying lands of the earth were overflowed; the very
mountains, while not under water, were covered by the continual
floods of rain. There was water everywhere. To appreciate this
condition of things, one has but to look at the geological maps of
the amount of land known to have been overflowed by water during the
so-called Glacial Age in Europe.
And so the narrative proceeds:
Verse 6. "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the
waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters."
This has been incomprehensible to the critics. It has been supposed
that by this "firmament" was meant the heavens; and that the waters
"above the firmament" were the clouds; and it has been said that this
was a barbarian's conception, to wit, that the unbounded and
illimitable space, into which the human eye, aided by the telescope,
can penetrate for thousands of billions of miles, was a blue arch a
few hundred feet high, on top of which were the clouds; and that the
rain was simply the leaking of the water through this roof of the
earth. And men have said: "Call ye this real history, or inspired
narrative? Did God know no more about the nature of the heavens than
this?"
And Religion has been puzzled to reply.
But read Genesis in this new light: There was water everywhere;
floods from the clouds, floods from the melting ice; floods on the
land, where the return of the evaporated moisture was not able, by
the channel-ways of the earth, to yet find its way back to the oceans.
"And God said, Let there be a firmament _in the midst of the waters_,
and let it divide the waters from the waters."
{p. 332}
That is to say, first a great island appeared dividing the waters
from the waters. This was "the island of the innocent," referred to
by Job, where the human race did not utterly perish. We shall see
more about it hereafter.
"7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were
under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament:
and it was so.
"8. _And God called the firmament Heaven_. And the evening and the
morning were the second day."
The Hebrew _Rokiâ_ is translated _stereoma_, or _solidity_, in the
Septuagint version. It meant solid land--not empty space.
And if man was not or had not yet been on earth, whence could the
name Heaven have been derived? For whom should God have named it, if
there were no human ears to catch the sound? God needs no lingual
apparatus--he speaks no human speech.
The true meaning probably is, that this was the region that had been
for ages, before the Drift and the Darkness, regarded as the home of
the godlike, civilized race; situated high above the ocean, "_in the
midst of the waters_," in mid-sea; precipitous and mountainous, it
was the first region to clear itself of the descending torrents.
What next?
"9. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered
together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
"10. And God called the dry land Earth and the gathering together of
the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good."
This may be either a recapitulation of the facts already stated, or
it may refer to the gradual draining off of the continents, by the
passing away of the waters; the continents
{p. 333}
being distinguished in order of time from the island "in the midst of
the waters."
"11. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding
seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is
in itself _upon the earth_: and it was so."
It has been objected, as I have shown, that this narrative was false,
because science has proved that the fruit-trees did not really
precede in order of creation the creeping things and the fish, which,
we are told, were not made until the fifth day, two days afterward.
But if we will suppose that, as the water disappeared from the land,
the air grew warmer by the light breaking through the diminishing
clouds, the grass began to spring up again, as told in the Norse,
Chinese, and other legends, and the fruit-trees, of different kinds,
began to grow again, for we are told they produced each "after his
kind."
And we learn "that its seed is in itself upon the earth." Does this
mean that the seeds of these trees were buried in the earth, and
their vitality not destroyed by the great visitation of fire, water,
and ice?
And on the fourth day "God made two great lights," the sun and moon.
If this were a narration of the original creation of these great
orbs, we should be told that they were made exclusively to give
light. But this is not the case. The light was there already; it had
appeared on the evening of the first day; they were made, we are
told, to "divide the day from the night." Day and night already
existed, but in a confused and imperfect way; even the day was dark
and cloudy; but, with the return of the sun, the distinction of day
and night became once more clear.
"14. And God said . . . Let them be for signs and for _seasons_, and
for days and years."
{p. 334}
That is to say, let them be studied, as they were of old, as
astronomical and astrological _signs_, whose influences control
affairs on earth. We have seen that in many legends a good deal is
said about the constellations, and the division of time in accordance
with the movements of the heavenly bodies, which was made soon after
the catastrophe:
"90. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving
creature that hath life, and fowls that may fly above the earth in
the open firmament of heaven."
That is to say, the moving creatures, the fishes which still live,
which have escaped destruction in the deep waters of the oceans or
lakes, and the fowls which were flying wildly in the open firmament,
are commanded to bring forth abundantly, to "replenish" the desolated
seas and earth.
"23. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
"24. And God said, Let the earth _bring forth_ the living creature
after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing and beast of the earth
after his kind: and it was so."
God does not, in this, _create_ them; he calls them forth from the
earth, from the caves and dens where they had been hiding, each
_after his kind_; they were already divided into species and genera.
"28. And God blessed them," (the human family,) "and God said unto
them, Be fruitful, and multiply and REPLENISH the _earth_."
Surely the poor, desolated world needed replenishing, restocking. But
how could the word "replenish" be applied to a new world, never
before inhabited?
We have seen that in chapter ii (verses 16 and 17) God especially
limited man and enjoined him not to eat of the
{p. 335}
fruit of the tree of knowledge; while in v. 22, ch. iii, it is
evident that there was another tree, "the tree of life," which God
did not intend that man should enjoy the fruit of. But with the close
of the Tertiary period and the Drift Age all this was changed: these
trees, whatever they signified, had been swept away, "the blazing
sword" shone between man and the land where they grew, or had grown;
and hence, after the Age of Darkness, God puts no such restraint or
injunction upon the human family. We read:
Ch. i, v. 29. "And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb
bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and _every
tree_, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; _to you it
shall be for meat_."
With what reason, if the text is in its true order, could God have
given man, in the first chapter, the right to eat the fruit of
_every_ tree, and in the following chapters have consigned the whole
race to ruin for eating the fruit of one particular tree?
But after the so-called Glacial Age all limitations were removed. The
tree of knowledge and the tree of life had disappeared for ever. The
Drift covered them.
Reader, waive your natural prejudices, and ask yourself whether this
proposed readjustment of the Great Book does not place it thoroughly
in accord with all the revelations of science; whether it does not
answer all the objections that have been made against the
reasonableness of the story; and whether there is in it anything
inconsistent with the sanctity of the record, the essentials of
religion, or the glory of God.
Instead of being, compelled to argue, as Religion now does, that the
whole heavens and the earth, with its twenty miles in thickness of
stratified rocks, were made in six actual days, or to interpret
"days" to mean vast periods
{p. 336}
of time, notwithstanding the record speaks of "the evening and the
morning" constituting these "days," as if they were really
subdivisions of sun-marked time; we here see that the vast Creation,
and the great lapses of geologic time, all lie far back of the day
when darkness was on the face of the deep; and that the six days
which followed, and in which the world was gradually restored to its
previous condition, were the natural subdivisions into which events
arranged themselves. The Chinese divided this period of
reconstruction into "branches" or "stems"; the race from whom the
Jews received their traditions divided it into days.
The first subdivision was, as I have said, that of the twilight age,
when light began to invade the total darkness; it was subdivided
again into the evening and the morning, as the light grew stronger.
The next subdivision of time was that period, still in the twilight,
when the floods fell and covered a large part of the earth, but
gradually gathered themselves together in the lower lands, and left
the mountains bare. And still the light kept increasing, and the
period was again subdivided into evening and morning.
And why does the record, in each case, tell us that the evening and
the morning "constituted the day, instead of the morning and the
evening? The answer is plain:--mankind were steadily advancing from
darkness to light; each stage terminating in greater clearness and
brightness; they were moving steadily forward to the perfect dawn.
And it is a curious fact that the Israelites, even now, commence the
day with the period of darkness: they begin their Sabbath on Friday
at sunset.
The third subdivision was that in which the continents cleared
themselves more and more of the floods, and the increasing light and
warmth called forth grass and the
{p. 337}
trees, and clothed nature in a mantle of green. Man had come out of
his cave, and there were scattered remnants of the animal kingdom
here and there, but the world, in the main, was manless and
lifeless--a scene of waste and desolation.
