Hindoo legends refer, (see page 238, _ante_): on its top was heaven,
Olympus; below it was hell, where the Asuras, the comets, dwelt; and
between was Meru, (Mero Merou,) the land of the Meropes, Atlantis.
The _Asas_ were clearly a human race of noble and godlike qualities.
The proof of this is that they perished in Ragnarok; they were
mortal. They rode over the bridge every day going from heaven, the
heavenly land, to the earth, Europe.
We read on:
"Kormt and Ormt,
And the two Kerlaugs
These shall Thor wade
Every day,
When he goes to judge
Near the Ygdrasil ash;
_For the Asa-bridge
Burns all ablaze--_
The holy waters roar."
These rivers, Kormt and Ormt and the two Kerlaugs, were probably
breaks in the long ridge, where it had gradually subsided into the
sea. The Asa-bridge was, very likely, dotted with volcanoes, as the
islands of the Atlantic are to this day.
"Then answered Ganglere, 'Does fire burn over Bifrost?' Har answered:
'The red which you see in the rainbow is burning fire. The
frost-giants and the mountain-giants would go up to heaven if Bifrost
were passable for all who desired to go there. Many fair places are
there in heaven, and they are protected by a divine defense.'"
We have just seen (p. 371, _ante_) that the home of the godlike race,
the _Asas_, to wit, heaven, Asgard, was surrounded by the ocean, was
therefore an island; and that around the outer margin of this ocean,
the Atlantic,
[1. Elder Edda, "Grimner's Lay," 29.]
{p. 381}
the godlike race had given lands for the ice-giants to dwell in. And
now we read that this Asa-bridge, this Bifrost, reached from earth to
heaven, to wit, across this gulf that separated the island from the
colonies of the ice-giants. And now we learn that, if this bridge
were not defended by a divine defense, these troublesome ice-giants
would go up to heaven; that is to say, the bold Northmen would march
across it from Great Britain and Ireland to the Azores, to wit, to
Atlantis. Surely all this could not apply to the rainbow.
But we read a little further. Har is reciting to Ganglere the wonders
of the heavenly land, and is describing its golden palaces, and its
mixed population of dark and light colored races, and he says:
"Furthermore, there is a dwelling, by name Himinbjorg, _which stands
at the end of heaven, where the Bifrost bridge is united with
heaven_."
And then we read of Heimdal, one of the gods who was subsequently
killed by the comet:
"He dwells in a place called Himinbjorg, near Bifrost. He is the
ward," (warder, guardian,) "of the gods, and sits _at the end of
heaven, guarding the bridge against the mountain-giants_. He needs
less sleep than a bird; sees an hundred miles around him, and as well
by night as by day. _His teeth are of gold_."
This reads something like a barbarian's recollection of a race that
practiced dentistry and used telescopes. We know that gold filling
has been found in the teeth of ancient Egyptians and Peruvians, and
that telescopic lenses were found in the ruins of Babylon.
But here we have Bifrost, a bridge, but not a continuous structure,
interrupted in places by water, reaching from Europe to some Atlantic
island. And the island-people regarded it very much as some of the
English look
{p. 382}
upon the proposition to dig a tunnel from Dover to Calais, as a
source of danger, a means of invasion, a threat; and at the end of
the island, where the ridge is united to it, they did what England
will probably do at the end of the Dover tunnel: they erected
fortifications and built a castle, and in it they put a ruler,
possibly a sub-king, Heimdal, who constantly, from a high lookout,
possibly with a field-glass, watches the coming of the turbulent
Goths, or Gauls, or Gael, from afar off. Doubtless the white-headed
and red-headed, hungry, breekless savages had the same propensity to
invade the civilized, wealthy land, that their posterity had to
descend on degenerate Rome.
The word _Asas_ is not, as some have supposed, derived from Asia.
Asia is derived from the _Asas_. The word _Asas_ comes from a Norse
word, still in use in Norway, _Aas_, meaning _a ridge of high
land_.[1] Anderson thinks there is some connection between _Aas_, the
high ridge, the mountain elevation, and _Atlas_, who held the world
on his shoulders.
The _Asas_, then, were the civilized race who inhabited a high,
precipitous country, the meeting-point of a number of ridges. Atlas
was the king, or god, of Atlantis. In the old time all kings were
gods. They are something more than men, to the multitude, even yet.
And when we reach "Ragnarok" in these Gothic legends, when the jaw of
the wolf Fenris reached from the earth to the sun, and he vomits fire
and poison, and when Surt, and all the forces of Muspel, "ride over
Bifrost, _it breaks to pieces_." That is to say, in this last great
catastrophe of the earth, the ridge of land that led from the British
Islands to Atlantis goes down for ever.
[1. The Younger Edda," Anderson, note, p. 226.]
{p. 383}
And in Plato's description of Atlantis, as received by Solon from the
Egyptian priests, we read:
"There was an island" (Atlantis) "situated in front of the straits
which you call the Columns of Hercules; the island was larger than
Libya and Asia put together, and _was the way to other islands_, and
from the islands _you might pass through the whole of the opposite
continent_," (America,) "which surrounds the true ocean."
Now this is not very clear, but it may signify that there was
continuous land communication between Atlantis and the islands of the
half-submerged ridge, and from the islands to the continent of
America. It would seem to mean more than a passage-way by boats over
the water, for that existed everywhere, and could be traversed in any
direction.
I have quoted on p. 372, _ante_, in the last chapter, part of the
Sanskrit legend of Adima and Héva, as preserved in the Bagaveda-Gita,
and other sacred books of the Hindoos. It refers very distinctly to
the bridge which united the island-home of primeval humanity with the
rest of the earth. But there is more of it:
When, under the inspiration of the prince of demons, Adima and Héva
begin to wander, and desire to leave their island, we read:
"Arriving at last at the extremity of the island"--
We have seen that the bridge Bifrost was connected with the extremity
of Asgard--
"they beheld a smooth and narrow arm of the sea, and beyond it a vast
and apparently boundless country," (Europe?) "_connected with their
island by a narrow and rocky pathway, arising from the bosom of the
waters_."
This is probably a precise description of the connecting ridge; it
united the boundless continent, Europe, with
{p. 384}
the island; it rose out of the sea, it was rocky; it was the broken
crest of a submerged mountain-chain.
What became of it? Here again we have a tradition of its destruction.
We read that, after Adima and Héva had passed over this rocky bridge--
"No sooner did they touch the shore, than trees, flowers, fruit,
birds, all that they had seen from the opposite side, vanished in an
instant, _amidst terrible clamor; the rocks by which they had crossed
sank beneath the waves_, a few sharp peaks alone remaining above the
surface, to indicate the place of the bridge, _which had been
destroyed by divine displeasure_."
Here we have the crushing and instant destruction by the Drift, the
terrific clamor of the age of chaos, and the breaking down of the
bridge Bifrost under the feet of the advancing armies of Muspel; here
we have "the earth" of Ovid "settling down a little" in the ocean;
here we have the legends of the Cornishmen of the lost land,
described in the poetry of Tennyson; here we have the emigrants to
Europe cut off from their primeval home, and left in a land of stones
and clay and thistles.
It is, of course, localized in Ceylon, precisely as the mountain of
Ararat and the mountain of Olympus crop out in a score of places,
wherever the races carried their legends. And to this day the Hindoo
points to the rocks which rise in the Indian Ocean, between the
eastern point of India and the Island of Ceylon, as the remnants of
the Bridge; and the reader will find them marked on our maps as"
Adam's Bridge" (_Palam Adima_). The people even point out, to this
day, a high mountain, from whose foot the Bridge went forth, over
which Adima and Héva, crossed to the continent; and it is known in
modern geography as "Adam's Peak." So vividly have the traditions of
a vast antiquity come down to us! The legends
{p. 385}
of the Drift have left their stamp even in our schoolbooks.
And the memory of this Bridge survives not only in our geographies,
but in our religions.
Man reasons, at first, from below upward; from godlike men up to
man-like gods; from Cæsar, the soldier, up to Cæsar, the deity.
Heaven was, in the beginning, a heavenly city on earth; it is
transported to the clouds; and there its golden streets and sparkling
palaces await the redeemed.
This is natural: we can only conceive of the best of the spiritual by
the best we know of the material; we can imagine no musical
instrument in the bands of the angels superior to a harp; no weapon
better than a sword for the grasp of Gabriel.
This disproves not a spiritual and superior state; it simply shows
the poverty and paucity of our poor intellectual apparatus, which,
like a mirror, reflects only that which is around it, and reflects it
imperfectly.
Men sometimes think they are mocking spiritual things when it is the
imperfection of material nature, (which they set so much store by,)
that provokes their ridicule.
So, among all the races which went out from this heavenly land, this
land of high intelligence, this land of the master race, it was
remembered down through the ages, and dwelt upon and sung of until it
moved upward from the waters of the Atlantic to the distant skies,
and became a spiritual heaven. And the ridges which so strangely
connected it with the continents, east and west, became the bridges
over which the souls of men must pass to go from earth to heaven.
For instance:
The Persians believe in this bridge between earth and
{p. 386}
paradise. In his prayers the penitent in his confession says to this
day:
"I am wholly without doubt in the existence of the Mazdayaçnian
faith; in the coming of the resurrection of the latter body; in the
stepping _over the bridge Chinvat_; as well as in the continuance of
paradise."
The bridge and the land are both indestructible.
Over the midst of the Moslem hell stretches the bridge Es-Sirat,
"finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword."
In the Lyke-Wake Dirge of the English north-country, they sang of
The Brig of Dread
Na braider than a thread."
In Borneo the passage for souls to heaven is across a long tree; it
is scarcely practicable to any except those who have killed a man.
In Burmah, among the Karens, they tie strings across the rivers, for
the ghosts of the dead to pass over to their graves.
In Java, a bridge leads across the abyss to the dwelling-place of the
gods; the evil-doers fall into the depths _below_.
Among the Esquimaux the soul crosses an awful gulf over a stretched
rope, until it reaches the abode of "the great female evil spirit
below" (beyond?) "the sea."
The Ojibways cross to paradise on a great snake, which serves as a
bridge.
The Choctaw bridge is a slippery pine-log.
The South American Manacicas cross on a wooden bridge.
Among many of the American tribes, the Milky Way is the bridge to the
other world.
[1. Poor, "Sanskrit Literature," p. 151.]
{p. 387}
The Polynesians have no bridge; they pass the chasm in canoes.
The Vedic Yama of the Hindoos crossed the rapid waters, and showed
the way to our Aryan fathers.
The modern Hindoo hopes to get through by holding on to the cow's
tail!
Even the African tribes, the Guinea negroes, believe that the land of
souls can only be reached by crossing a river.