In the fourth subdivision of time, the sun, moon, and stars
appeared;--dimly, and wrapped in clouds, in the evening; clearer and
brighter in the morning.
In the next subdivision of time, the fish, which spawn by the
million, and the birds, which quadruple their numbers in a year,
began to multiply and scatter themselves, and appear everywhere
through the waters and on the land. And still the light kept
increasing, and "the evening and the morning were the fifth day."
And on the sixth day, man and the animals, slower to increase, and
requiring a longer period to reach maturity, began to spread and show
themselves everywhere on the face of the earth.
There was a long interval before man sent out his colonies and
repossessed the desolated continents. In Europe, as I have shown,
twelve feet of stalagmite intervenes in the caves between the remains
of pre-glacial and post-glacial man. As this deposit forms at a very
slow rate, it indicates that, for long ages after the great
destruction, man did not dwell in Europe. Slowly, "like a great blot
that spreads," the race expanded again over its ancient
bunting-grounds.
And still the skies grew brighter, the storms grew less, the earth
grew warmer, and "the evening and the morning" constituted the sixth
subdivision of time.
And this process is still going on. Mr. James Geikie says:
"We are sure of this, that since the deposition of the shelly clays,
and the disappearance of the latest local glaciers,
{p. 338}
there have been no oscillations, but only a _gradual amelioration of
climate_."[1]
The world, like Milton's lion, is still trying to disengage its
binder limbs from the superincumbent weight of the Drift. Every
snow-storm, every chilling blast that blows out from the frozen lips
of the icy North, is but a reminiscence of Ragnarok.
But the great cosmical catastrophe was substantially over with the
close of the sixth day. We are now in the seventh day. The darkness
has gone; the sun has come back; the waters have returned to their
bounds; vegetation has resumed its place; the fish, the birds, the
animals, men, are once more populous in ocean, air, and on the land;
the comet is gone, and the orderly processes of nature are around us,
and God is "resting" from the great task of restoring his afflicted
world.
The necessity for some such interpretation as this was apparent to
the early fathers of the Christian Church, although they possessed no
theory of a. comet. St. Basil, St. Cæsarius, and Origen, long before
any such theory was dreamed of, argued that the sun, moon, and stars
existed from the beginning, but that they did not _appear_ until the
fourth day. "Who," says Origen, "that has sense, can think that the
first, second, and third days were without sun, moon, or stars?"
But where were they? Why did they not appear? What obscured them?
What could obscure them but dense clouds? Where did the clouds come
from? They were vaporized water. What vaporized the water and caused
this darkness on the face of the deep, so dense that the sun, moon,
and stars did not appear until the world had clothed itself
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 438.]
{p. 389}
again in vegetation? Tremendous heat. Where did the heat come from?
If it was not caused by contact with a comet, _what was it_? And if
it was not caused by contact with a comet, how do you explain the
blazing sword at the gate of Eden; the fire falling from heaven on
"the cities of the plain"; and the fire that fell on Job's sheep and
camels and consumed them; and that drove Job to clamber by ropes down
into the narrow-mouthed bottomless cave; where he tells us of the
leviathan, the twisted, the undulating one, that cast down stones in
the mire, and made the angels in heaven to tremble, and the deep to
boil like a pot? And is it not more reasonable to suppose that this
sublime religious poem, called the Book of Job, represents the
exaltation of the human soul under the stress of the greatest
calamity our race has ever endured, than to believe that it is simply
a record of the sufferings of some obscure Arab chief from a
loathsome disease? Surely inspiration should reach us through a
different channel; and there should be some proportion between the
grandeur of the thoughts and the dignity of the events which produced
them.
And if Origen is right, and it is absurd to suppose that the sun,
moon, and stars were not created until the third day, then the sacred
text is dislocated, transposed; and the second chapter narrates
events which really occurred before those mentioned in the first
chapter; and the "darkness" is something which came millions of years
after that "Beginning," in which God made the earth, and the heavens,
and all the host of them.
In conclusion, let us observe how fully the Bible record accords with
the statements of the Druidical, Hindoo, Scandinavian, and other
legends, and with the great unwritten theory which underlies all our
religion. Here we have:
{p. 340}
1. The Golden Age; the Paradise.
2. The universal moral degeneracy of mankind; the age of crime and
violence.
3. God's vengeance.
4. The serpent; the fire from heaven.
5. The cave-life and the darkness.
6. The cold; the struggle to live.
7. The "Fall of Man," from virtue to vice; from plenty to poverty;
from civilization to barbarism; from the Tertiary to the Drift; from
Eden to the gravel.
8. Reconstruction and regeneration.
Can all this be accident? Can all this mean nothing?
{p. 341}
PART IV.
(Conclusions)
CHAPTER I.
WAS PRE-GLACIAL MAN CIVILIZED?
WE come now to another and very interesting question:
In what stage of development was mankind when the Drift fell upon the
earth?
It is, of course, difficult to attain to certainties in the
consideration of an age so remote as this. We are, as it were,
crawling upon our hands and knees into the dark cavern of an abysmal
past; we know not whether that which we encounter is a stone or a
bone; we can only grope our way. I feel, however, that it is proper
to present such facts as I possess touching this curious question.
The conclusion at which I have arrived is, that mankind, prior to the
Drift, had, in some limited localities, reached a high stage of
civilization, and that many of our most important inventions and
discoveries were known in the pre-glacial age. Among these were
pottery, metallurgy, architecture, engraving, Carving, the use of
money, the domestication of some of our animals, and even the use of
an alphabet. I shall present the proofs of this startling conclusion,
and leave the reader to judge for himself.
{p. 342}
While this civilized, cultivated race occupied a part of the earth's
surface, the remainder of the world was peopled by races more rude,
barbarous, brutal, and animal-like than anything we know of on our
earth to-day.
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 earth, and upon which we can rely
to a much greater extent.
First, as to the legends:
If I have correctly interpreted Job as a religious drama, founded on
the fall of the Drift, then we must remember that Job describes the
people overtaken by the catastrophe as a highly civilized race. They
had passed the stage of worshiping sticks and stones and idols, and
had reached to a knowledge of the one true God; they were
agriculturists; they raised flocks of sheep and camels; they built
houses; they had tamed the horse; they had progressed so far in
astronomical knowledge as to have mapped out the heavens into
constellations; they wrote books, consequently they possessed an
alphabet; they engraved inscriptions upon the rocks.
But it may be said truly that the book of Job, although it may be
really a description of the Drift catastrophe, was not necessarily
written at the time of, or even immediately after, that event. So
gigantic and terrible a thing must have been the overwhelming
consideration and memory of mankind for thousands of years after it
occurred. We will see that its impress still exists on the
{p. 343}
imagination of the race. Hence we may assign to the book of Job an
extraordinary antiquity, and nevertheless it may have been written
long ages after the events to which it refers occurred; and the
writer may have clothed those events with the associations and
conditions of the age of its composition. Let us, then, go forward to
the other legends, for in such a case we can _prove_ nothing. We can
simply build up cumulative probabilities.
In Ovid we read that the Earth, when the dread affliction fell upon
her, cried out:
"O sovereign of the gods, if thou approvest of this, if I have
deserved it, why do thy lightnings linger? . . . And dost thou give
this as my recompense? This as the reward of my fertility and of my
duty, in that _I endure wounds from the crooked plow and harrows_,
and am harassed all the year through? In that I supply green leaves
to the _cattle_, and _corn_, a wholesome food for mankind, and
_frankincense_ for yourselves? "
Here we see that Ovid received from the ancient traditions of his
race the belief that when the Drift Age came man was already an
agriculturist; he had invented the plow and the barrow; he had
domesticated the cattle; he had discovered or developed some of the
cereals; and he possessed a religion in which incense was burned
before the god or gods. The legend of Phaëton further indicates that
man had tamed the horse and had invented wheeled vehicles.
In the Hindoo story of the coming of the demon Ravana, the comet, we
read that he carried off Sita, the wife of Rama, the sun; and that
her name indicates that she represented "the _furrowed earth_," to
wit, a condition of development in which man plowed the fields and
raised crops of food.
When we turn to the Scandinavian legends, we see
{p. 344}
that those who transmitted them from the early ages believed that
pre-glacial man was civilized. The Asas, the godlike, superior race,
dwelt, we are told, "in stone houses."
In describing, in the Elder Edda, the corrupt condition of mankind
before the great catastrophe occurred, the world, we are told, was
given over to all manner of sin and wickedness. We read:
"Brothers will fight together,
And become each other's bane
Sisters' children
Their sib shall spoil.
Hard is the world;
Sensual sins grow huge.
There are _axe_-ages, _sword_-ages
_Shields_ are cleft in twain,
There are wind-ages,
murder-ages,
Ere the world falls dead."[1]
When the great day of wrath comes, Heimdal blows in the
Gjallar-_horn_, Odin _rides_ to Mimer's well, Odin puts on his
_golden helmet_, the Asas hold counsel before their _stone doors_.
All these things indicate a people who had passed far beyond
barbarism. Here we have axes, swords, helmets, shields, musical
instruments, domesticated horses, the use of gold, and stone
buildings. And after the great storm was over, and the remnant of
mankind crept out of the caves, and came back to reoccupy the houses
of the slain millions, we read of the delight with which they found
in the grass "the golden tablets" of the _Asas_--additional proof
that they worked in the metals, and possessed some kind of a written
language; they also had "the runes," or runic letters of Odin.
[1. "The Vala's Prophecy," 48, 49.]
{p. 345}
In the Norse legends we read that Loke, the evil genius, carried off
Iduna, and her _apples_.
And when we turn to the American legends, similar statements present
themselves.
We see the people, immediately after the catastrophe, sending a
messenger to the happy eastern land, over the sea, by a bridge, to
procure drums and other musical instruments; we learn from the Aztecs
that while the darkness yet prevailed, the people built a sumptuous
_palace_, a masterpiece of skill, and on the top of it they placed an
_axe of copper_, the edge being uppermost, and on this axe the
heavens rested.[1]
The Navajos, shut up in their cave, had flute-players with them. The
Peruvians were dug out of their cave with a golden _spade_. In the
Tahoe legend, we read that the superior race compelled the inferior
to build a great _temple_ for their protection from floods; and the
oppressed people escaped in _canoes_, while the world blazes behind
them.
Soon after the Navajos came out of the cave, we find them, according
to the legend, possessed of water-jars, and we have references to the
division of the heavens into constellations.
In the Arabian legend of the City of Brass, we are told that the
people who were destroyed were great architects, metallurgists,
agriculturists, and machinists, and that they possessed a written
language.
We turn now to the more reliable evidences of man's condition, which
have been exhumed from the caves and the Drift.
In the seventeenth century, Fray Pedro Simon relates that some
miners, running an adit into a hill near Callao,
[1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 71.]
{p. 346}
"met with a ship, _which had on top of it the great mass of the
hill_, and did not agree in its make and appearance with our ships."
Sir John Clerk describes a canoe found near Edinburgh, in 1726. "The
washings of the river Carron discovered a _boat thirteen or fourteen
feet under ground_; it is thirty-six feet long and four and a half
broad, all of one piece of oak. There were several strata above it,
such as loam, clay, shells, moss, sand, and gravel."
Boucher de Perthes found remains of man _thirty to forty feet_ below
the surface of the earth.
In the following we have the evidence that the pre-glacial race was
acquainted with the use of fire, and cooked their food:
"In the construction of a canal between Stockholm and Gothenburg, it
was necessary to cut through one of those hills called _osars_, or
erratic blocks, which were deposited by the Drift ice during the
glacial epoch. Beneath an immense accumulation of osars, with shells
and sand, there was discovered _in the deepest layer of subsoil, at a
depth of about sixty feet_, a circular mass of stones, forming a
hearth, in the middle of which there were wood-coals. No other hand
than that of man could have performed the work."[2]
In the State of Louisiana, on Petite Anse Island, remarkable
discoveries have been made.[3]
At considerable depths below the surface of the earth, fifteen to
twenty feet, _immediately overlying the salt-rocks_, and _underneath_
what Dr. Foster believes to be the equivalent of the _Drift_ in
Europe, "associated with the bones of elephants and other huge
extinct quadrupeds," "incredible quantities of _pottery_ were found";
in some
[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 330.
2. Maclean's "Manual of Antiquity of Man," p. 60; Buchner, p. 242.
3. Foster's "Prehistoric Races," p. 56, etc.]
{p. 347}
cases these remains of pottery formed "veritable strata, three and
six inches thick"; in many cases the bones of the mastodon were found
_above_ these strata of pottery. Fragments of baskets and matting
were also found.
Here we have evidence of the long-continued occupation of this spot
by man prior to the Drift Age, and that the human family had
progressed far enough to manufacture pottery, and weave baskets and
matting.
The cave of Chaleux, Belgium, was buried by a mass of rubbish caused
by the falling in of the roof, consequently preserving all its
implements. There were found the split bones of mammals, and the
bones of birds and fishes. There was an immense number of objects,
chiefly manufactured from reindeer-horn, such as needles,
arrow-heads, daggers, and hooks. Besides these, there were ornaments
made of shells, pieces of slate with engraved figures, mathematical
lines, remains of very coarse pottery, hearthstones, ashes, charcoal,
and last, but not least, thirty thousand worked flints mingled with
the broken bones. In the hearth, placed in the center of the cave,
was discovered a stone, with certain but unintelligible signs
engraved upon it. M. Dupont also found about twenty pounds of the
bones of the water-rat, either scorched or roasted.[1]
###
EARTHEN VASE, FOUND IN THE CAVE OF FURFOOZ, BELGIUM.
[1. Maclean's "Antiquity of Man," p. 87.]
{p. 348}
Here we have the evidence that the people who inhabited this cave, or
some race with whom they held intercourse, manufactured pottery; that
they wore clothing which they sewed with needles; that they used the
bow and arrow; that they caught fish with hooks; that they ornamented
themselves; that they cooked their food; that they engraved on stone;
and that they had already reached some kind of primitive alphabet, in
which signs were used to represent things.
We have already seen, (page 124, _ante_,) that there is reason to
believe that pre-glacial Europe contained a very barbarous race,
represented by the Neanderthal skull, side by side with a cultivated
race, represented by the fine lines and full brow of the Engis skull.
The latter race, I have suggested, may have come among the former as
traders, or have been captured in war; precisely as today in Central
Africa the skulls of adventurous, civilized Portuguese or Englishmen
or Americans might be found side by side with the rude skulls of the
savage populations of the country. The possession of a piece of
pottery, or carving, by an African tribe would not prove that the
Africans possessed the arts of engraving or manufacturing pottery,
but it would prove that somewhere on the earth's surface a race had
advanced far enough, at that time, to be capable of such works of
art. And so, in the remains of the pre-glacial age of Europe, we have
the evidence that some of these people, or their captives, or those
with whom they traded or fought, had gone so far in the training of
civilized life as to have developed a sense of art and a capacity to
represent living forms in pictures or carvings, with a considerable
degree of taste and skill. And these works are found in the most
ancient caves, "the archaic caves," associated with the bones of the
animals _that ceased to exist in Europe at the time of the_
{p. 349}
###
PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE MAMMOTH
{p. 350}
_Drift deposits_. Nay, more, a picture of a mammoth has been found
engraved _upon a piece of mammoth-tusk_. The engraving on page 349
represents this most curious work of art.
The man who carved this must have seen the creature it represented;
and, as the mammoth did not survive the Drift, that man must have
lived before or during the Drift. And he was no savage. Says Sir John
Lubbock:
"No representation, however rude, of any animal has yet been found in
any of the Danish shell-mounds, or the Stone-Age lake-villages. Even
on objects of the Bronze Age they are so rare that it is doubtful
whether a single well-authenticated instance could be produced."[1]
In the Dordogne caves the following spirited drawing was found,
representing a group of reindeer:
###
PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF REINDEER.