Among some of the North American tribes "the souls come to a great
lake," (the ocean,) "where there is a _beautiful island_, toward
which they have to paddle in a canoe of white stone. On the way there
arises a storm, and the wicked souls are wrecked, and the heaps of
their bones are to be seen under the water, but the good reach the
happy _island_."[1]
The Slavs believed in a pathway or road which led to the other world;
it was both the rainbow (as in the Gothic legends) and the Milky Way;
and, since the journey was long, they put boots into the coffin, (for
it was made on foot,) and coins to pay the ferrying across a wide
sea, even as the Greeks expected to be carried over the Styx by
Charon. This abode of the dead, at the end of this long pathway, was
_an island_, a warm, fertile land, called _Buyau_.[2]
In their effort to restore the dead men to the happy island-home, the
heavenly land, beyond the water, the Norsemen actually set their dead
heroes afloat in boats on the open ocean.[3]
Subsequently they raised a great mound over boat, warrior, horses,
weapons, and all. These boats are now being dug up in the north of
Europe and placed in the
[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 362.
2. Poor, "Sanskrit and Kindred Literatures," pp. 3 71, 372.
3. Ibid.]
{p. 388}
great museums. They tell a marvelous religious and historical story.
I think the unprejudiced reader will agree with me that these legends
show that some Atlantic island played an important part in the very
beginning of human history. It was the great land of the world before
the Drift; it continued to be the great land of the world between the
Drift and the Deluge. Here man fell; here he survived; here he
renewed the race, and from this center he repopulated the world.
We see also that this island was connected with the continents east
and west by great ridges of land.
The deep-sea soundings show that the vast bulk of land, of which the
Azores are the outcroppings, are so connected yet with such ridges,
although their crests are below the sea-level; and we know of no
other island-mass of the Atlantic that is so united with the
continents on both sides of it.
Is not the conclusion very strong that Atlantis was the island-home
of the race, in whose cave Job dwelt; on whose shores Phaëton fell;
on whose fields Adam lived; on whose plain Sodom and Gomorrah stood,
and Odin and Thor and Citli died; from which the Quiches and the
Aztecs wandered to America; the center of all the races; the root of
all the mythologies?
{p. 389}
CHAPTER IV.
OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED.
LET ME consider, briefly, those objections to my theory which have
probably presented themsevles {_sic_} to some of my readers.
First, it may be said:
"We don't understand you. You argue that there could not have been
such an ice-age as the glacialists affirm, and yet you speak of a
period of cold and ice and snow."
True: 'but there is a great difference between such a climate as that
of Scotland, damp and cold, snowy and blowy, and a continental
ice-sheet, a mile or two thick, reaching from John o' Groat's House
to the Mediterranean. We can see that the oranges of Spain can grow
to-day within a comparatively short distance of Edinburgh; but we can
not realize that any tropical or semitropical plant could have
survived in Africa when a precipice of ice, five thousand feet high,
frowned on the coast of Italy; or that any form of life could have
survived on earth when the equator in South America was covered with
a continental ice-sheet a mile in thickness, or even ten feet in
thickness. We can conceive of a glacial age of snow-storms, rains,
hail, and wind--a terribly trying and disagreeable climate for man
and beast--but we can not believe that the whole world was once in
the condition that the dead waste of ice-covered Greenland is in now.
{p. 390}
Secondly, it may be said--
"The whole world is now agreed that ice produced the Drift; what
right, then, has any one man to set up a different theory against the
opinions of mankind? "
One man, Mohammed said, with God on his side, is a majority; and one
man, with the truth on his side, must become a majority.
All recognized truths once rested, solitary and alone, in some one
brain.
Truth is born an acorn, not an oak.
The Rev. Sydney Smith once said that there was a kind of men into
whom you could not introduce a new idea without a surgical operation.
He might have added that, when you had once forced an idea into the
head of such a man, you could not deliver him of it without
instruments.
The conservatism of unthinkingness is one of the potential forces of
the world. It lies athwart the progress of mankind like a colossal
mountain-chain, chilling the atmosphere on both sides of it for a
thousand miles. The Hannibal who would reach the eternal city of
Truth on the other side of these Alps must fight his way over ice and
hew his way through rocks.
The world was once agreed that the Drift was due to the Deluge. It
abandoned this theory, and then became equally certain that it came
from icebergs. This theory was, in turn, given up, and mankind were
then positive that glaciers caused the Drift. But the glaciers were
found to be inadequate for the emergency; and so the continents were
lifted up fifteen hundred feet, and the ice-sheets were introduced.
And now we wait to hear that the immense ice-masses of the Himalayas
have forsaken their elevations and are moving bodily over the plains
of India, grinding up the rocks into clay and gravel
{p. 391}
as they go, before we accept a theory which declares that they once
marched over the land in this fashion from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn,
from Spitzbergen to Spain.
The universality of an error proves nothing, except that the error is
universal. The voice of the people is only the voice of God in the
last analysis. We can safely appeal from Caiaphas and Pilate to Time.
But, says another:
"We find deep grooves or striations under the glaciers of to-day;
therefore the glaciers caused the grooves."
But we find striations on level plains far remote from mountains,
where the glaciers could not have been; therefore the glaciers did
not cause the striations. "A short horse is soon curried."
Superposition is not paternity. A porcelain nest-egg found under a
hen is no proof that the hen laid it.
But, says another
"The idea of a comet encountering the earth, and covering it with
_débris_, is so stupendous, so out of the usual course of nature, I
refuse to accept it."
Ah, my friend, you forget that those Drift deposits, hundreds of feet
in thickness, are _there_. _They_ are out of the usual course of
nature. It is admitted that they came suddenly from some source. If
you reject my theory, you do not get clear of the phenomena. The
facts are a good deal more stupendous than the theory. Go out and
look at the first Drift deposit; dig into it a hundred feet or more;
follow it for a few hundred miles or more; then come back, and
scratch your head, and tell me where it came from! Calculate how many
cart-loads there are of it, then multiply this by the area of your
own continent, and multiply that again by the area of two or three
more continents, and then again tell me where it came from!
{p. 392}
Set aside my theory as absurd, and how much nearer are you to solving
the problem? If neither waves, nor icebergs, nor glaciers, nor
ice-sheets, nor comets, produced this world-cloak of _débris_, where
did it come from?
Remember the essential, the incontrovertible elements of the problem:
1. Great heat.
2. A sudden catastrophe.
3. Great evaporation of the seas and waters.
4. Great clouds.
5. An age of floods and snows and ice and torrents.
6. The human legends.
Find a theory that explains and embraces all these elements, and
then, and not until then, throw mine aside.
Another will say:
"But in one place you give us legends about an age of dreadful and
long-continued heat, as in the Arabian tale, where no rain is said to
have fallen for seven years; and in another place you tell us of a
period of constant rains and snows and cold. Are not these statements
incompatible?"
Not at all. This is a big globe we live on: the tropics are warmer
than the poles. Suppose a tremendous heat to be added to our natural
temperature; it would necessarily make it hotter on the equator than
at the poles, although it would be warm everywhere. There can be no
clouds without condensation, no condensation without some degree of
cooling. Where would the air cool first? Naturally at the points most
remote from the equator, the poles. Hence, while the sun was still
blazing in the uncovered heavens of the greater part of the earth,
small caps of cloud would form at the north and south poles, and shed
their moisture in gentle rain. As the heat brought to the earth by
the comet was accidental and
{p. 393}
adventitious, there would be a natural tendency to return to the
pre-comet condition. The extraordinary evaporation would of itself
have produced refrigeration. Hence the cloud-caps would grow and
advance steadily toward the equator, casting down continually
increasing volumes of rain. Snow would begin to form near the poles,
and it too would advance. We would finally have, down to say the
thirty-fifth degree of north and south latitude, vast belts of rain
and snow, while the equator would still be blazing with the tropical
heat which would hold the condensation back. Here, then, we would
have precisely the condition of things described in the "Younger
Edda" of the Northmen:
"Then said Jafnhar: 'All that part of Ginungagap' (the Atlantic)
'that turns toward the north _was filled with thick, heavy ice and
rime_,' (snow,) 'and everywhere within were _drizzling gusts and
rain_. But the south part of Ginungagap was lighted up by the
_glowing sparks_ that flew out of Muspelheim' (Africa?). Added
Thride: 'As cold and all things grim proceeded from Niflheim, so that
which bordered on Muspelheim was hot and bright, and Ginungagap' (the
Atlantic near Africa?) 'was as warm and mild as windless air.'"
Another may say:
"But how does all this agree with your theory that the progenitors of
the stock from which the white, the yellow, and the brown races were
differentiated, were saved in one or two caverns in one place? How
did they get to Africa, Asia, and America?"
In the first place, it is no essential part of my case that man
survived in one place or a dozen places; it can not, in either event,
affect the question of the origin of the Drift. It is simply an
opinion of my own, open to modification upon fuller information. If,
for instance, men dwelt in Asia at that time, and no Drift deposits
{p. 394}
fell upon Asia, races may have survived there; the negro may have
dwelt in India at that time; some of the strange Hill-tribes of China
and India may have had no connection with Lif and Lifthraser.
But if we will suppose that the scene of man's survival was in that
Atlantic island, Atlantis, then this would follow:
The remnant of mankind, whether they were a single couple, like Lif
and Lifthraser; or a group of men and women, like Job and his
companions; or a numerous party, like that referred to in the Navajo
and Aztec legends, in any event, they would not and could not stay
long in the cave. The distribution of the Drift shows that it fell
within twelve hours; but there were probably several days thereafter
during which the face of the earth was swept by horrible cyclones,
born of the dreadful heat. As soon, however, as they could safely do
so, the remnant of the people must have left the cave; the limited
nature of their food-supplies would probably drive them out. Once
outside, their condition was pitiable indeed. First, they encountered
the great heat; the cooling of the atmosphere had not yet begun;
water was a pressing want. Hence we read in the legends of Mimer's
well, where Odin pawned his eye for a drink. And we are told, in an
American legend, of a party who traveled far to find the life-giving
well, and found the possessor sitting over it to hide it. It was
during this period that the legends originated which refer to the
capture of the cows and their recovery by demi-gods, Hercules or Rama.
Then the race began to wander. The world was a place of stones.
Hunger drove them on. Then came the clouds, the rains, the floods,
the snows, the darkness; and still the people wandered. The receded
ocean laid bare the great ridges, if they had sunk in the catastrophe,
{p. 395}
and the race gradually spread to Europe, Africa, and America.
"But," says one, "how long did all this take?
Who shall say? It may have been days, weeks, months, years,
centuries. The Toltec legends say that their ancestors wandered for
more than a hundred years in the darkness.