Here it would appear as if the reindeer were fastened together by
lines or reins; if so, it implies that they were
[1. "Prehistoric Times," p. 333.]
{p. 351}
domesticated. In this picture they seem to have become entangled in
their lines, and some have fallen to the ground.
And it does not follow from the presence of the reindeer that the
climate was Lapland-like. The ancestors of all our so-called Arctic
animals must have lived during the mild climate of the Tertiary Age;
and those only survived after the Drift, in the north, that were
capable of accommodating themselves to the cold; the rest perished or
moved southwardly.
Another group of animals was found, engraved on a piece of the palm
of a reindeer's horn, as follows:
###
PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE HORSE.
Here the man stands alongside the horse's head--a very natural
position if the horse was domesticated, a very improbable one if he
was not.
Pieces of pottery have also been found accompanying these palæolithic
remains of man.
The oldest evidence of the existence of man is probably the fragment
of a cut rib from the Pliocenes of Tuscany, preserved in the museum
at Florence; it was associated with flint-flakes and _a piece of rude
pottery_.[1]
But the art-capacity of these people was not limited to the drawing
of animals; they also carved figures out
[1. Dawkins's "Early Man in Britain," p. 91.]
{p. 352}
of hard substances. The following engraving represents a poniard cut
from a reindeer's horn.
###
A SPECIMEN OF PRE-GLACIAL CARVING.
Sir John Lubbock says:
"The artist bas ingeniously adapted the position of the animal to the
necessities of the case. The horns are thrown back on the neck, the
fore-legs are doubled up under the belly, and the hind-legs are
stretched out along the blade."[1]
These things seem to indicate quite an advanced condition; the people
who made them manufactured pottery, possessed. domesticated animals,
and were able to engrave and carve images of living objects. It is
difficult to believe that they could have carved and engraved these
hard substances without metallic gravers or tools of some kind.
The reader will see, on page 130, _ante_, a representation of a
sienite plummet found _thirty feet below the surface_, in a well, in
the San Joaquin Valley, California, which Professor Foster pronounces
to be--
"A finer exhibition of the lapidary's skill than has yet been
furnished by the Stone Age of either continent. "[2]
[1. "Prehistoric Times," p. 335.
2. Foster's "Prehistoric Races of the United States," p. 56.]
{p. 353}
The following picture represents a curious image carved out of black
marble, about twice as large as the cut, found near Marlboro, Stark
County, Ohio, by some workmen, while digging a well, at a depth of
_twelve feet below the surface_. The ground above it had never been
disturbed. It was imbedded in _sand and gravel_. The black or
variegated marble out of which this image is carved has not been
found in place in Ohio.
###
STONE IMAGE FOUND IN OHIO
T. W. Kinney, of Portsmouth, Ohio, writes as follows:
"Last summer, while digging a vault for drainage, at the _depth of
twenty-seven feet_, the workmen found the tusk of a mastodon. The
piece was about four feet long and four inches in diameter at the
thickest part. It was nearly all lost, having, crumbled very much
when exposed to the air. I have a large piece of it; also several
flakes of flint found near the same depth.
"I also have several of the flakes from other vaults, some of which
show evidence of work.
"We also found a log at the depth of _twenty-two feet_. The log was
_burned at one end_, and at the other end was a _gap, the same as an
axeman's kerf_. Shell-banks below the level of the base of
mound-builders' works, from six to fifteen feet."[1]
Was this burned log, thus found at a depth of twenty-two feet, a
relic of the great conflagration? Was that
[1. "American Antiquarian," April, 1878, p. 36.]
{p. 354}
axe-kerf made by some civilized man who wielded a bronze or iron
weapon?
It is a curious fact that _burned_ logs have, in repeated instances,
been exhumed from great depths in the Drift clay.
While this work is going through the press, an article has appeared
in "Harper's Monthly Magazine," (September, 1882, p. 609,) entitled
"The Mississippi River Problem," written by David A. Curtis, in which
the author says:
"When La Salle found out how goodly a land it was, his report was the
warrant of eviction that drove out the red man to make place for the
white, as the mound-builders had made place for the Indian in what we
call the days of old. Yet it must have been only yesterday that the
mound-builders wrought in the valley, for in the few centuries that
have elapsed since then the surface of the ground has risen only a
few feet--not enough to bury their works out of sight. How long ago,
then, must it have been that the race lived there whose pavements and
cisterns of Roman brick now lie _seventy feet underground_?"
Mr. Curtis does not mean that the bricks found in this prehistoric
settlement had any historical connection with Rome, but simply that
they resemble Roman bricks. These remains, I learn, were discovered
in the vicinity of Memphis, Tennessee. The details have not yet, so
far as I am aware, been published.
Is it not more reasonable to suppose that civilized man existed on
the American Continent thirty thousand years ago, (the age fixed by
geologists for the coming of the Drift,) a comparatively short period
of time, and that his works were then covered by the Drift-_débris_,
than to believe that a race of human beings, far enough advanced in
civilization to manufacture bricks, and build pavements and cisterns,
dwelt in the Mississippi Valley, in a past so inconceivably remote
that the slow increase of the soil,
{p. 355}
by vegetable decay, has covered their works to the depth of _seventy
feet_?
I come now to the most singular and marvelous revelation of all:
Professor Alexander Winchell, in an interesting and recent work,[1]
says:
"I had in my possession for some time a copper relic resembling a
rude coin, which was taken from an artesian boring at the depth of
_one hundred and fourteen feet_, at Lawn Ridge, Marshall County,
Illinois.
"Mr. W. H. Wilmot, then of Lawn Ridge, furnished me, in a letter
dated December 4, 1871, the following statement of deposits pierced
in the boring:
Soil 3 feet.
Yellow clay 17 "
Blue clay 44 "
Dark vegetable matter 4 "
Hard purplish clay 18 "
Bright green clay 8 "
Mottled clay 18 "
Soil 2 "
Depth of coin 114 "
Yellow clay 1 "
Sand and clay.
Water, rising 60 feet.
"In a letter of the 27th of December, written from Chillicothe,
Illinois, he stated that the bore was four inches for eighty feet,
and three inches for the remainder of the depth. But before one
hundred feet had been reached the four-inch portion was 'so plastered
over as to be itself but three inches in diameter,' and hence the
'coin' could not have come from any depth less than _eighty feet_.
"'Three persons saw "the coin" at the same instant, and each claims
it.' This so-called coin was about the
[1. "Sparks from a Geologist's Hammer," p. 170.]
{p. 356}
thickness and size of a silver quarter of a dollar, and was of
_remarkably uniform thickness_. It was approximately round, and
_seemed to have been cut_. Its two faces bore marks as shown in the
figure, _but they were not stamped as with a die nor engraved_. They
looked as if _etched_
### ###
COPPER COIN, FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN FEET UNDER GROUND IN
ILLINOIS.
_with acid_. The character of the marks was partly unintelligible. On
each side, however, was a rude outline of a human figure. One of
these held in one hand an object resembling a child, while the other
was raised as if in the act of striking. The figure wore a
head-dress, apparently made of quills. _Around the border were
undecipherable hieroglyphics_. The figure on the opposite side
extended only to the waist, and had also one hand upraised. This was
furnished _with long tufts like mule's ears_. Around the border was
another circle of hieroglyphics. On this side also was a rude outline
of a quadruped. I exhibited this relic to the Geological Section of
the American Association, at its meeting at Buffalo in 1876. The
general impression seemed to be that its origin could not date from
the epoch of the stratum in which it is represented to have been
found. One person thought he could detect a rude representation of
the signs of the zodiac around the border. Another fancied he could
discover numerals, and even dates. No one could even offer any
explanation of the objects or the circumstances of its discovery. The
figures bear a close resemblance to rude drawings executed on
birch-bark and rock surfaces by the American Indians. _But by what
means were they etched_? And by what means was _the uniform thickness
of the copper produced_?