The torrent-torn face of the earth; the vast rearrangement of the
Drift materials by rivers, compared with which our own rivers are
rills; the vast continental regions which were evidently flooded, all
testify to an extraordinary amount of moisture first raised up from
the seas and then cast down on the lands. Given heat enough to raise
this mass, given the cold caused by its evaporation, given the time
necessary for the great battle between this heat and this
condensation, given the time to restore this body of water to the
ocean, not once but many times,--for, along the southern border of
the floods, where Muspelheim. and Niflheim met, the heat must have
sucked up the water as fast almost as it fell, to fall again, and
again to be lifted up, until the heat-area was driven back and water
fell, at last, everywhere on the earth's face, and the extraordinary
evaporation ceased,--this was a gigantic, long-continued battle.
But it may be asked:
"Suppose further study should disclose the fact that the Drift _is_
found in Siberia and the rest of Asia, and over all the world, what
then? "
It will not disprove my theory. It will simply indicate that the
_débris_ did not, as I have supposed, strike the earth
instantaneously, but that it continued to fall during twenty-four
hours. If the comet was split into fragments, if there was the
"Midgard-Serpent" as well as the
{p. 396}
"Fenris Wolf" and "the dog Garm," they need not necessarily have
reached the earth at the same time.
Another says:
"You supposed in your book, 'Atlantis,' that the Glacial Age might
have been caused by the ridges radiating from Atlantis shutting off
the Gulf Stream and preventing the heated waters of the tropics from
reaching the northern shores of the world."
True; and I have no doubt that these ridges did play an important
part in producing climatic changes, subsequent to the Drift Age, by
their presence or absence, their elevation or depression; but on
fuller investigation I find that they are inadequate to account for
the colossal phenomena of the Drift itself--the presence of the clay
and gravel, the great heat and the tremendous downfall of water.
It may be asked,
"How does your theory account for the removal of great blocks,
weighing many tons, for hundreds of miles from their original site?
The answer is plain. We know the power of the ordinary hurricanes of
the earth. "The largest trees are uprooted, or have their trunks
snapped in two; and few if any of the most massive buildings stand
uninjured."[1] If we will remember the excessive heat and the
electrical derangements that must have accompanied the Drift Age, we
can realize the tremendous winds spoken of in many of the legends. We
have but to multiply the hurricane of the West Indies, or the cyclone
of the Mississippi Valley, a hundred or a thousand fold, and we shall
have power enough to move all the blocks found scattered over the
face of the Drift deposits or mixed with its material.
[1. Appletons' "American Cyclopædia," vol. ix, p. 80.]
{p. 397}
Another asks:
"How do you account for the fact that this Drift material does not
resemble the usual aërolites, which are commonly composed of iron,
and unlike the stones of the earth?"
I nave shown that aërolites have fallen that did not contain any
iron, and that could not be distinguished from the material native to
the earth. And it must be remembered that, while the shining
meteoroids that blaze in periodical showers from radiant points in
the sky are associated with comets, and are probably lost fragments
of comet-tails, these meteoroids do not reach the earth, but are
always burned out, far up in our atmosphere, by the friction produced
by their motion. The iron aërolite is of different origin. It may be
a product of space itself, a condensation of metallic gases. The fact
that it reaches the earth without being consumed would seem to
indicate that it belongs at a lower level than the meteoric showers,
and has, consequently, a less distance to fall and waste.
And these views are confirmed by a recent writer,[1] who, after
showing that the meteoroids, or shooting-stars, are very different
from meteorites or aërolites, and seldom or never reach the earth,
proceeds to account for the former. He says:
"Many theories have been advanced in the past to account for these
strange bodies, but the evidence now accumulated proves beyond
reasonable doubt that they are near relatives, and probably the
_débris_ of comets.
"Tempel's comet is now known to be traveling in the same orbit as the
November meteors, and is near the head of the train, and it appears,
in like manner, that the second comet of 1862 (Swift's comet) is
traveling in the orbit of the August meteors. And the first comet of
1881 seems to be similarly connected with the April meteors. . . .
[1. Ward's "Science Bulletin," E. E. II., 1882, p. 4.]
{p. 398}
"Although few scientific men now question a relationship between
comets and the ordinary meteors, there are those, and among them some
of our ablest men, who think that the large meteors, or bolides, and
aërolites, may be different astronomically, and perhaps physically,
from the ordinary shooting-stars, and in the past some contended that
they originated in our atmosphere others that they were ejected from
terrestrial volcanoes. . . And at the present time the known facts,
and all scientific thought, seem to point to the conclusion that the
difference between them and ordinary shooting-stars is analogous to
that between rain and mist, and, in addition to the reasons already
given for connecting them with comets, may be mentioned the fact that
meteorites bring with them carbonic acid, which is known to form so
prominent a part of comets' tails; and if fragments of meteoric iron
or stone be heated moderately in a vacuum, they yield up gases
consisting of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and the
spectrum of these gases corresponds to the spectrum of a cornet's
coma and tail.
"By studying their microscopical structure, Mr. Sorby has been able
to determine that the material was at one time certainly in a state
of fusion; and that the most remote condition of which we have
positive evidence was that of small, detached, melted globules, the
formation of which can not be explained in a satisfactory manner,
except by supposing that their constituents were originally in the
state of vapor, as they now exist in the atmosphere of the sun; and,
on the temperature becoming lower, condensed into these "ultimate
cosmical particles." These afterward collected into larger masses,
which have been variously changed by subsequent metamorphic action,
and broken up by repeated mutual impact, and often again collected
together and solidified. The meteoric irons are probably those
portions of the metallic constituents which were separated from the
rest by fusion when the metamorphism was carried to that extreme
point.'"
But if it be true, as is conceded, that all the planets and comets of
the solar system were out-throwings from the sun itself, then all
must be as much of one quality of
{p. 399}
material as half a dozen suits of clothes made from the same bolt of
cloth. And hence our-brother-the-comet must be made of just such
matter as our earth is made of. And hence, if a comet did strike the
earth and deposited its ground-up and triturated material upon the
earth's surface, we should find nothing different in that material
from earth-substance of the same kind.
But, says another:
"If the Drift fell from a comet, why would not this clay-dust and
these pebbles have been consumed before reaching the earth by the
friction of our atmosphere just as we have seen the meteoroids
consumed; or, if not entirely used up, why would these pebbles not
show a fused surface, like the iron aërolites? "
Here is the difference: a meteorite, a small or large stone, is
detached, isolated, lone-wandering, lost in space; it comes within
the tremendous attractive power of our globe; it has no parental
attraction to restrain it; and it rushes headlong with lightning-like
rapidity toward the earth, burning itself away as it falls.
But suppose two heavenly bodies, each with its own center of
attraction, each holding its own scattered materials in place by its
own force, to meet each other; then there is no more probability of
the stones and dust of the comet flying to the earth, than there is
of the stones and dust of the earth flying to the comet. And the
attractive power of the comet, great enough to bold its gigantic mass
in place through the long reaches of the fields of space, and even
close up to the burning eye of the awful sun itself, holds its dust
and pebbles and bowlders together until the very moment of impact
with the earth. In short, they, the dust and stones, do not continue
to follow the comet, because the earth has got in their way and
arrested them. It was this terrific force of the
{p. 400}
comet's attraction, represented in a fearful rate of motion, that
tore and pounded and scratched and furrowed our poor earth's face, as
shown in the crushed and striated rocks under the Drift. They would
have gone clean through the earth to follow the comet, if it had been
possible.
If we can suppose the actual bulk of the comet to have greatly
exceeded the bulk of the earth, then the superior attraction of the
comet may have shocked the earth out of position. It has already been
suggested that the inclination of the axis of the earth may have been
changed at the time of the Drift; and the Esquimaux have a legend
that the earth was, at that time, actually shaken out of its
position. But upon this question I express no opinion.
But another may say:
"Your theory is impossible; these dense masses of clay and gravel
could not have fallen from a comet, because the tails of comets are
composed of material so attenuated that sometimes the stars are seen
through them."
Granted: but remember that the clay did not come to the earth as
clay, but as a finely comminuted powder or dust; it packed into clay
after having been mixed with water. The particles of this dust must
have been widely separated while in the comet's tail; if they had not
been, instead of a deposit of a few hundred feet, we should have had
one of hundreds of miles in thickness. We have seen, (page 94,
_ante_,) that the tail of one comet was thirteen million miles broad;
if the particles of dust composing that tail had been as minute as
those of clay-dust, and if they had been separated from each other by
many feet in distance, they would still have left a deposit on the
face of any object passing through them much greater than the Drift.
To illustrate my meaning: you ride on a summer day a hundred miles in
a railroad-car, seated by an open
{p. 401}
window. There is no dust perceptible, at least not enough to obscure
the landscape; yet at the end of the journey you find yourself
covered with a very evident coating of dust. Now, suppose that,
instead of traveling one hundred miles, your ride had been prolonged
a million miles, or thirteen million miles; and, instead of the
atmosphere being perfectly clear, you had moved through a cloud of
dust, not dense enough to intercept the light of the stars, and yet
dense enough to reflect the light of the sun, even as a smoke-wreath
reflects it, and you can readily see that, long before you reached
the end of your journey, you would be buried alive under hundreds of
feet of dust. To creatures like ourselves, measuring our stature by
feet and inches, a Drift-deposit three hundred feet thick is an
immense affair, even as a deposit a foot thick would be to an ant;
but, measured on an astronomical scale, with the foot-rule of the
heavens, and the Drift is no more than a thin coating of dust, such
as accumulates on a traveler's coat. Even estimating it upon the
scale of our planet, it is a mere wrapping of tissue-paper thickness.
In short, it must be remembered that we are an infinitely
insignificant breed of little creatures, to whom a cosmical
dust-shower is a cataclysm.
And that which is true of the clay-dust is true of the gravel. At a
million miles' distance it, too, is dust; it runs in lines or
streaks, widely separated; and the light shines between its particles
as it does through the leaves of the trees
"And glimmering through the groaning trees
Kirk Alloway seems in a blaze;
Through every bore the beams are glancing."
But another says:
"Why do you think the finer parts of the material of the comet are
carried farthest back from the head?"
{p. 402}
Because the attractive power lodged in the nucleus acts with most
force on the largest masses; even as the rock is not so likely to
leave the earth in a wind-storm as the dust; and in the flight of the
comet through space, at the rate of three hundred and sixty-six miles
per second, its lighter substances would naturally trail farthest
behind it; for--
"The thing that's heavy in itself
Upon enforcement flies with greatest speed."
And it would seem as if in time this trailing material of the comet
falls so far behind that it loses its grip, and is lost; hence the
showers of _meteoroids_.
Another says:
"I can not accept your theory as to the glacial clays they were
certainly deposited in water, formed like silt, washed down from the
adjacent continents."
I answer they were not, because:--
1. If laid down in water, they would be stratified; but they are not.
2. If laid down in water, they would be full of the fossils of the
water, fresh-water shells, sea-shells, bones of fish, reptiles,
whales, seals, etc.; but they are non-fossiliferous.
3. If laid down in water, they would not be made exclusively from
granite. Where are the continents to be found which are composed of
granite and nothing but granite?
4. Where were the continents, of any kind, from which these washings
came? They must have reached from pole to pole, and filled the whole
Atlantic Ocean. And how could the washings of rivers have made this
uniform sheet, reaching over the whole length and half the breadth of
this continent?
5. If these clays were made from land-washings, how comes it that in
some places they are red, in others blue, in others yellow? In
Western Minnesota you penetrate
{p. 403}
through twenty feet of yellow clay until you reach a thin layer of
gravel, about an inch thick, and then pass at once, without any
gradual transition, into a bed of blue clay fifty feet thick; and
under this, again, you reach gravel. What separated these various
deposits? The glacialists answer us that the yellow clay was
deposited in fresh water, and the blue clay in salt water, and hence
the difference in the color. But how did the water change instantly
from salt to fresh? Why was there no interval of brackish water,
during which the blue and yellow clays would have gradually shaded
into each other? The transition from the yellow clay to the blue is
as immediate and marked as if you were to lay a piece of yellow cloth
across a piece of blue cloth. You can not take the salt out of a vast
ocean, big enough to cover half a continent, in a day, a month, a
year, or a century. And where were the bowl-like ridges of land that
inclosed the continent, and kept out the salt water during the ages
that elapsed while the yellow clay was being laid down in fresh
water? And, above all, why are no such clays, blue, yellow, or red,
now being formed anywhere on earth, under sheet-ice, glaciers,
icebergs, or anything else? And how about the people who built
cisterns, and used coins and iron implements before this silt was
accumulated in the seas, a million years ago, for it must have taken
that long to create these vast deposits if they were deposited as
silt in the bottom of seas and lakes.
It may be asked:
"What relation, in order of time, do you suppose the Drift Age to
hold to the Deluge of Noah and Deucalion? "
The latter was infinitely later. The geologists, as I have shown,
suppose the Drift to have come upon the earth--basing their
calculations upon the recession of the
{p. 404}
Falls of Niagara--about thirty thousand years ago. We have seen that
this would nearly accord with the time given in Job, when he speaks
of the position of certain constellations. The Deluge of Noah
probably occurred somewhere from eight to eleven thousand years ago.
Hence, about twenty thousand years probably intervened between the
Drift and the Deluge. These were the "myriads of years" referred to
by Plato, during which mankind dwelt on the great plain of Atlantis.
And this order of events agrees with all the legends.
In the Bible a long interval elapsed between the fall of man, or his
expulsion from paradise, and the Deluge of Noah; and during this
period mankind rose to civilization; became workers in the metals,
musicians, and the builders of cities.
In the Egyptian history, as preserved by Plato, the Deluge of
Deucalion, which many things prove to have been identical with the
Deluge of Noah, was the last of a series of great catastrophes.
In the Celtic legends the great Deluge of Ogyges preceded the last
deluge.
In the American legends, mankind have been many times destroyed, and
as often renewed.
But it may be asked:
"Are you right in supposing that man first rose to civilization in a
great Atlantic island?
We can conceive, as I have shown, mankind at some central point, like
the Atlantic island, building up anew, after the Drift Age, the
shattered fragments of pre-glacial civilization, and hence becoming
to the post-glacial ancient world the center and apparent fountain of
all cultivation. But in view of the curious discoveries made, as I
have shown, in the glacial clays of the United
{p. 405}
States, further investigations may prove that it was on the North
American Continent civilization was first born, and that it was
thence moved _eastward_ over the bridge-like ridges to Atlantis.
And it is, in this connection, remarkable that the Bible tells us
(Genesis, chap. ii, v. 8):
"And the Lord God planted a garden _eastward, in Eden_; and there he
put the man that he had formed."
He had first (v. 7) "formed man of the dust of the ground," and then
he moves him eastward to Eden, to the garden.
And, as I have shown, when the fall of man came, when the Drift
destroyed the lovely Tertiary conditions, man was _again moved
eastward_; he was driven out of Eden, and the cherubims guarded the
_eastern_ extremity of the garden, to prevent man's return from (we
will say) the shores of Atlantis. In other words, the present habitat
of men is, as I have shown, according to the Bible, _east_ of their
former dwelling-place.
In the age of man's declension he moved eastward. In the age of his
redemption he moves westward.
Hence, if the Bible is to be relied on, before man reached the garden
of Eden, he had been created in some region _west of the garden_, to
wit, in America; and here he may have first developed the
civilization of which we find traces in Illinois, showing a
metal-working race sufficiently advanced to have an alphabet and a
currency.
But in all this we do not touch upon the question of where man was
first formed by God.
The original birthplace of the human race who shall tell? It was
possibly in some region now under the ocean, as Professor Winchell
has suggested; there he was evolved during the mild, equable, gentle,
plentiful,
406 CONCLUSIONS.
garden-age of the Tertiary; in the midst of the most favorable
conditions for increasing the vigor of life and expanding it into new
forms. It showed its influence by developing mammalian life in one
direction into the monstrous forms of the mammoth and the mastodon,
the climax of animal growth; and in the other direction into the more
marvelous expansion of mentality found in man.
There are two things necessary to a comprehension of that which lies
around us--development and design, evolution and purpose; God's way
and God's intent. Neither alone will solve the problem. These are the
two limbs of the right angle which meet at the first life-cell found
on earth, and lead out until we find man at one extremity and God at
the other.
Why should the religious world shrink from the theory of evolution?
To know the path by which God has advanced is not to disparage God.
Could all this orderly nature have grown up out of chance, out of the
accidental concatenation of atoms? As Bacon said:
"I would rather believe all the fables in the Talmud and the Koran
than that this universal frame is _without a mind!_"
Wonderful thought! A flash of light through the darkness.
And what greater guarantee of the future can we have than evolution?
If God has led life from the rudest beginnings, whose fossils are
engraved, (blurred and obscured,) on the many pages of the vast
geological volume, up to this intellectual, charitable, merciful,
powerful world of to-day, who can doubt that the same hand will guide
our posterity to even higher levels of development?
{p. 407}
If our thread of life has expanded from Cain to Christ, from the man
who murders to him who submits to murder for the love of man, who can
doubt that the Cain-like in the race will gradually pass away and the
Christ-like dominate the planet?
Religion and science, nature and spirit, knowledge of God's works and
reverence for God, are brethren, who should stand together with
twined arms, singing perpetual praises to that vast atmosphere,
ocean, universe of spirituality, out of which matter has been born,
of which matter is but a condensation; that illimitable,
incomprehensible, awe-full Something, before the conception of which
men should go down upon the very knees of their hearts in adoration.
{p. 408}
CHAPTER V.
BIELA'S COMET.
HUMBOLDT Says:
"It is probable that the vapor of the tails of comets mingled with
our atmosphere in the years 1819 and 1823."[1]
There is reason to believe that the present generation has passed
through the gaseous prolongation of a comet's tail, and that hundreds
of human beings lost their lives, somewhat as they perished in the
Age of Fire and Gravel, burned up and poisoned by its exhalations.
And, although this catastrophe was upon an infinitely smaller scale
than that of the old time, still it may throw some light upon the
great cataclysm. At least it is a curious story, with some marvelous
features:
On the 27th day of February, 1826, (to begin as M. Dumas would
commence one of his novels,) M. Biela, an Austrian officer, residing
at Josephstadt, in Bohemia, discovered a comet in the constellation
Aries, which, at that time, was seen as a small round speck of filmy
cloud. Its course was watched during the following month by M.
Gambart at Marseilles and by M. Clausen at Altona, and those
observers assigned to it an elliptical orbit, with a period of _six
years and three quarters_ for its revolution.
M. Damoiseau subsequently calculated its path, and announced that on
its next return the comet would cross
[1. "Cosmos," Vol. i, p. 100.]
{p. 409}
the orbit of the earth, within _twenty thousand miles of its track,
and but about one month before the earth would have arrived at the
same spot!_
This was shooting close to the bull's-eye!
He estimated that it would lose nearly ten days on its return trip,
through the retarding influence of Jupiter and Saturn; but, if it
lost forty days instead of ten, what then?
But the comet came up to time in 1832, and the earth _missed it by
one month_.
And it returned in like fashion in 1839 and 1846. But here a
surprising thing occurred. _Its proximity to the earth had split it
in two_; each half had a head and tail of its own; each had set up a
separate government for itself; and they were whirling through space,
side by side, like a couple of race-horses, about sixteen thousand
miles apart, or about twice as wide apart as the diameter of the
earth. Here is a picture of them, drawn from life.
###
BIELA'S COMET, SPLIT IN TWO, (From Guillemin's "The Heavens," page
247.)
{p. 410} Did the Fenris-Wolf, the Midgard-Serpent, and the Dog-Garm
look like this?
In 1852, 1859, and 1866, the comet SHOULD have returned, but it did
not. It was lost. It was dissipated. Its material was banging around
the earth in fragments somewhere. I quote from a writer in a recent
issue of the "Edinburgh Review":
The puzzled astronomers were left in a state of tantalizing
uncertainty as to what had become of it. At the beginning of the year
1866 this feeling of bewilderment gained expression in the Annual
Report of the Council of the Royal Astronomical Society. The matter
continued, nevertheless, in the same state of provoking uncertainty
for another six years. The third period of the perihelion passage had
then passed, and nothing had been seen of the missing luminary. But
on the night of November 27, 1872, night-watchers were startled by a
sudden and a very magnificent display of falling stars or meteors, of
which there had been no previous forecast, and Professor
Klinkerflues, of Berlin, having carefully noted the common radiant
point in space from which this star-shower was discharged into the
earth's atmosphere, with the intuition of ready genius jumped at once
to the startling inference that here at last were traces of the
missing luminary. There were eighty of the meteors that furnished a
good position for the radiant point of the discharge, and that
position, strange to say, was very much the same as the position in
space which Biela's comet should have occupied just about that time
on its fourth return toward perihelion. Klinkerflues, therefore,
taking this spot as one point in the path of the comet, and carrying
the path on as a track into forward space, fixed the direction there
through which it should pass as a 'vanishing-point' at the other side
of the starry sphere, and having satisfied himself of that further
position he sent off a telegram to the other side of the world, where
alone it could be seen--that is to say, to Mr. Pogson, of the Madras
Observatory--which may be best told in his own nervous and simple
words.