{p. 357}
This object was sent by the owner to the Smithsonian Institution for
examination, and Secretary Henry referred it to Mr. William E.
Dubois, who presented the result of his investigation to the American
Philosophical Society. _Mr. Dubois felt sure that the object had
passed through a rolling-mill, and he thought the cut edges gave
further evidence of the machine-shop_. 'All things considered,' he
said, 'I can not regard this Illinois piece as _ancient_ nor _old_
(observing the usual distinction), nor yet recent; because the tooth
of time is plainly visible.' He could suggest nothing to clear up the
mystery. Professor J. P. Lesley thought it might be an astrological
amulet. He detected upon it the signs of Pisces and Leo. He read the
date 1572. He said, 'The piece was placed there as a practical joke.'
He thought it might be Hispano-American or French-American in origin.
the suggestion of 'a practical joke' is itself something which must
be taken as a joke. No person in possession of this interesting
object would willingly part with it; least of all would he throw so
small an object into a hole where not one chance in a thousand
existed that it would ever be seen again by any person.
"If this object does not date from the age of the stratum from which
obtained, it can only be a relic of the sixteenth or seventeenth
century, buried beneath the alluvium deposited more recently by the
Illinois River. The country is a level prairie, and 'Peoria Lake' is
an expansion of the river ten miles long and a mile and a half broad.
It is certainly possible that in such a region deep alluvial deposits
may have formed since the visits of the French in the latter part of
the seventeenth century. _But it is not easy to admit an accumulation
of one hundred and fourteen or one hundred and twenty-feet_, since
such a depth extends too much below the surface of the river. In
Whiteside County, fifty miles northwest from Peoria County, about
1851, according to Mr. Moffat, _a large copper ring was found one
hundred and twenty feet beneath the surface_, as also something which
has been compared to a boat-hook. Several other objects have been
found at less depths, including _stone pipes and pottery, and a
spear-shaped hatchet_, MADE OF IRON. If these
{p. 358}
are not 'ancient,' their occurrence at depths of ten, forty, fifty,
and one hundred and twenty feet must be explained as I have suggested
in reference to the 'coin.' An instrument of iron is a strong
indication of the civilized origin of all."
This is indeed an extraordinary revelation. Here we have a copper
medal, very much like a coin, inscribed with alphabetical or
hieroglyphical signs, which, when placed under the microscope, in the
hands of a skeptical investigator, satisfies him that it is not
recent, and that it _passed through a rolling-mill and was cut by a
machine_.
If it is not recent, if the tooth of time is plainly seen on it, it
is not a modern fraud; if it is not a modern fraud, then it is really
the coin of some pre-Columbian people. The Indians possessed no
currency or alphabet, so that it dates back of the red-men. Nothing
similar has been found in the hundreds of American mounds that have
been opened, so that it dates back of the mound-builders.
It comes from a depth of _not less than eighty feet in glacial clay_,
therefore it is profoundly ancient.
It is engraved after a method _utterly unknown to any civilized
nation on earth, within the range of recorded history_. IT IS
ENGRAVED WITH ACID!
It belongs, therefore, to a civilization unlike any we know of. If it
had been derived from any other human civilization, the makers, at
the same time they borrowed the round, metallic form of the coin,
would have borrowed also the mold or the stamp. But they did not; and
yet they possessed a rolling-mill and a machine to cut out the coin.
What do we infer? That there is a relationship between our
civilization and this, but it is a relationship in which this
represents the parent; and the round metallic
{p. 359}
coins of historical antiquity were derived from it, but without the
art of engraving by the use of acid.
It does not stand alone, but at great depths in the same clay
_implements of copper and of_ IRON _are found_.
What does all this indicate?
That far below the present level of the State of Illinois, in the
depths of the glacial clays, about one hundred or one hundred and
twenty feet below the present surface of the land, there are found
the evidences of a high civilization. For a coin with an inscription
upon it implies a high civilization:--it implies an alphabet, a
literature, a government, commercial relations, organized society,
regulated agriculture, which could alone sustain all these; and some
implement like a plow, without which extensive agriculture is not
possible; and this in turn implies domesticated animals to draw the
plow. The presence of the coin, and of implements of copper and iron,
proves that mankind had passed far beyond the Stone Age. And these
views are confirmed by the pavements and cisterns of brick found
seventy feet below the surface in the lower Mississippi Valley.
There is a Pompeii, a Herculaneum, somewhere, underneath central and
northwestern Illinois or Tennessee, of the most marvelous character;
not of Egypt, Assyria, or the Roman Empire, things of yesterday, but
belonging to an inconceivable antiquity; to pre-glacial times; to a
period ages before the flood of Noah;--a civilization which was
drowned and deluged out of sight under the immeasurable clay-flood of
the comet.
Man crawled timidly backward into the history of the past over his
little limit of six thousand years; and at the farther end of his
tether he found the perfect civilization of early Egypt. He rises to
his feet and looks still backward, and the vista of history spreads
and
{p. 360}
spreads to antediluvian times. Here at last he thinks he has reached
the beginning of things: here man first domesticated the animals;
here he first worked in copper and iron; here he possessed for the
first time an alphabet, a government, commerce, and coinage. And, lo!
from the bottom of well-holes in Illinois, one hundred and fourteen
feet deep, the buckets of the artesian-well auger bring up copper
rings and iron hatchets and engraved coins--engraved by a means
unknown to historical mankind--and we stand face to face with a
civilization so old that man will not willingly dare to put it into
figures.
Here we are in the presence of that great, but possibly brutal and
sensual development of man's powers, "the sword-ages, the axe-ages,
the murder-ages of the Goths," of which God cleared the earth when he
buried the mastodon under the Drift for ever.
How petty, how almost insignificant, how school-boy-like are our
historians, with their little rolls of parchment under their arms,
containing their lists of English, Roman, Egyptian, and Assyrian
kings and queens, in the presence of such stupendous facts as these!
Good reader, your mind shrinks back from such conceptions, of course.
But can you escape the facts by shrinking back? Are they not there?
Are they not all of a piece--Job, Ovid, Rama, Ragnarok, Genesis, the
Aztec legends; the engraved ivory tablets of the caves, the pottery,
the carved figures of pre-glacial Europe; the pottery-strata of
Louisiana under the Drift; the copper and iron implements, the brick
pavements and cisterns, and this coin, dragged up from well-holes in
Illinois?
And what do they affirm?
That this catastrophe was indeed THE FALL OF MAN.
Think what a fall!
From comfort to misery; from plowed fields to the
{p. 361}
thistles and the stones; from sunny and glorious days in a stormless
land to the awful trials of the Drift Age; the rains, the cold, the
snow, the ice, the incessant tempests, the darkness, the poverty, the
coats of hides, the cave-life, the cannibalism, the Stone Age.
Here was a fall indeed.
There is nothing in antiquity that has not a meaning. The very fables
of the world's childhood should be sacred from our laughter.
Our theology, even where science has most ridiculed it, is based on a
great, a gigantic truth. Paradise, the summer land of fruits, the
serpent, the fire from heaven, the expulsion, the waving sword, the
"fall of man," the "darkness on the face of the deep," the age of
toil and sweat--all, all, are literal facts.
And could we but penetrate their meaning, the trees of life and
knowledge and the apples of paradise probably represent likewise
great and important facts or events in the history of our race.
And with what slow steps did mankind struggle upward! In some favored
geographical center they recovered the arts of metallurgy, the
domestication of animals, and the alphabet.
"All knowledge," says the Hindoo Krishna, "was originally bestowed on
mankind by God. They lost it. They recovered it as a recollection."
The poor barbarian Indians of America possess traditions of this
ancient civilization, traditions in forms as rude as their own
condition.
It was represented by the Great Hare, Manibozho, or Nanaboshu.
Do we not find his typical picture, with those great mule-tufts,
(referred to by Professor Winchell,) the hare-like ears, on this coin
of Illinois?