{p. 411}
Herr Klinkerflues's telegram to Mr. Pogson, of Madras, was to the
following effect:
"'November 30th--Biela touched the earth on the 27th of November.
Search for him near Theta Centauri.'
"The telegram reached Madras, through Russia, in one hour and
thirty-five minutes, and the sequel of this curious passage of
astronomical romance may be appropriately told in the words in which
Mr. Pogson replied to Herr Klinkerflues's pithy message. The answer
was dated Madras, the 6th of December, and was in the following words:
"'On the 30th of November, at sixteen hours, the time of the comet
rising here, I was at my post, but hopelessly; clouds and rain gave
me no chance. The next morning I had the same bad luck. But on the
third trial, with a line of blue break, about 17¼ hours mean time, _I
found Biela immediately!_ Only four comparisons in successive minutes
could be obtained, in strong morning twilight, with an anonymous
star; but direct motion of 2.5 seconds decided that I had got the
comet all right. I noted it--circular, bright, with, a decided
nucleus, but NO TAIL, and about forty-five seconds in diameter. Next
morning I got seven good comparisons with an anonymous star, showing
a motion of 17.9 seconds in twenty-eight minutes, and I also got two
comparisons with a Madras star in our current catalogue, and with
7,734 Taylor. I was too anxious to secure one good place for the one
in hand to look for the other comet, and the fourth morning was
cloudy and rainy.'
"Herr Klinkerflues's commentary upon this communication was that he
forthwith proceeded to satisfy himself that no provoking accident had
led to the discovery of a comet altogether unconnected with Biela's,
although in this particular place, and that he was ultimately quite
confident of the identity of the comet observed by Mr. Pogson with
one of the two heads of Biela. It was subsequently settled that Mr.
Pogson had, most probably, seen both heads of the comet, one on the
first occasion of his successful search, and the second on the
following day; and the meteor-shower experienced in Europe on
November 27th was unquestionably due to the passage
{p. 412}
near the earth of a meteoric trail traveling in the track of the
comet. When the question of a possible collision was mooted in 1832,
Sir John Herschel remarked that such an occurrence might not be
unattended with danger, and that on account of the intersection of
the orbits of the earth and the comet a rencontre would in all
likelihood take place within the lapse of some millions of years. As
a matter of fact the collision did take place on November 27, 1872,
and the result, so far as the earth was concerned, was a magnificent
display of aërial fireworks! But a more telling piece of ready-witted
sagacity than this prompt employment of the telegraph for the
apprehension of the nimble delinquent can scarcely be conceived. The
sudden brush of the comet's tail, the instantaneous telegram to the
opposite side of the world, and the glimpse thence of the vagrant
luminary as it was just whisking itself off into space toward the
star Theta Centauri, together constitute a passage that stands quite
without a parallel in the experience of science."
But did the earth escape with a mere shower of fireworks?
I have argued that the material of a comet consists of a solid
nucleus, giving out fire and gas, enveloped in a great gaseous mass,
and a tail made up of stones, possibly gradually diminishing in size
as they recede from the nucleus, until the after-part of it is
composed of fine dust ground from the pebbles and bowlders; while
beyond this there may be a still further prolongation into gaseous
matter.
Now, we have seen that Biela's comets lost their tails. What became
of them? There is no evidence to show whether they lost them in 1852,
1859, 1866, or 1872. The probabilities are that the demoralization
took place before 1852, as otherwise the comets would have been seen,
tails and all, in that and subsequent years. It is true that the
earth came near enough in 1872 to attract some of the wandering
gravel-stones toward itself, and that they fell,
{p. 413}
blazing and consuming themselves with the friction of our atmosphere,
and reached the surface of our planet, if at all, as cosmic dust. But
where were the rest of the assets of these bankrupt comets? They were
probably scattered around in space, _disjecta membra_, floating
hither and thither, in one place a stream of stones, in another a
volume of gas; while the two heads had fled away, like the fugitive
presidents of a couple of broken banks, to the Canadian refuge of
"_Theta Centauri_"--shorn of their splendors and reduced to first
principles.
Did anything out of the usual order occur on the face of the earth
about this time?
Yes. In the year 1871, on Sunday, the 8th of October, at half past
nine o'clock in the evening, events occurred which attracted the
attention of the whole world, which caused the death of hundreds of
human beings, and the destruction of millions of property, and which
involved three different States of the Union in the wildest alarm and
terror.
The summer of 1871 had been excessively dry; the moisture seemed to
be evaporated out of the air; and on the Sunday above named the
atmospheric conditions all through the Northwest were of the most
peculiar character. The writer was living at the time in Minnesota,
hundreds of miles from the scene of the disasters, and he can never
forget the condition of things. There was a parched, combustible,
inflammable, furnace-like feeling in the air, that was really
alarming. It felt as if there were needed but a match, a spark, to
cause a world-wide explosion. It was weird and unnatural. I have
never seen nor felt anything like it before or since. Those who
experienced it will bear me out in these statements.
At that hour, half past nine o'clock in the evening, _at apparently
the same moment_, at points hundreds of miles
{p. 414}
apart, in three different States, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois,
fires of the most peculiar and devastating kind broke out, so far as
we know, by spontaneous combustion.
In Wisconsin, on its eastern borders, in a heavily timbered country,
near Lake Michigan, a region embracing _four hundred square miles_,
extending north from Brown County, and containing Peshtigo, Manistee,
Holland, and numerous villages on the shores of Green Bay, was swept
bare by an absolute whirlwind of flame. There were _seven hundred and
fifty people killed outright_, besides great numbers of the wounded,
maimed, and burned, who died afterward. More than three million
dollars' worth of property was destroyed.[1]
It was no ordinary fire. I quote:
"At sundown there was a lull in the wind and comparative stillness.
For two hours there were no signs of danger; but at a few minutes
after nine o'clock, and by a singular coincidence, _precisely the
time at which the Chicago fire commenced_, the people of the village
heard a terrible roar. It was that of a tornado, crushing through the
forests. _Instantly the heavens were illuminated with a terrible
glare_. _The sky_, which had been so dark a moment before, _burst
into clouds of flame_. A spectator of the terrible scene says the
fire did not come upon them gradually from burning trees and other
objects to the windward, but the first notice they had of it was _a
whirlwind of flame in great clouds from above the tops of the trees_,
which fell upon and entirely enveloped everything. The poor people
inhaled it, or the intensely hot air, and fell down dead. This is
verified by the appearance of many of the corpses. They were found
dead in the roads and open spaces, _where there were no visible marks
of fire near by, with not a trace of burning upon their bodies or
clothing_. At the Sugar Bush, which is an extended clearing, in some
places four miles in width,
[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton,
Chicago, 1871, pp. 393, 394, etc.]
{p. 415}
corpses were found in the open road, between fences only slightly
burned. _No mark of fire was upon them; they lay there as if asleep_.
This phenomenon seems to explain the fact that so many were killed in
compact masses. They seemed to have huddled together, in what were
evidently regarded at the moment as the safest places, _far away from
buildings, trees, or other inflammable_ material, and there to have
died together."[1]
Another spectator says:
"Much has been said of the intense heat of the fires which destroyed
Peshtigo, Menekaune, Williamsonville, etc., but all that has been
said can give the stranger but a faint conception of the reality. The
heat has been compared to that engendered by a flame concentrated on
an object by a blow-pipe; but even that would not account for some of
the phenomena. For instance, we have in our possession a copper cent
taken from the pocket of a dead man in the Peshtigo Sugar Bush, which
will illustrate our point. _This cent has been partially fused_, but
still retains its round form, and the inscription upon it is legible.
Others, in the same pocket, were partially _melted_, and yet _the
clothing and the body of the man were not even singed_. We do not
know in what way to account for this, unless, as is asserted by some,
the tornado and fire were accompanied by electrical phenomena."[2]
"It is the universal testimony that the prevailing idea among the
people was, that the last day had come. Accustomed as they were to
fire, nothing like this had ever been known. They could give no other
interpretation to this ominous roar, this _bursting of the sky with
fame, and this dropping down of fire out of the very heavens_,
consuming instantly everything it touched.
"No two give a like description of the great tornado as it smote and
devoured the village. It seemed as if 'the fiery fiends of hell had
been loosened,' says one. 'It came in great sheeted _flames from
heaven_,' says another. 'There was _a pitiless rain of fire and_
SAND.' 'The
[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton,
Chicago, 1871, p. 372.
2. Ibid., p. 373.]
{p. 416}
atmosphere was all afire.' Some speak of '_great balls of fire
unrolling and shooting forth, in streams_.' The fire leaped over
roofs and trees, and ignited whole streets at once. No one could
stand before the blast. It was a race with death, above, behind, and
before them."[1]
A civil engineer, doing business in Peshtigo, says
"The heat increased so rapidly, as things got well afire, that, _when
about four hundred feet from the bridge and the nearest building_, I
was obliged to lie down behind a log that was aground in about two
feet of water, and by going under water now and then, and holding my
head close to the water behind the log, I managed to breathe. There
were a dozen others behind the same log. If I had succeeded in
crossing the river and gone among the buildings on the other side,
probably I should have been lost, as many were."
We have seen Ovid describing the people of "the earth" crouching in
the same way in the water to save themselves from the flames of the
Age of Fire.
In Michigan, one Allison Weaver, near Port Huron, determined to
remain, to protect, if possible, some mill-property of which he had
charge. He knew the fire was coming, and dug himself a shallow well
or pit, made a thick plank cover to place over it, and thus prepared
to bide the conflagration.
I quote:
"He filled it nearly full of water, and took care to saturate the
ground around it for a distance of several rods. Going to the mill,
he dragged out a four-inch plank, sawed it in two, and saw that the
parts tightly covered the mouth of the little well. 'I kalkerated it
would be tech and go,' said he, 'but it was the best I could do.' At
midnight he had everything arranged, and the roaring then was
[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton,
Chicago, 1871, p. 374.]
{p. 417}
awful to hear. The clearing was ten to twelve acres in extent, and
Weaver says that, for two hours before the fire reached him, there
was a constant flight across the ground of small animals. As he
rested a moment from giving the house another wetting down, a horse
dashed into the opening at full speed and made for the house. Weaver
could see him tremble and shake with excitement and terror, and felt
a pity for him. After a moment the animal gave utterance to a snort
of dismay, ran two or three times around the house, and then shot on
into the woods like a rocket."
We have, in the foregoing pages, in the legends of different nations,
descriptions of the terrified animals flying with the men into the
caves of the earth to escape the great conflagration.