{p. 362}
Read what the Indians tell of this great being
"From the remotest wilds of the Northwest," says Dr. Brinton, "to the
coast of the Atlantic, from the southern boundaries of Carolina to
the cheerless swamps of Hudson's Bay, the Algonquins were never tired
of gathering around the winter fire and repeating the story of
Manibozho or Michabo, the _Great Hare_. With entire unanimity their
various branches, the Powhatans of Virginia, the Lenni-Lenape of the
Delaware, the warlike hordes of New England, the Ottawas of the far
North, and the Western tribes, perhaps without exception, spoke of
this 'chimerical beast,' as one of the old missionaries calls it as
_their common ancestor_. The totem or clan which bore his name was
looked up to with peculiar respect. . . .
"What he really was we must seek in the accounts of older travelers,
in the invocations of the _jossakeeds_ or prophets, and in the part
assigned to him in the solemn mysteries of religion. In these we find
him portrayed as the patron and founder of the Meda worship, _the
inventor of picture-writing_, the father and guardian of their
nation, the ruler of the winds, even the maker and preserver of the
world and creator of the sun and moon. From a grain of sand brought
from the bottom of the primeval ocean, he fashioned the habitable
land, and set it floating on the waters till it grew to such a size
that a strong young wolf, running constantly, died of old age ere he
reached its limits. . . . He was the founder of the medicine-hunt. .
. . He himself was a _mighty hunter_ of old. . . . Attentively
watching the spider spread its web to trap unwary flies, _he devised
the art of knitting nets to catch fish_."[1]
This is a barbarian's recollection of a great primeval civilized race
who established religion, invented nets, and, as the other legends
concerning him show, first made the bow and arrow and worked in the
metals.
There is every reason to think the division of the people into
several classes, or families, who take the name of
[1. "Myths of the New World," p. 175.]
{p. 363}
some animal whose picture is their _totem_, dates back to the very
beginning of the human race. The animal fables, as I have suggested,
grew out of these animal _totems_; we find them everywhere among the
American tribes; and in some cases they are accompanied by mental and
physical traits which may be supposed to indicate that they
originated in primal race differences. This is the belief of Warren,
the native historian of the Ojibways. I am indebted to Hon. H. Al.
Rice, of St. Paul, for an opportunity to examine his valuable
manuscript history of that tribe of Indians.
The great _totem_ of the Algonquins is the Hare; he represents a
ruling class, and is associated with recollections of this Great
Hare, this demi-god, this man or race, who taught them all the arts
of life with which they are acquainted. Then there is a _turtle
totem_, associated with myths of the turtle or tortoise, which are
the images all over the world of an island.[1]
And when we cross the Atlantic we find[2] that the Arabs are divided
up in the same way into tribes bearing animal names.
"_Asad_, lion; 'a number of tribes.' _Aws_, wolf; 'a tribe of the
Ancar, or Defenders.' _Badau_, ibex; 'a tribe of the Kalb and
others.' _Tha'laba_, she-fox; 'a name of tribes.' _Garad_, locusts;
'a sub-tribe of the Azol.' _Thawr_, bull; 'a sub-tribe of Hamdan and
of Abel Manah.' _Gahah_, colt of an ass; 'a sub-tribe of the Arabs.'
_Hida'_, kite; 'a sub-tribe of Murad.'
"The origin of all names is referred, in the genealogical system of
the Arabs, to an ancestor who bore the tribal or gentile name. Thus
the _Kalb_ or dog-tribe consists of the Beni-Kalb--sons of Kalb (the
dog), who is in turn son of Wabra (the female rock-badger), son of
Tha'laba
[1. Tylor's "Early History of Mankind."
2. W. J. F. Maclennan, "Fortnightly Review," 1869 and 1870.]
{p. 364}
(the she-fox), great-grandson of Quoda'a, grandson of Saba', the
Sheba of Scripture. A single member of the tribe is Kalbi--a
Kalbite--_Caninus_."
"The same names which appear as _totem_ tribes reach through Edom,
Midian, and Moab, into the land of Canaan."[1]
Among the Jews there was the stock of the serpent, Nashon, to which
David belonged; and there is no doubt that they were once divided
into totemic families.
And in all this we see another proof of the race-identity of the
peoples on the opposite sides of the Atlantic.
Permit me to close this chapter with a suggestion:
Is there not energy enough among the archæologists of the United
States to make a thorough examination of some part of the deep clay
deposits of Central Illinois or of those wonderful remains referred
to by Mr. Curtis?
If one came and proved that at a given point he had found indications
of a coal-bed or a gold-mine, he would have no difficulty in
obtaining means enough to dig a shaft and excavate acres. Can not the
greed for information do one tenth as much as the greed for profit?
Who can tell what extraordinary revelations wait below the vast mass
of American glacial clay? For it must be remembered that the articles
already found have been discovered in the narrow holes bored or dug
for wells. How small is the area laid bare by such punctures in the
earth compared with the whole area of the country in which they are
sunk! How remarkable that _anything_ should have been found under
such circumstances! How probable, therefore, that the remains of man
are numerous at a certain depth!
Where a coin is found we might reasonably expect to
[1. W. J. F. Maclennan, "Fortnightly Review," 1869 and 1870.]
{p. 365}
find other works of copper, and all those things which would
accompany the civilization of a people working in the metals and
using a currency,--such as cities, houses, temples, etc. Of course,
such things might exist, and yet many shafts might be sunk without
coming upon any of them. But is not the attempt worth making?
{p. 366}
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 of the pro-glacial
age and that from this center, in the course of ages, they spread
east and west, until they reached the plains of Asia and the islands
of the Pacific.
The negro race, it seems probable, may have separated from our own
stock in pre-glacial times, and survived, in fragments, somewhere in
the land of torrid heats, probably in some region on which the Drift
did not fall.
We are told by Ovid that it was the tremendous heat of the comet-age
that baked the negro black; in this Ovid doubtless spoke the opinion
of antiquity. Whether or not that period of almost insufferable
temperature produced any effect upon the color of that race I shall
not undertake to say; nor shall I dare to assert that the white race
was bleached to its present complexion by the long absence of the sun
during the Age of Darkness.
{p. 367}
It is true Professor Hartt tells us[1] that there is a marked
difference in the complexion of the Botocudo Indians who have lived
in the forests of Brazil and those, of the same tribe, who have dwelt
on its open prairies; and that those who have resided for hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of years in the dense forests of that tropical
land are nearly white in complexion. If this be the case in a merely
leaf-covered tract, what must have been the effect upon a race
dwelling for a long time in the remote north, in the midst of a humid
atmosphere, enveloped in constant clouds, and much of the time in
almost total darkness?
There is no doubt that here and then were developed the rude,
powerful, terrible "ice-giants" of the legends, out of whose
ferocity, courage, vigor, and irresistible energy have been evolved
the dominant races of the west of Europe--the land-grasping,
conquering, colonizing races; the men of whom it was said by a Roman
poet, in the Viking Age: "The sea is their school of war and the
storm their friend they are sea-wolves that prey on the pillage of
the world."
They are now taking possession of the globe.
Great races are the weeded-out survivors of great sufferings.
What are the proofs of my proposition that man survived on an
Atlantic island?
In the first place we find Job referring to "the _island_ of the
innocent."
In chapter xxii, verse 29, Eliphaz, the Temanite, says
When men are cast down, then thou shalt say, There is lifting up; and
he shall save the humble person."
Where shall he save him? The next verse (30) seems to tell
[1. "The Geology of Brazil," p. 589.]
{p. 368}
"He shall deliver _the island of the innocent_: and _it is delivered_
by the pureness of thine [Job's] hands."
And, as I have shown, in Genesis it appears that, after the Age of
Darkness, God separated the floods which overwhelmed the earth and
made a firmament, a place of solidity, a refuge, (chap. i, vs. 6, 7,)
"in the midst of the waters." A firm place in the _midst_ of the
waters is necessarily an island.
And the location of this Eden was westward from. Europe, for we read,
(chap. iii, v. 24):
"So he drove out the man; and he placed _at the_ EAST _of the garden
of Eden_ cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to
keep the way of the tree of life."