'I Not long after this the fire came. Weaver stood by his well, ready
for the emergency, yet curious to see the breaking-in of the flames.
The roaring increased in volume, the air became oppressive, a cloud
of dust and cinders came showering down, and he could see the flame
through the trees. It did not run along the ground, or leap from tree
to tree, but it came on like a tornado, _a sheet of flame reaching
from the earth to the tops of the trees_. As it struck the clearing
he jumped into his well, and closed over the planks. He could no
longer see, but he could hear. He says that the flames made no halt
whatever, or ceased their roaring for an instant, but he hardly got
the opening closed before the house and mill were burning tinder, and
both were down in five minutes. The smoke came down upon him
powerfully, and his den was so hot he could hardly breathe.
"He knew that the planks above him were on fire, but, remembering
their thickness, he waited till the roaring of the flames had died
away, and then with his head and hands turned them over and put out
the fire by dashing up water with his hands. Although it was a cold
night, and the water had at first chilled him, the heat gradually
warmed him up until he felt quite comfortable. He remained in his den
until daylight, frequently turning
{p. 418}
over the planks and putting out the fire, and then the worst had
passed. The earth around was on fire in spots, house and mill were
gone, leaves, brush, and logs were swept clean away as if shaved off
and swept with a broom, and nothing but soot and ashes were to be
seen."[1]
In Wisconsin, at Williamson's Mills, there was a large but shallow
well on the premises belonging to a Mr. Boorman. The people, when cut
off by the flames and wild with terror, and thinking they would find
safety in the water, leaped into this well. "The relentless fury of
the flames drove them pell-mell into the pit, to struggle with each
other and die--some by drowning, and others by fire and suffocation.
None escaped. _Thirty-two bodies were found there_. They were in
every imaginable position; but the contortions of their limbs and the
agonizing expressions of their faces told the awful tale."[2]
The recital of these details, horrible though they may be, becomes
excusable when we remember that the ancestors of our race must have
endured similar horrors in that awful calamity which I have discussed
in this volume.
James B. Clark, of Detroit, who was at Uniontown, Wisconsin, writes:
"The fire suddenly made a rush, like the flash of a train of
gunpowder, and swept in the shape of a crescent around the
settlement. It is almost impossible to conceive _the frightful
rapidity of the advance of the flames_. The rushing fire seemed to
eat up and annihilate the trees."
They saw a black mass coming toward them from the wall of flame:
"It was a stampede of cattle and horses thundering toward us,
bellowing moaning, and neighing as they galloped
[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton,
Chicago, 1871, p. 390.
2. Ibid., p. 386.]
{p. 419}
on; rushing with fearful speed, their eyeballs dilated and glaring
with terror, and every motion betokening delirium of fright. Some had
been badly burned, and must have plunged through a long space of
flame in the desperate effort to escape. Following considerably
behind came a solitary horse, panting and snorting and nearly
exhausted. He was saddled and bridled, and, as we first thought, had
a bag lashed to his back. As he came up we were startled at the sight
of a young lad lying fallen over the animal's neck, the bridle wound
around his hands, and the mane being clinched by the fingers. Little
effort was needed to stop the jaded horse, and at once release the
helpless boy. He was taken into the house, and all that we could do
was done; but he had inhaled the smoke, and was seemingly dying. Some
time elapsed and he revived enough to speak. He told his
name--Patrick Byrnes--and said: 'Father and mother and the children
got into the wagon. I don't know what became of them. Everything is
burned up. I am dying. Oh! is hell any worse than this?'"[1]
How vividly does all this recall the book of Job and the legends of
Central America, which refer to the multitudes of the burned, maimed,
and wounded lying in the caverns, moaning and crying like poor
Patrick Byrnes, suffering no less in mind than in body!
When we leave Wisconsin and pass about two hundred and fifty miles
eastward, over Lake Michigan and across the whole width of the State
of Michigan, we find much the same condition of things, but not so
terrible in the loss of human life. Fully _fifteen thousand people
were rendered homeless by the fires_; and their food, clothing,
crops, horses, and cattle were destroyed. Of these five to six
thousand were burned out the _same night that the fires broke out in
Chicago and Wisconsin_. The
[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton,
Chicago, 1871, p. 383.]
{p. 420}
total destruction of property exceeded one million dollars; not only
villages and cities, but whole townships, were swept bare.
But it is to Chicago we must turn for the most extraordinary results
of this atmospheric disturbance. It is needless to tell the story in
detail. The world knows it by heart:
Blackened and bleeding, helpless, panting, prone,
On the charred fragments of her shattered throne,
Lies she who stood but yesterday alone."
I have only space to refer to one or two points.
The fire was spontaneous. The story of Mrs. O'Leary's cow having
started the conflagration by kicking over a lantern was proved to be
false. It was the access of gas from the tail of Biela's comet that
burned up Chicago!
The fire-marshal testified:
"I felt it in my bones that we were going to have a burn."
He says, speaking of O'Leary's barn:
"We got the fire under control, and it would not have gone a foot
farther; but the next thing I knew they came and told me that St.
Paul's church, about two squares north, was on fire."[1]
They checked the church-fire, but--
"The next thing I knew the fire was in Bateham's planing-mill."
A writer in the New York "Evening Post" says he saw in Chicago
"buildings far beyond the line of fire, _and in no contact with it,
burst into flames from the interior_."
[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton,
Chicago, 1871, p. 163.]
{p. 421}
It must not be forgotten that the fall of 1871 was marked by
extraordinary conflagrations in regions widely separated. On the 8th.
of October, _the same day_ the Wisconsin, Michigan, and Chicago fires
broke out, the States of Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, and Illinois were
severely devastated by prairie-fires; while terrible fires raged on
the Alleghanies, the Sierras of the Pacific coast, and the Rocky
Mountains, and in the region of the Red River of the North.
"The Annual Record of Science and Industry" for 1876, page 84, says:
"For weeks before and after the great fire in Chicago in 1872, great
areas of forest and prairie-land, both in the United States and the
British Provinces, were on fire."
The flames that consumed a great part of Chicago were of an unusual
character and produced extraordinary effects. They absolutely
_melted_ the hardest building-stone, which had previously been
considered fire-proof. Iron, glass, granite, were fused and run
together into grotesque conglomerates, as if they had been put
through a blast-furnace. No kind of material could stand its breath
for a moment.
I quote again from Sheahan & Upton's Work:
"The huge stone and brick structures melted before the fierceness of
the flames as a snow-flake melts and disappears in water, and almost
as quickly. Six-story buildings would take fire and _disappear for
ever from sight in five minutes by the watch_. . . . The fire also
doubled on its track at the great Union Depot and burned half a mile
southward _in the very teeth of the gale_--a gale which blew a
perfect tornado, and in which no vessel could have lived on the lake.
. . . _Strange, fantastic fires of blue, red, and green played along
the cornices of buildings_."[1]
[1. "History of the Chicago Fire," pp. 85, 86.]
{p. 422}
Hon. William B. Ogden wrote at the time:
"The fire was accompanied by the fiercest tornado of wind ever known
to blow here."[1]
"The most striking peculiarity of the fire was its intense heat.
Nothing exposed to it escaped. Amid the hundreds of acres left bare
there is not to be found a piece of wood of any description, and,
_unlike most fires, it left nothing half burned_. . . . The fire
swept the streets of all the ordinary dust and rubbish, consuming it
instantly."[2]
The Athens marble burned like coal!
"The intensity of the heat may be judged, and the thorough combustion
of everything wooden may be understood, when we state that in the
yard of one of the large agricultural-implement factories was stacked
some hundreds of tons of pig-iron. This iron was two hundred feet
from any building. To the south of it was the river, one hundred and
fifty feet wide. No large building but the factory was in the
immediate vicinity of the fire. Yet, so great was the heat, that
_this pile of iron melted and run, and is now in one large and nearly
solid mass_."[3]
The amount of property destroyed was estimated by Mayor Medill at one
hundred and fifty million dollars; and the number of people rendered
houseless, at one hundred and twenty-five thousand. Several hundred
lives were lost.
All this brings before our eyes vividly the condition of things when
the comet struck the earth; when conflagrations spread over wide
areas; when human beings were consumed by the million; when their
works were obliterated, and the remnants of the multitude fled before
the rushing flames, filled with unutterable consternation;
[1. "History of the Chicago Fire," p. 87.
2. Ibid., p. 119.
3. Ibid., p. 121.]
{p. 423}
and as they jumped pell-mell into wells, so we have seen them in Job
clambering down ropes into the narrow-mouthed, bottomless pit.
Who shall say how often the characteristics of our atmosphere have
been affected by accessions from extraterrestrial sources, resulting
in conflagrations or pestilences, in failures of crops, and in
famines? Who shall say how far great revolutions and wars and other
perturbations of humanity have been due to similar modifications?
There is a world of philosophy in that curious story, "Dr. Ox's
Hobby," wherein we are told how he changed the mental traits of a
village of Hollanders by increasing the amount of oxygen in the air
they breathed.
{p. 424}
CHAPTER VI.
THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF OF MANKIND.
THERE are some thoughts and opinions which we seem to take by
inheritance; we imbibe them with our mothers' milk; they are in our
blood; they are received insensibly in childhood.
We have seen the folk-lore of the nations, passing through the
endless and continuous generation of children, unchanged from the
remotest ages.
In the same way there is an untaught but universal feeling which
makes all mankind regard comets with fear and trembling, and which
unites all races of men in a universal belief that some day the world
will be destroyed by fire.
There are many things which indicate that a far-distant, prehistoric
race existed in the background of Egyptian and Babylonian
development, and that from this people, highly civilized and
educated, we have derived the arrangement of the heavens into
constellations, and our divisions of time into days, weeks, years,
and centuries. This people stood much nearer the Drift Age than we
do. They understood it better. Their legends and religious beliefs
were full of it. The gods carved on Hindoo temples or painted on the
walls of Assyrian, Peruvian, or American structures, the flying
dragons, the winged gods, the winged animals, Gucumatz, Rama, Siva,
Vishnu, Tezcatlipoca, were painted in the very colors of the clays
which came from the disintegration of the granite, "red,
{p. 425}
white, and blue," the very colors which distinguished the comet; and
they are all reminiscences of that great monster. The idols of the
pagan world are, in fact, congealed history, and will some day be
intelligently studied as such.
Doubtless this ancient astronomical, zodiac-building, and
constellation-constructing race taught the people the true doctrine
of comets; taught that the winding serpent, the flying dragon, the
destructive winged dog, or wolf, or lion, whose sphinx-like images
now frown upon us from ancient walls and door-ways, were really
comets; taught how one of them had actually struck the earth; and
taught that in the lapse of ages another of these multitudinous
wanderers of space would again encounter our globe, and end all
things in one universal conflagration.
And down through the race this belief has come, and down through the
race it will go, to the consummation of time.
We find this "day of wrath" prefigured in the words of Malachi,
(chap. iv, v. 1):
"1. For behold the day cometh that shall burn as an oven; and all the
proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day
that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it
shall leave them neither root nor branch.
"2. But unto you that fear my name shall the sun of righteousness
arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up
as calves of the stall.
"3. And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under
the soles of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the
Lord of hosts."
We find the same great catastrophe foretold in the book of
Revelation, (chap. xii, v. 3):
"And there appeared another _wonder in heaven_; and behold a great
red _dragon_, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon
his heads.
{p. 426}
"4. _And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did
cast them to the earth_."
And again, (chap. vi):
"12. And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there
was a great earthquake; _and the sun became black as sackcloth of
hair_, and the moon became as blood;
"13. _And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth_, even as a
fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty
wind.
"14. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together;
and _every mountain and island were moved out of their places_.
"15. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men,
and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman and
every freeman, _hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the
mountains_;
"16. And said to the mountains and the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us
from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath
of the Lamb
17. _For the great day of his wrath is come_, and who shall be able
to stand?"
Here we seem to have the story of Job over again, in this
prefiguration of the future.
The Ethiopian copy of the apocryphal book of Enoch contains a poem,
which is prefixed to the body of that work, and which the learned
author of "Nimrod" supposes to be authentic. It certainly dates from
a vast antiquity. It is as follows:
"Enoch, a righteous man, who was with God, answered and spoke while
his eyes were open, and while _he saw a holy vision in the heavens_.
. . .
"Upon this account I spoke, and conversed with him who will _go forth
from his habitation_, the holy and mighty One, the God of the world.
"Who will hereafter tread upon the mountain Sinai, and _appear with
his hosts_, and he manifested in the strength of his power from
heaven.
{p. 427}
"All shall be afraid, and the watchers be terrified. Great fear and
trembling shall seize even to the ends of the earth.
"The lofty mountains shall be troubled, and the exalted hills
depressed, _melting like honeycomb in the flame_.
"The earth shall be _immerged_, and _all things_ which are in it
_perish_. . . .
"He shall preserve the elect, and toward them exercise clemency. . .
. The whole earth is full of water."
This is either history or prophecy.
In the Second Epistle General of Peter, (chap. iii,) we have some
allusions to the past, and some prophecies based upon the past, which
are very curious:
Verse 5. "For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word
of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the
water and in the water."
That is to say, the earth was, as in Ovid and Ragnarok, and the
legends generally, an island, "standing out of the water and in the
water."
Verse 6. "Whereby _the world that then was_, being overflowed with
water, perished."
This seems to refer to the island Atlantis, "overflowed with water,"
and destroyed, as told by Plato; thereby forming a very distinct
connection between the Island of Poseidon and the Deluge of Noah.
We read on:
Verse 7. "But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same
word are kept in store, _reserved unto fire_ against the day of
judgment and perdition of ungodly men."
Verse 10. "But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night;
in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the
elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works
that are therein shall be burned up."
{p. 428}
The Gothic mythology tells us that Surt, with his flaming sword,
"shall come at the end of the world; he shall vanquish all the gods;
he shall give up the universe a prey to the flames."
This belief in the ultimate destruction of the world and all its
inhabitants by fire was found among the American races as well as
those of the Old World:
"The same terror inspired the Peruvians at every eclipse; for some
day--taught the Amantas--the shadow will veil the sun for ever, and
land, moon, and stars will be wrapped in a devouring conflagration,
to know no regeneration."[1]
The Algonquin races believed that some day Michabo "will stamp his
foot on the ground, flames will burst forth to consume the habitable
land; only a pair, or only, at most, those who have maintained
inviolate the institutions he ordained, will he protect and preserve
to inhabit the new world he will then fabricate."[2]
Nearly all the American tribes had similar presentiments. The
Chickasaws, the Mandans of the Missouri, the Pueblo Indians of New
Mexico, the Muyscas of Bogota, the Botocudos of Brazil, the
Araucanians of Chili, the Winnebagoes, all have possessed such a
belief from time immemorial. The Mayas of Yucatan had a prediction
which Father Lizana, _curé_ of Itzamal, preserved in the Spanish
language:
"At the close of the ages, it hath been decreed,
Shall perish and vanish each weak god of men,
And the world shall be _purged with ravening fire_."
We know that among our own people, the European races, this looking
forward to a conflagration which is to end all things is found
everywhere; and that everywhere a comet is regarded with terror. It
is a messenger of
[1. Brinton's "Myths," p. 235.
2. Ibid.]
{p. 429}
woe and disaster; it is a dreadful threat shining in the heavens; it
is "God's rod," even as it was in Job's day.
I could fill pages with the proofs of the truth of this statement.
An ancient writer, describing the great meteoric shower of the year
1202, says:
"The stars flew against one another like a scattering swarm of
locusts, to the right and left; this phenomenon lasted until
daybreak; people were thrown into consternation and cried to God, the
Most High, with confused clamor."[1]
The great meteoric display of 1366 produced similar effects. An
historian of the time says:
"Those who saw it were filled with such great fear and dismay that
they were astounded, imagining that they were all dead men, and that
the end of the world had come."[2]
How could such a universal terror have fixed itself in the blood of
the race, if it had not originated from some great primeval fact? And
all this terror is associated with a dragon.
And Chambers says:
"The dragon appears in the mythical history and legendary poetry of
almost every nation, as the emblem of the destructive and anarchical
principle; . . . as misdirected physical force and untamable animal
passions. . . . The dragon proceeds openly to work, running on its
feet with expanded wings, and head and tail erect, violently and
ruthlessly outraging decency and propriety, _spouting fire and fury
from both mouth and tail, and wasting and devastating the whole
land_."[3]
This fiery monster is the comet.
[1. Popular Science Monthly," June, 1882, p. 193.
2. Ibid., p. 193.
3. "Chambers's Encyclopaedia," vol. iii, p. 655.]
{p. 430}
And Milton speaks from the same universal inspiration when he tells
us:
"A comet burned,
That fires the length of Ophiucus huge
In th' arctic sky, and _from its horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war_."
And in the Shakespeare plays[1] we read:
"Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky;
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars."
Man, by an inherited instinct, regards the comet as a great terror
and a great foe; and the heart of humanity sits uneasily when one
blazes in the sky. Even to the scholar and the scientist they are a
puzzle and a fear; they are erratic, unusual, anarchical,
monstrous--something let loose, like a tiger of the heavens, athwart
an orderly, peaceful, and harmonious world. They may be impalpable
and harmless attenuations of gas, or they way be loaded with death
and ruin; but in any event man can not contemplate them without
terror.
[1. 1 Henry VI, 1, 1.]
{p. 431}
CHAPTER VII.
THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES.
IF the reader is satisfied, from my reasoning and the facts I have
adduced, that the so-called Glacial Age really represents a collision
of the earth with one of these wandering luminaries of space, the
question can not but occur to him, Was this the first and only
occasion, during all the thousands of millions of years that our
planet has been revolving on its axis and circling around the sun,
that such a catastrophe has occurred?
The answer must be in the negative.
We find that all through the rocky record of our globe the same
phenomena which we have learned to recognize as peculiar to the Drift
Age are, at distant intervals, repeated.
The long ages of the Palæozoic Time passed with few or no
disturbances. The movements of the earth's crust oscillated at a rate
not to exceed one foot in a century.[1] It was an age of peace. Then
came a tremendous convulsion. It has been styled by the geologists
"the epoch of the Appalachian revolution."
"Strata were upraised and flexed into great (olds, some of the folds
a score or more of miles in span. Deep fissures were opened in the
earth's crust," like the fiords or great rock-cracks which
accompanied the Diluvial or Drift Age. "Rocks were consolidated; and
over some parts sandstones and shales were crystallized into gneiss,
[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 150.]
{p. 432}
mica-schist, and other related rocks, and limestone into
architectural and statuary marble. Bituminous coal was turned into
anthracite in Pennsylvania."[1]
I copy from the same work (p. 153) the following cut, showing the
extent to which the rocks were crushed out of shape:
###
SECTION ON THE SCHUYLKILL, PENNSYLVANIA.
_P, Pottsville on the coal-measures; 2, Calciferous formation; 3,
Trenton; 4, Hudson River; 5, Oneida and Niagara; 7, Lower Helderberg;
8, 10, 11, Devonian; 12, 13, Subcarboniferous; 14, Carboniferous, or
coal-measures._
These tremendous changes were caused by a pressure of some kind which
came from the east, from where the Atlantic Ocean now rolls.
"It was due to a _lateral_ pressure, the folding having taken place
just as it might in paper or cloth under a lateral or _pushing_
movement."[2]
"It was accompanied by _great heat_ which melted and consolidated the
rocks, changed their condition, drove the volatile gases out of the
bituminous coal and changed it into anthracite, in some places
altered it to graphite, as if it had been passed through a
furnace."[3]
It also made an almost universal slaughter of all forms of life:
"The extermination of life which took place at this time was one of
the most extensive in all geological history; . . . no fossils of the
Carboniferous formation occur in later rocks."[4]
[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 152.
2. Ibid., p. 155.
3. Ibid., p. 155.
4. Ibid., p. 157.]
{p. 433}
it was accompanied or followed, as in the Drift Age, by tremendous
floods of water; the evaporated seas returned to the earth in wasting
storms:
"The waters commenced the work of denudation, which has been
continued to the present time."[1]
Is not all this a striking confirmation of my theory?
Here we find that, long before the age of man, a fearful catastrophe
happened to the earth. Its rocks were melted--not merely decomposed,
as in the Drift Age,--but actually melted and metamorphosed; the
heat, as in the Drift Age, sucked up the waters of the seas, to cast
them down again in great floods; it wiped out nearly all the life of
the planet, even as the Drift Age exterminated the great mammals;
whatever drift then fell probably melted with the burning rocks.
Here are phenomena which no ice-sheet, though it were a thousand
miles thick, can explain; here is heat, not ice; combustion, not
cold; and yet all these phenomena are but the results which we have
seen would naturally follow the contact of the earth with a comet.
But while, in this particular case, the size of the comet, or its
more fiery nature, melted the surface of the globe, and changed the
very texture of the solid rocks, we find in the geological record the
evidences of repeated visitations when Drift was thrown upon the
earth in great quantities; but the heat, as in the last Drift Age,
was not great enough to consume all things.
In the Cambrian formation, conglomerates are found, combinations of
stones and hardened clay, very much like the true "till."