The man driven out of the Edenic land was, therefore, driven
_eastward_ of Eden, and the cherubims in the east of Eden faced him.
The land where the Jews dwelt was eastward of paradise; in other
words, paradise was west of them.
And, again, when Cain was driven out be too moved _eastward_; he
"dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden," (chap. iv, verse
16.) There was, therefore, a constant movement of the human family
eastward. The land of Nod may have been _Od_, _Ad_, Atlantis; and
from _Od_ may have come the name of _Odin_, the king, the god of
Ragnarok.
In Ovid "the earth" is contradistinguished from the rest of the
globe. It is an island-land, the civilized land, the land of the
Tritons or water-deities, of Proteus, Ægeon, Doris, and Atlas. It is,
in my view, Atlantis.
Ovid says, (book ii, fable 1, "The Metamorphoses")
"_The sea circling around the encompassed earth_. . . . The earth has
upon it men and cities, and woods and wild beasts, and rivers, and
nymphs and other deities of the
{p. 369}
country." On this land is "the palace of the sun, raised high on
stately columns, bright with radiant gold, and carbuncle that rivals
the flames; polished ivory crests its highest top, and double folding
doors shine with the brightness of silver."
In other words, the legend refers to the island-home of a civilized
race, over which was a palace which reminds one of the great temple
of Poseidon in Plato's story.
The Atlantic was sometimes called "the sea of ivory," in allusion,
probably, to this ivory-covered temple of Ovid. Hence Croly sang:
Now on her hills of ivory
Lie giant-weed and ocean-slime,
Hiding from man and angel's eye
The land of crime."
And, again, Ovid says, after enumerating the different rivers and
mountains and tracts of country that were on fire in the great
conflagration, and once more distinguishing the pre-eminent earth
from the rest of the world:
"However, the genial Earth, _as she was surrounded with sea_, amid
the waters of the _main_," (the ocean,) "and the springs dried up on
every side, lifted up her _all-productive face_," etc.
She cries out to the sovereign of the gods for mercy. She refers to
the burdens of the crops she annually bears; the wounds of the
crooked plow and the barrow, which she voluntarily endures; and she
calls on mighty Jove to put an end to the conflagration. And he does
so. The rest of the world has been scarred and seared with the fire,
but he spares and saves this island-land, this agricultural,
civilized land, this land of the Tritons and Atlas; this "island of
the innocent" of Job. And when the terrible convulsion was over, and
the
{p. 370}
rash Phaëton dead and buried, Jove repairs, with especial care, "his
own Arcadia."
It must not be forgotten that Phaëton was the son of _Merops_; and
Theopompus tells us that the people who inhabited Atlantis were the
_Meropes_, the people of Merou. And the Greek traditions[1] show that
the human race issued from _Upa-Merou_; and the Egyptians claim that
their ancestors came from the _Island of Mero_; and among the Hindoos
the land of the gods and the godlike men was _Meru_.
And here it is, we are told, where in deep caves, and from the seas,
receding under the great heat, the human race, crying out for mercy,
with uplifted and blistered hands, survived the cataclysm.
And Ovid informs us that this land, "with a mighty trembling, sank
down a little" in the ocean, and the Gothic and Briton (Druid)
legends tell us of a prolongation of Western Europe which went down
at the same time.
In the Hindoo legends the great battle between Rama and Ravana, the
sun and the comet, takes place _on an island_, the Island of Lanka,
and Rama builds a stone bridge sixty miles long to reach the island.
In the Norse legends Asgard lies to the west of Europe; communication
is maintained with it by the bridge Bifrost. Gylfe goes to visit
Asgard, as Herodotus and Solon went to visit Egypt: the outside
barbarian was curious to behold the great civilized land. There he
asks many questions, as Herodotus and Solon did. He is told:[2]
"The earth is round, and _without it round about lies the deep
ocean_."
[1. "Atlantis," p. 171.
2. The Fooling of Gylfe--The Creation of the World--The Younger Edda.]
{p. 371}
The earth is Ovid's earth; it is Asgard. It is an island, surrounded
by the ocean:
"And along the outer strand of that sea they gave lands for the
giant-races to dwell in; and against the attack of restless giants
they built a burg within the sea and around the earth."
This proves that by "the earth" was not meant the whole globe; for
here we see that around the outside margin of that ocean which
encircled Asgard, the mother-country had given lands for colonies of
the giant-races, the white, large, blue-eyed races of Northern and
Western Europe, who were as "restless" and as troublesome then to
their neighbors as they are now and will be to the end of time.
And as the _Elder_ and _Younger Edda_ claim that the Northmen were
the giant races, and that their kings were of the blood of these
Asas; and as the bronze-using people advanced, (it has been proved by
their remains,[1]) into Scandinavia from the _southwest_, it is clear
that these legends do not refer to some mythical island in the Indian
Seas, or to the Pacific Ocean, but to the Atlantic: the west coasts
of Europe were "the outer strand" where these white colonies were
established; the island was in the Atlantic; and, as there is no body
of submerged land in that ocean with roots or ridges reaching out to
the continents east and west, except the mass of which the Azores
Islands constitute the mountain-tops, the conclusion is irresistible
that here was Atlantis; here was Lanka; here was "the island of the
innocent," here was Asgard.
And the Norse legends describe this "Asgard" as a land of temples and
plowed fields, and a mighty civilized race.
And here it is that Ragnarok comes. It is from the
[1. Du Chaillu's "Land of the Midnight Sun," vol. i, pp. 343, 345,
etc.]
{P. 372}
people of Asgard that the wandering Gylfe learns all that he tells
about Ragnarok, just as Solon learned from the priests of Sais the
story of Atlantis. And it is here in Asgard that, as we have seen,
"during Surt's fire two persons, called Lif and Lifthraser, a man and
a woman, concealed themselves in Hodmimer's holt," and afterward
repeopled the world.
We leave Europe and turn to India.
In the Bagaveda-Gita Krishna recalls to the memory of his disciple
Ardjouna the legend as preserved in the sacred books of the Veda.
We are told:
"The earth was covered with flowers; the trees bent under their
fruit; thousands of animals sported over the plains and in the air;
white elephants roved unmolested under the shade of gigantic forests,
and Brahma perceived that the time had come for the creation of man
to inhabit this dwelling-place."[1]
This is a description of the glorious world of the Tertiary Age,
during which, as scientific researches have proved, the climate of
the tropics extended to the Arctic Circle.
Brahma makes man, Adima, (Adam,) and he makes a companion for him,
Héva, (Eve).
_They are upon an island_. Tradition localizes the legend by making
this the Island of Ceylon.
"Adima and Héva lived for some time in perfect happiness--no
suffering came to disturb their quietude; they had but to stretch
forth their hands and pluck from surrounding trees the most delicious
fruits--but to stoop and gather rice of the finest quality."
This is the same Golden Age represented in Genesis, when Adam and
Eve, naked, but supremely happy, lived
[1. Jacolliet, "The Bible in India," p. 195.]
{p. 373}
upon the fruits of the garden, and knew neither sorrow nor suffering,
neither toil nor hunger.
But one day the evil-one came, as in the Bible legend the Prince of
the _Rakchasos_ (Raknaros--Ragnarok?) came, and broke up this
paradise. Adima and Héva leave their _island_; they pass to a
boundless country; they fall upon an evil time; "trees, flowers,
fruits, birds, vanish in an instant, amid terrific clamor";[1] the
Drift has come; they are in a world of trouble, sorrow, poverty, and
toil.
And when we turn to America we find the legends looking, not
westward, but _eastward_, to this same island-refuge of the race.
When the Navajos come out of the cave the white race goes _east_, and
the red-men go _west_; so that the Navajos inhabit a country _west_
of their original habitat, just as the Jews inhabit one _east_ of it.
"Let me conclude," says the legend, "by telling how the Navajos came
by the seed they now cultivate. All the wise men being one day
assembled, a Turkey-Hen came flying _from the direction of the
morning star_, and shook from her feathers an ear of blue corn into
the midst of the company; and in subsequent visits _brought all the
other seeds they possess_."[2]
In the Peruvian legends the civilizers of the race came _from the
east_, after the cave-life.
So that these people not only came from the east, but they maintained
intercourse for some time afterward with the parent-land.
On page 174, _ante_, we learn that the Iroquois believed that when
Joskeha renewed the world, after the great battle with Darkness, he
learned from _the great tortoise_
[1. Jacolliet, "The Bible in India," p. 198.
2. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 83.]
{p. 374}
--always the image of an island--how to make fire, and taught the
Indians the art. And in their legends the battle between the White
One and the Dark One took place in the east near the great ocean.
Dr. Brinton says, speaking of the Great Hare, Manibozho:
"In the oldest accounts of the missionaries he was alleged to reside
_toward the east_, and in the holy formula of the meda craft, when
the winds are invoked to the medicine-lodge, the _east is summoned_
in his name, the door opens in that direction, and there _at the edge
of the earth_, where the sun rises, on _the shore of the infinite
ocean that surrounds the land_, he has his house, and sends the
luminaries forth on their daily journey."[1]
That is to say, in the east, in the _surrounding_ ocean of the east,
to wit, in the Atlantic, this god, (or godlike race,) has his house,
his habitation, upon a land surrounded by the ocean, to wit, an
island; and there his power and his civilization are so great that he
controls the movements of the sun, moon, and stars; that is to say,
he fixes the measure of time by the movements of the sun and moon,
and he has mapped out the heavenly bodies into constellations.
In the Miztec legend, (see page 214, _ante_,) we find the people
praying to God to gather the waters together and enlarge the land,
for they have only "a little garden" to inhabit in the waste of
waters. This meant an island.
In the Arabian legends we have the scene of the catastrophe described
as an island west of Arabia, and it _requires two years and a half of
travel to reach it_. It is the land of bronze.
In the Hindoo legend of the battle between Rama, the
[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 177.]
{p. 375}
sun, and Ravana, the comet, the scene is laid on the _Island_ of
Lanka.
In the Tahoe legend the survivors of the civilized race take refuge
in a cave, in a mountain on an _island_. They give the tradition a
local habitation in Lake Tahoe.
The Tacullies say God first created an _island_.
In short, we may say that, wherever any of these legends refer to the
locality where the disaster came and where man survived, the scene is
placed upon an island, in the ocean, in the midst of the waters; and
this island, wherever the points of the compass are indicated, lies
to the west of Europe and to the east of America: it is, therefore,
in the Atlantic Ocean; and the island, we shall see, is connected
with these continents by long bridges or ridges of land.
This island was Atlantis. Ovid says it was the land of Neptune,
Poseidon. It is Neptune who cries out for mercy. And it is associated
with Atlas, the king or god of Atlantis.
Let us go a step further in the argument.
{p. 376}
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 and continuous
mountain-chains, like the Andes or the Rocky Mountains, the backbone
of a vast primeval Atlantic-filling, but, even then, in great part,
sunken continent, were above the water, they furnished a wonderful
feature in the scenery and geography of the world; they were the
pathways over which the migrations of races extended in the ancient
days; they wound for thousands of miles, irregular, rocky,
wave-washed, through the great ocean, here expanding into islands,
there reduced to a narrow strip, or sinking into the sea; they
reached from a central civilized land--an ancient, long-settled land,
the land of the godlike race--to its colonies, or connections, north,
south, east, and west; and they impressed themselves vividly on the
imagination and the traditions of mankind, leaving their image even
in the religions of the world unto this day.
As, in process of time, they gradually or suddenly settled
{p. 377}
into the deep, they must at first have formed long, continuous
strings of islands, almost touching each other, resembling very much
the Aleutian Archipelago, or the Bahama group; and these islands
continued to be used, during later ages, as the stepping-stones for
migrations and intercourse between the old and the new worlds, just
as the discovery of the Azores helped forward the discovery of the
New World by Columbus; he used them, we know, as a halting-place in
his great voyage.
When Job speaks of "the island of the innocent," which was spared
from utter destruction, he prefaces it by asking, (chap. xxii):
"15. Hast thou marked _the old way_ which wicked men have trodden?
"16. Which were (was?) cut down out of time, _whose foundation was
overflown with a flood_."
And in chapter xxviii, verse 4, we have what may be another allusion
to this "way," along which go the people who are on their journey,
and which "divideth the flood," and on which some are escaping.
The Quiche manuscript, as translated by the Abbé Brasseur de
Bourbourg,[1] gives an account of the migration of the Quiche race to
America from some eastern land in a very early day, in "the day of
darkness," ere the sun was, in the so-called glacial age.
When they moved to America they wandered for a long time through
forests and over mountains, and "they had a _long passage to make,
through the sea, along the shingle and pebbles and drifted sand_."
And this long passage was through the sea "which was parted for their
passage." That is, the sea was on both sides of this long ridge of
rocks and sand.
[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 308.]
{p. 378}
The abbé adds:
"But it is not clear how they crossed the sea; they passed as though
there had been no sea, for they passed over scattered rocks, and
these rocks were rolled on the sands. This is why they called the
place 'ranged stones and torn-up sands,' the name which they gave it
in their passage within the sea, the water being divided when they
passed."
They probably migrated along that one of the connecting ridges which,
the sea-soundings show us, stretched from Atlantis to the coast of
South America.
We have seen in the Hindoo legends that when Rama went to the Island
of Lanka to fight the demon Ravana, he built a bridge of stone, sixty
miles long, with the help of the monkey-god, in order to reach the
island.
In Ovid we read of the "settling down a little" of the island on
which the drama of Phaëton was enacted.
In the Norse legends the bridge Bifrost cuts an important figure. One
would be at first disposed to regard it as meaning, (as is stated in
what are probably later interpolations,) the rainbow; but we see,
upon looking closely, that it represents a material fact, an actual
structure of some kind.
Gylfe, who was, we are told, A king of Sweden in the ancient days,
visited Asgard. He assumed the name of Ganglere, (the walker or
wanderer). I quote from the "_Younger Edda, The Creation_":
"Then asked Ganglere, 'What is the path from earth to heaven?'"
The earth here means, I take it, the European colonies which surround
the ocean, which in turn surrounds Asgard; heaven is the land of the
godlike race, Asgard. Ganglere therefore asks what is, or was, in the
mythological past, the pathway from Europe to the Atlantic island.
{p. 379}
"Har answered, laughing, 'Foolishly do you now ask. Have you not been
told that the gods made a bridge from earth to heaven, which is
called Bifrost? You must have seen it. It may be that you call it the
rainbow. It has three colors, is very strong, and is made with more
craft and skill than other structures. Still, however strong it is,
it will break when the sons of Muspel come to ride over it, and then
they will have to swim their horses over great rivers in order to get
on.'"
Muspel is the blazing South, the land of fire, of the convulsions
that accompanied the comet. But how can Bifrost mean the rainbow?
What rivers intersect a rainbow?
"Then said Ganglere, 'The gods did not, it seems to me, build that
bridge honestly, if it shall be able to break to pieces, since they
could have done so if they had desired.' Then made answer Har: 'The
gods are worthy of no blame for this structure. Bifrost is indeed a
good bridge, but there is nothing in the world that is able to stand
when the sons of Muspel come to the fight.'"
Muspel here means, I repeat, the heat of the South. Mere heat has no
effect on rainbows. They are the product of sunlight and falling
water, and are often most distinct in the warmest weather.
But we see, a little further on, that this bridge Bifrost was a real
structure. We read of the roots of the ash-tree Ygdrasil, and one of
its roots reaches to the fountain of Urd:
Here the gods have their doomstead. The _Asas ride hither every day
over Bifrost_, which is also called Asa-bridge."
And these three mountain-chains going out to the different continents
were the three roots of the tree Ygdrasil, the sacred tree of the
mountain-top; and it is to this "three-pronged root of the
world-mountain" that the