In the Lower Silurian of the south of Scotland, large blocks and
bowlders (from one foot to five feet in diameter)
[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 156.]
{p. 434}
are found, "of gneiss, syenite, granite, etc., none of which belong
to the rocks of that neighborhood."
Geikie says:
"Possibly these bowlders may have come from some ancient Atlantis,
transported by ice."[1]
The conglomerates belonging to the Old Red Sandstone formation in the
north of England and in Scotland, we are told, "closely resemble a
consolidated bowlder drift."[2]
Near Victoria, in Australia, a conglomerate was found _nearly one
hundred feet in thickness_.
"Great beds of conglomerate occur at the bottom of the Carboniferous,
in various parts of Scotland, which it is difficult to believe are
other than ancient morainic _débris_. They are frequently quite
unstratified, and the stones _often show that peculiar blunted form
which is so characteristic of glacial work_."[3]
Professor Ramsay found well-scratched and blunted stones in a Permian
conglomerate.
In the north of Scotland, a coarse, bowlder-conglomerate is
associated with the Jurassic strata. The Cretaceous formation has
yielded great stones and bowlders. In the Eocene of Switzerland,
erratics have been found, some angular and some rounded. They often
attain great size; one measured one hundred and five feet in length,
ninety feet in breadth, and forty-five feet in height. Some of the
blocks consist of _a kind of granite not known to occur anywhere in
the Alps_.
Geikie says:
"The occurrence in the Eocene of huge ice-carried blocks seems
_incomprehensible_ when the general character of the Eocene fossils
is taken into account, for these have a somewhat _tropical_ aspect.
So, likewise, the appearance of ice-transported blocks in the Miocene
is a _sore puzzle_,
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 478.
2. Ibid., p. 479.
3. Ibid.]
{p. 435}
as the fossils imbedded in this formation speak to us of tropical and
sub-tropical climates having prevailed in Central Europe."[1]
It was precisely during the age when a warm climate prevailed in
Spitzbergen and North Greenland that these erratics were dropped down
on the plains of Italy!
And, strange to say, just as we have found the Drift-deposits of
Europe and America unfossiliferous,--that is to say, containing no
traces of animal or vegetable life,--so these strange stone and clay
deposits of other and more ancient ages were in like manner
unfossiliferous.[2]
In the "flysch" of the Eocene of the Alps, few or no fossils have
been found. In the conglomerates of Turin, belonging to the Upper
Miocene period, not a single organic remain has been found.
What conclusion is forced upon us?
That, written in the rocky pages of the great volume of the planet,
are the records of _repeated visitations from the comets_ which then
rushed through the heavens.
No trace is left of their destructive powers, save the huge,
unstratified, unfossiliferous deposits of clay and stones and
bowlders, locked away between great layers of the sedimentary rocks.
Can it be that there wanders through immeasurable space, upon an
orbit of such size that millions of years are required to complete
it, some monstrous luminary, so vast that when it returns to us it
fills a large part of the orbit which the earth describes around the
sun, and showers down upon us deluges of _débris_, while it fills the
world with flame? And are these recurring strata of stones and clay
and bowlders, written upon these widely separated pages of the
geologic volume, the record of its oft and regularly recurring
visitations?
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 480.
2. Ibid., p. 481.]
{p. 436}
Who shall say? Science will yet compare minutely the composition of
these different conglomerates. No secret can escape discovery when
the light of a world's intelligence is brought to bear upon it.
And even here we stumble over a still more tremendous fact:
It has been supposed that the primeval granite was the molten crust
of the original glowing ball of the earth, when it first hardened as
it cooled.
But, lo! the microscope, (so Professor Whichell tells us,) reveals
that this very granite, this foundation of all our rocks, this
ancient globe-crust, is itself made up of sedimentary rocks, which
were melted, fused, and run together in some awful conflagration
which wiped out all life on the planet.
Beyond the granite, then, there were seas and shores, winds and
rains, rivers and sediment carried into the waters to form the rocks
melted up in this granite; there were countless ages; possibly there
were animals and man; but all melted and consumed together. Was this,
too, the result of a comet visitation?
Who shall tell the age of this old earth? Who shall count the ebbs
and flows of eternity? Who shall say how often this planet has been
developed up to the highest forms of life, and how often all this has
been obliterated in universal fire?
The earth is one great tomb of life:
"All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom."
In endless series the ages stretch along--birth, life, development,
destruction. And so shall it be till time is no more.
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CHAPTER VIII.
THE AFTER-WORD.
WHEN that magnificent genius, Francis Bacon, sent forth one of his
great works to the world, he wrote this prayer:
"Thou, O Father, who gavest the visible light as the first-born of
thy creatures, and didst pour into man the intellectual light as the
top and consummation of thy workmanship, be pleased to protect and
govern this work, which coming from thy goodness returneth to thy
glory. . . . We humbly beg that this mind may be steadfastly in us;
and that thou, by our hands and the hands of others, on whom thou
shalt bestow the same spirit, wilt please to convey a largess of new
alms to thy family of mankind."
And again he says:
"This also we beg, that human things may not prejudice such as are
divine; neither that from the unlocking of the gates of sense, and
the kindling of a greater natural light, anything of incredulity, or
intellectual night, may arise in our minds toward divine mysteries."
In the same spirit, but humbly halting afar after this illustrious
man, I should be sorry to permit this book to go out to the world
without a word to remove the impression which some who read it, and
may believe it, may form, that such a vast catastrophe as I have
depicted militates against the idea that God rules and cares for his
world and his creatures. It will be asked, If "there is a special
providence even in the fall of a sparrow," how
{p. 438}
could He have permitted such a calamity as this to overtake a
beautiful, populous, and perhaps civilized world?
Here we fall again upon the great debate of Job, and we may answer in
the words which the author of that book puts into the mouth of God
himself, when from out the whirlwind he answered him:
"Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him "He that
reproveth God, let him answer."
In other words, Who and what is man to penetrate the counsels and
purposes of the Creator; and who are you, Job?--
"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare
it, if thou hast understanding.
"Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who has
stretched the line upon it?
"Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the
corner-stone thereof?
"When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God
shouted for joy."
Consider, Job, the littleness of man, the greatness of the universe;
and what right have you to ask Him, who made all this, the reasons
for his actions?
And this is a sufficient answer: A creature seventy inches long
prying into the purposes of an Awful Something, whose power ranges so
far that blazing suns are seen only as mist-specks!
But I may make another answer:
Although it seems that many times have comets smitten the earth,
covering it with _débris_, or causing its rocks to boil, and its
waters to ascend into the heavens, yet, considering all life, as
revealed in the fossils, from the first cells unto this day, _nothing
has perished that was worth preserving_.
{p. 439}
So far as we can judge, after every cataclysm the world has risen to
higher levels of creative development.
If I am right, despite these incalculable tons of matter piled on the
earth, despite heat and cyclones and darkness and ice and floods, not
even a tender tropical plant fit to adorn or sustain man's life was
blotted out; not an animal valuable for domestication was
exterminated; and not even the great inventions which man had
attained to, during the Tertiary Age, were lost. Nothing died but
that which stood in the pathway of man's development,--the monstrous
animals, the Neanderthal races, the half-human creatures intermediate
between man and the brute. The great centers of human activity to-day
in Europe and America are upon the Drift-deposits; the richest soils
are compounded of the so-called glacial clays. Doubtless, too, the
human brain was forced during the Drift Age to higher reaches of
development under the terrible ordeals of the hour.
Surely, then, we can afford to leave God's planets in God's hands.
Not a particle of dust is whirled in the funnel of the cyclone but
God identifies it, and has marked its path.
If we fall again upon
"Axe-ages, sword-ages,
Wind-ages, murder-ages--
if "sensual sins grow huge"; if "brother spoils brother" if Sodom and
Gomorrah come again--who can say that God may not bring out of the
depths of space a rejuvenating comet?
Be assured of one thing--this world tends now to a deification of
matter.
Dives says: "The earth is firm under my feet; I own my possessions
down to the center of the earth and up to
{p. 440}
the heavens. If fire sweeps away my houses, the insurance company
reimburses me; if mobs destroy them, the government pays me; if civil
war comes, I can convert them into bonds and move away until the
storm is over; if sickness comes, I have the highest skill at my call
to fight it back; if death comes, I am again insured, and my estate
makes money by the transaction; and if there is another world than
this, still am I insured: I have taken out a policy in the -----
church, and pay my premiums semiannually to the minister."
And Dives has an unexpressed belief that heaven is only a larger Wall
Street, where the millionaires occupy the front benches, while those
who never had a bank account on earth sing in the chorus.
Speak to Dives of lifting up the plane of all the underfed,
under-paid, benighted millions of the earth--his fellow-men--to
higher levels of comfort, and joy, and intelligence--not tearing down
any but building up all--and Dives can not understand you.
Ah, Dives! consider, if there is no other life than this, the fate of
these uncounted millions of your race! What does existence give to
them? What do they get out of all this abundant and beautiful world?
To look down the vista of such a life as theirs is like gazing into
one of the corridors of the Catacombs: an alley filled with reeking
bones of dead men; while from the cross-arches, waiting for the poor
man's coming on, ghastly shapes look out:--sickness and want and sin
and grim despair and red-eyed suicide.
Put yourself in his place, Dives, locked up in such a cavern as that,
and the key thrown away!
Do not count too much, Dives, on your lands and houses and
parchments; your guns and cannon and laws; your insurance companies
and your governments. There
{p. 441}
may be even now one coming from beyond Arcturus, or Aldebaran, or
Coma Berenices, with glowing countenance and horrid hair, and
millions of tons of _débris_, to overwhelm you and your possessions,
and your corporations, and all the ant-like devices of man in one
common ruin.
Build a little broader, Dives. Establish spiritual relations. Matter
is not everything. You do not deal in certainties. You are but a
vitalized speck, filled with a fraction of God's delegated
intelligence, crawling over an egg-shell filled with fire, whirling
madly through infinite space, a target for the bombs of a universe.
Take your mind off your bricks and mortar, and put out your tentacles
toward the great spiritual world around you. Open communications with
God. You can not help God. For Him who made the Milky Way you can do
nothing. But here are his creatures. Not a nerve, muscle, or
brain-convolution of the humblest of these but duplicates your own;
you excel them simply in the coordination of certain inherited
faculties which have given you success. Widen your heart. Put your
intellect to work to so readjust the values of labor, and increase
the productive capacity of Nature, that plenty and happiness, light
and hope, may dwell in every heart, and the Catacombs be closed for
ever.
And from such a world God will fend off the comets with his great
right arm, and the angels will exult over it in heaven.
End of Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel