The source of this uncorrected OCR text may be viewed in the DjVu format at: http://fax.libs.uga.edu/GN751xD685/ or http://purl.galileo.usg.edu/ugafax/GN751xD685/ RAGNAROK: AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL. IGNATIUS pONNELLY, AÜTHOB OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WOBLD." ILLUSTRATED. "I am not inclined to conclude that, man had no existence at all before the epoch, of the great retolutions of the earth. He might haw inhabited certain, districts of no great extent, whence, after these terrible events, ?ie npeopleii the world. Perhaps, also, the spots where he abode were swallowed up, and lúa bones IK buried under the beds of the present seas.''—CUTIER. D. NEW YORK: APPLETON AND COMPANY, 1, 3, AND 5 BOND STREET. 1883. LI r COPTRIOHT BY D. APPLETCTT AND COMPAQ. 1882. l 1,9,4 PART I. THE DRIFT. CHAPTER I.—THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DRIFT . II.—THE ORIGIN OF THE DRIFT NOT KNOWN III.—THE ACTIOI OF WAVES IV.—WAS IT CAUSED BY ICEBERGS? . V.——WAS IT CADSED BY GLACIERS? VI.——WAS IT CADSED BY A COOTIXENTAL ICE-SHEET ? VII.—THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTBorHE Till.—GREAT HEAT A PREREQUISITE . PACE 1 8 10 13 17 23 43 53 PART II. THE COMET. I.—A COMET CAUSED THE DRIFT II.—WHAT is A COMET? III.—CODLD A COMET STEIKE THE EARTH? TV.—THE CONSEQUENCES TO THE EARTH 03 65 82 91 IV CONTENTS. ri PART III. THE LEQENDS. CnAPTEB I.—THE NATURE OP MYTHS II.—DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT? III.—LEGENDS OF THE COMING OF THE COMET IV.—RAONAROK .... V.—THE CONFLAGRATION OF PHAETON . VI.—OTHER LEGENDS OF THE CONFLAGRATION VII.—LEGENDS OF IHB CAVE-LIFE . VIII.—LEGENDS OP THE AGE OF DARKNESS I..—THE TRIUMPH OF THE SUN . X.—THE FALL OF THE CLAY AND GRAVEL . XI.—THE ARABIAN MYTHS Xu.—THE BOOK OF JOB XIII,—GENESIS READ BY THE LIGHT OP THE COMET PART IV. CONCLUSIONS. I.—WAS PRE-GLACIAL MAN CIVILIZED? II.—THE SCENE OF MAN'S SCRVIVVL III.—THE BRIDGE .... IV.—OBJECTIONS CONSIDECED V.—BIELA'S COMET .... VI.—THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF OF MANKI-SD VII.—THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES VIIL—THE AFTEB-WORD .... PAGH 113 121 132 141 154 löö 195 208 233 231 268 276 316 341 36G 376 389 408 424 431 43Ï LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE DRUT TILL OVERLAID WITH BOWLDER-CLAY SCRATCHED SIONE, FROM THE TILL . RIVER ISSUING FROM A Swiss GLACIER TERMINAL MORAINE ...... GLACIER-FERROUS AND SCRATCHES AT SlONY POINT, LAKE 1'CIE DRIFT-DEPOSITS IN THE TROPICS . Frontispiece. . 5 6 . 19 20 2G 38 Ulill!'1>.L/Ciirimi.£) ».1 a j_mu _.»u.-.__ STRATIFIED BEDS IN TILL, LEITHEN WATER, PEEBLESSHIRE, SCOTLAND, 54 SECTION AT JOINVILLE . ORBITS OF THE PERIODIC COMETS ORBIT OF EARTH AND COMET . . . . THE EARTH'S OEBIT .... THE COMET SWEEPING PAST THE EARTH THE SIDE OF THE EARTH STRCCK BY THE COMET THE SIDE NOT STRUCK BY THE COMET THE GKEAT COMET OF 1811 CRAG AND TAIL .... SOLAR SPECTRCM ..... SECTION AT ST. ACHECL THE ENGIS SKULL .... THE NEANDERTHAL SKCLL PLUMMET FROM SAN JOAQI is VALLEY, CALIFORNIA 64 83 83 89 92 93 93 95 98 105 122 124 125 130 >:• = ib ù. VI LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE COMET OF 1862 ....... 137 COURSE OF DONAH'S COMET . . . . .157 THE PRIMEVAL STOEM . . . . . .220 THE ATRITE IN THE PILLAR ..... 2ÏO DAHISH OVERTYKEN BY DIMIRIAT ..... 272 EARTHEN VASE, FOUND IN THE CAVE OF FURFOOZ, BELGIUM . 347 PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OP THE MAMMOTH . . . 340 PRE-GLVCIVL MAI'S PICTURE OF REINDEER . . . 350 PRE-GLACUL MAN'S PICTURE OP THE HORSE . . . 351 SPECIMEN OF FEE-GLACIAL CARVING .... 352 STONE IMAGE FOUND IN OHIO ..... 353 COPPER COIN, FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN FEET UNDER GROUND, IN ILLINOIS ...... 356 BIELA'S COMET, SPLIT IN TWO ..... 409 SECTION ON THE SCHUYLKILL ..... 432 RAGNAROK: THE AGE OF FIRE AKD GRAVEL. PAKT I. glje Drift. CHAPTER I. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DRIFT. READER,—Let us reason together :— What do we dwell on ? The earth. What part of tae earth ? The latest formations, of course. We live upon the top of a mighty series of stratified rocks, laid down in the water of ancient seas and lakes, during in calculable ages, said, by geologists, to be from ten to ticenty miles in thickness. Think of that ! Rock piled over rock, from the primeval granite upward, to a height four times greater than our highest mountains, and every rock stratified like the leaves of a book ; and every leaf containing the records of an intensely interesting history, illustrated with engravings, in the shape of fossils, of all forms of life, from the primordial cell up to the bones of man and his implements. But it is not with the pages of this sublime volume THE DRIFT. we have to deal in this book. It is with a vastly dif ferent but equally wonderful formation. Upon the top of the last of this series of stratified rocks we find THE DRIFT. What is it ? Go out with me where yonder men are digging a well. Let us observe the material they are casting out. First they penetrate through a few inches or a foot or two of surface soil ; then they enter a vast deposit of sand, gravel, and clay. It may be fifty, one hundred, five hundred, eight hundred feet, before they reach the stratified rocks on which this drift rests. It covers whole continents. It is our earth. It makea the basis of our soils ; our railroads cut their way through it ; our car riages drive over it ; our cities are built upon it ; our crops are derived from it ; the water we drink percolates through it ; on it we live, love, marry, raise children, think, dream, and die ; and in the bosom of it we will be buried. Where did it come from ? That is what I propose to discuss with you in this work,—if you will have the patience to follow me. So far as possible, [as I shall in all cases speak by the voices of others,] I shall summon my witnesses that you may cross-examine them. I shall try, to the best of my ability, to buttress every opinion with adequate proofs. If I do not convince, I hope at least to interest you. And to begin : let us understand what the Drift is, before we proceed to discuss its origin. In the first place, it is mainly unstratified ; its lower formation is altogether so. There may be clearly defined strata here and there in it, but they are such as a tem pest might make, working in a dust-heap : picking up a patch here and laying it upon another there. But there THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DRIFT. 3 are no continuous layers reaching over any large extent of country. Sometimes the material has been subsequently worked over by rivers, and been distributed over limited areas in strata, as in and around the beds of streams. But in the lower, older, and first-laid-down portion of the Drift, called in Scotland "the till," and in other countries " the hard-pan," there is a total absence of stratification. James Geikie says : " In describing the till, I remarked that the irregular manner in which the stones were scattered through that deposit imparted to it a confused and tumultuous' appear ance. The clay does not arrange itself in layers or beds, but is distinctly unstratified." * " The material consisted of earth, gravel, and stones, and also in some places broken trunks or branches of trees. Part of it was depo&ited in a pell-mell or unstrati fied condition during the progress of the period, and part either stratified or unstratified in the opening part of the next period when the ice melted." f " The unstratified drift may be described as a hetero geneous mass of clay, with sand and gravel in varying proportions, inclosing the transported fragments of rock, of all dimensions, partially rounded or worn into wedge- shaped forms, and generally with surfaces furrowed or scratched, the whole material looking as if it had been scraped together." \ The " till " of Scotland is " spread in broad but some what ragged sheets " through the Lowlands, " continuous across wide tracts," while in the Highland and upland dis tricts it is confined principally to the valleys.* * "The Great Ice Age," p. 21. t Dana's "Text-Book," p. 220. t "American Cyelopædia," rol. vi, p. Ill, * " Great Ice Age," Geikie, p. 6, THE DRIFT. " The lowest member is invariably a tough, stony clay, called 'till' or 'hard-pan.' Throughout wide districts stony clay alone occurs." * " It is hard to say whether the till consists more of stones or of clay." f This "till," this first deposit, will be found to be the strangest and most interesting. In the second place, although the Drift is found on the earth, it is unfossiliferous. That is to say, it contains no traces of pre-existent or contemporaneous life. This, when we consider it, is an extraordinary fact : Where on the face of this life-marked earth could such a mass of material be gathered up, and not contain any evidences of life ? It is as if one were to say that he had collected the detritus of a great city, and that it showed no marks of man's life or works. "I would reiterate," says Geikie,J "that nearly all the Scotch shell-bearing beds belong to the very close of the glacial period ; only in one or two places have'shells ever been obtained, with certainty, from a bed in the true till of Scotland. They occur here and there in bowlder-clay, and underneath bowlder-clay, in maritime districts ; but this clay, as I have shown, is more recent than the till — in fact, rests upon its eroded surface." "Tho lower bed of the drift is entirely destitute of organic remains." * Sir Charles Lyell tells us that even the stratified drift is usually devoid of fossils : " Whatever may be the cause, the fact is certain that over large areas in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, I might add throughout the northern hemisphere, on both sides of the Atlantic, the stratified drift of the glacial period is very commonly devoid of fossils." || * " Groat Ice Age," Geikle, p. 7. t r°id-, P- 9- I Ibid., p. 342. * Rev. 0. Fiahor, quoted in " The World before the Deluge," p. 461. ] " Antiquity of Man," third edition, p. 268. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DRIFT. 5 In the next place, this " till " differs from the rest of the Drift in its exceeding hardness : "This till is so tough that engineers would much rather excavate the most obdurate rocks than attempt to remove it from their path. Hard rocks are more or less easily assailable with gunpowder, and the numerous joints and fissures by which they are traversed enable the work men to wedge them out often in considerable lumps. But till has neither crack nor joint ; it will not blast, and to pick it to pieces is a very slow and laborious process. Should streaks of sand penetrate it, water will readily soak through, and large masses will then run or collapse, as soon as an opening is made into it." TlLL OVERLAID WITH BoWLDEH-CLAT, BlVEK STINCIÎAH. r, Rook ; i, Till ; g, Bowlder-Clay ; x, Fine Gravel, etc. The accompanying cut shows the manner in which it is distributed, and its relations to the other deposits of the Drift. In this " till " or " hard-pan " are found some strange and characteristic stones. They are bowlders, not water- worn, not rounded, as by the action of waves, and yet not angular—for every point and projection has been ground off. They are not very largo, and they differ in this and other respects from the bowlders found in the other por tions of the Drift. These stones in the " till " are always striated—that is, cut by deep lines or grooves, usually running lengthwise, or parallel to their longest diameter. The cut on the following page represents one of them. 6 THE DRIFT. Above this clay is a deposit resembling it, and yet dif fering from it, called the " bowlder-clay." This is not so tough or hard. The bo\v Iders in it are larger and more angular—sometimos they are of immense size ; one at \ SCRATCHED STOKE (BLACK SHALE), ntoit THE TILL. Bradford, Massachusetts, is estimated to weigh 4,500,000 pounds. Many on Cape Cod are twenty feet in diameter. One at Whitingham, Vermont, is forty-three feet long by thirty feet high, or 40,000 cubic feet in bulk. In some THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DRIFT. ^ cases no rocks of the same material are found within two hundred miles.* These two formations—the " till " and the " bowlder- clay"—sometimes pass into each other by insensible de grees. At other times the distinction is marked. Some of the stones in the bowlder-clay are furrowed or striated, but a large part of them are not ; while in the " till " the. stone not striated is the rare exception. Above this bowlder-clay we find sometimes beds of loose gravel, sand, and stones, mixed with the remains of man and other animals. These have all the appearance of being later in their deposition, and of having been worked over by the action of water and ice. This, then, is, briefly stated, the condition of the Drift. It is plain that it was the result of violent action of some kind. And this action must have taken place upon an unpar alleled and continental scale. One writer describes it as, "A remarkable and stupendous period—a period so startling that it might justly be accepted with hesitation, were not the conception unavoidable before a series of facts as extraordinary as itself." f Remember, then, in the discussions which follow, that if the theories advanced are gigantic, the facts they seek to explain are not less so. We are not dealing with little things. The phenomena are continental, world-wide, globe-embracing. * Dana'a " Text-Book," p. 221. t Gratacap, " Ice Age," " Popular Science Monthlj," January, 1878. 8 THE DRIFT. CHAPTER II. THE 0RIGIX OF THE DRIFT SOT KNOWN. WHILE several different origins have been assigned for the phenomena known as " the Drift," and while one or two of these have been widely accepted and taught in our schools as established truths, yet it is not too much to say that no one of them meets all the requirements of the case, or is assented to by the profoundest thinkers of our day. Says one authority : "The origin of the unstratified drift is a question which has been much controverted." * Louis Figuier says,f after considering one of the pro posed theories : " No such hypothesis is sufficient to explain either the cataclysms or the glacial phenomena ; and we need not hesitate to confess our ignorance of this strange, this mys terious episode in the history of our globe. . . . Never theless, we repeat, no explanation presents itself which can be considered conclusive ; and in science we should never be afraid to say, I do not know." Geikie says : " Many geologists can not yet be persuaded that till has ever formed and accumulated under ice." \ A recent scientific writer, after summing up all the facts and all the arguments, makes this confession : * " American Cyclopaedia," vol. vi, p. 112. t " The World before the Deluge," pp. 435, 463. t " The Great Ice Age," p. 370. THE ORIGIN OF THE DRIFT NOT KNOWN. 9 " From the foregoing facts, it seems to me that we are justified in concluding : " 1. That however simple and plausible the Lyellian hypothesis may be, or however ingenious the extension or application of it suggested by Dana, it is not sustained by any proof, and the testimony of the rocks seems to be decidedly against it. " 2. Though much may yet be learned from a more extended and careful study of the glacial phenomena of all parts of both hemispheres, the facts already gathered seem to be incompatible with any theory yet advanced which makes the Ice period simply a series of telluric phenomena, and so far strengthens the arguments of those who look to extraneous and cosmical causes for the origin of these phenomena." * The reader will therefore understand that, in advanc ing into this argument, he is not invading a realm where Science has already set up her walls and bounds and land marks ; but rather he is entering a forum in which a great debate still goes on, amid the clamor of many tongues. There are four theories by which it has been at tempted to explain the Drift. These are : I. The action of great waves and floods of water. II. The action of icebergs. III. The action of glaciers. rV. The action of a continental ice-sheet. We will consider these several theories in their order. * "Popular Science Monthly," July, 1876, p. 290. 10 THE DRIFT. THE ACTION OF WAVES. 11 CHAPTER III. THE ACTION OF WAVES. WHEN men began, for the first time, to study the drift deposits, they believed that they found in them the results of the Noachie Deluge ; and hence the Drift was called the Diluvium, and the period of time in which it was laid down was entitled the Diluvial age. It was supposed that— " Somehow and somewhere in the far north a aeries of gigantic waves was mysteriously propagated. These waves were supposed to have precipitated themselves upon the land, and then swept madly over mountain and valley alike, carrying along with them, a mighty burden of rocks and stones and rubbish. Such deluges were called ' waves of translation.' " * There were many difficulties about this theory : In the first place, there was no cause assigned for these waves, which must have been great enough to have swept over the tops of high mountains, for the evidences of the Drift age are found three thousand feet above the Baltic, four thousand feet high in the Grampians of Scot land, and six thousand feet high in New England. In the next place, if this deposit had been swept up from or by the sea, it would contain marks of its origin. The shells of the sea, the bones of fish, the remains of seals and whales, would have been taken up by these great deluges, and carried over the land, and have re- * " The Great Ice Age," p. 26. mained mingled in the debris which they deposited. This is not the case. The unstratified Drift is unfossiliferous, and where the stratified Drift contains fossils they are the remains of land animals, except in a few low-lying dis tricts near the sea. I quote : " Over the interior of the continent it contains no ma rine fossils or retics."* Geikie says : " Not a single trace of any marine organism has yet been detected in true till." f Moreover, if the sea-waves made these great deposits, they must have picked up the material composing them either from the shores of the sea or the beds of streams. And when we consider the vastness of the drift-deposits, extending, as they do, over continents, with a depth of hundreds of feet, it would puzzle us to say where were the sea-beaches or rivers on the globe that could produce such inconceivable quantities of gravel, sand, and clay. The production of gravel is limited to a small marge of the ocean, not usually more than a mile wide, where the waves and the rocks meet. If we suppose the whole shore of the oceans around the northern half of America to be piled up with gravel five hundred feet thick, it would go but a little way to form the immense deposits which stretch from the Arctic Sea to Patagonia. The stones of the "till" are strangely marked, striated, and scratched, with lines parallel to the longest diameter. No such stones are found in river-beds or on sea-shores. Geikie says : "We look in vain for striated stones in the gravel which the surf drives backward and forward on a beach, * Dana's "Text-Book," p. 220. "The Great Ice Age," p. 15. 12 THE DRIFT. and we may search the detritus that beaches and rivers push along their beds, but we shall not find any stones at all resembling those of the till." * But we need not discuss any further this theory. It is now almost universally abandoned. We know of no way in which such waves could be formed ; if they were formed, they could not find the ma terial to carry over the land ; if they did find it, it would not have the markings which are found in the Drift, and it would possess marine fossils not found in the Drift ; and the waves would not and could not scratch and groove the rock-surfaces underneath the Drift, as we know they are scratched and grooved. Let us then dismiss this hypothesis, and proceed to the consideration of the next. * "The Great Ice Age," p. G9. WAS IT CAUSED BY IQEBBRGSi 13 CHAPTER IV. WAS IT GAUSED BY ICEBERGSt WE come now to a much more reasonable hypothesis, and one not without numerous advocates even to this day, to wit : that the drift-deposits were caused by icebergs floating down, in deep water over the sunken land, loaded with debris from the Arctic shores, which they shed as they melted in the warmer seas of the south. This hypothesis explains the carriage of enormous blocks weighing hundreds of tons from their original site to where they are now found ; but it is open to many unanswerable objections. In the first place, if the Drift had been deposited un der water deep enough to float icebergs, it would present throughout unquestionable evidences of stratification, for the reason that the larger masses of stone would fall more rapidly than the smaller, and would be found at the bot tom of the deposit. If, for instance, you were to go to the top of a shot-tower, filled with water, and let loose at the same moment a quantity of cannon-balls, musket- balls, pistol-bills, duck-shot, reed-bird shot, and fine sand, all mixed together, the cannon-balls would reach the bottom first, and the other missiles in the order of their size ; and the deposit at the bottom would be found to be regularly stratified, with the sand and the finest shot on top. But nothing of this kind is found in the Drift, especially in the " till " ; clay, sand, gravel, stones, 14 THE DRIFT. and bowlders are all found mixed together in the utmost confusion, " higgledy-piggledy, pell-mell." Says Geikie : " Neither can till owe its origin to icebergs. If it had been distributed over the &ea-bottotn, it would assuredly have shown some kind of arrangement. When an ice berg drops its rubbish, it stands to reason that the heavier blocks will reach the bottom first, then the smaller stones, and lastly the finer ingredients. There is no such assort ment visible, however, in the normal ' till,' but large and small stones are scattered pretty equally through the clay, which, moreover, is quite unstratified." * Thia fact alone disposes of the iceberg theory as an explanation of the Drift. Again : whenever deposits are dropped in the sea, they fall uniformly and cover the surface below with a regular sheet, conforming to the inequalities of the ground, no thicker in one place than another. But in the Drift this is not the case. The deposit is thicker in the valleys and thinner on the hills, sometimes absent altogether on the higher elevations. "The true boulder-clay is spread out over the region under consideration as a somewhat widely extended and uniform sheet, yet it may be said to fill up all small val leys and depressions, and to be tliiii or absent on ridges or rising grounds." \ That is to say, it fell as a snow-storm falls, driven by high winds ; or as a semi-fluid mass might be supposed to fall, draining down from the elevation s and filling up the hollows. Again : the same difficulty presents itself which we found in the case of "the waves of transplantation." Where did the material of the Drift come from ? On what sea-shore, in what river-beds, was this incalciilable mass of clay, gravel, and stones found ? * " The Great Ice Age," p. Ï2. f " American Cyclopaedia," vol. vi, p. 112. WAS IT CAUSED BY ICEBERGS? 13 Again : if we suppose the supply to have existed on the Arctic coasts, the question comes, Would the icebergs have canied it over the face of the continents ? Mr. Groll has shown very clearly* that the icebergs nowadays usually sail down into the oceans without a scrap of díbris of any kind upon them. Again : how could the icebergs have made the con tinuous scratchings or striæ, found under the Drift nearly all over the continents of Europe and America ? Why, say the advocates of this theory, the icebergs press upon the bottom of the sea, and with the stones adhering to their base they make those striæ. But two things are necessary to this : First, that there should be a force great enough to drive the berg over the bottom of the sea when it has once grounded. We know of no such force. On the contrary, we do know that wherever a berg grounds it stays until it rocks itself to pieces or melts away. But, suppose there was such a pro pelling force, then it is evident that whenever the iceberg floated clear of the bottom it would cease to make the striæ, and would resume them only when it nearly stranded again. That is to say, when the water was deep enough for the berg to float clear of the bottom of the sea, there could be no striae ; when the water was too shallow, the berg would not float at all, and there would be no striic. The berg would mark the rocks only where it neither floated clear nor stranded. Hence we would find striæ only at a certain elevation, while the rocks below or above that level would be free from them. But this is not the case with the drift-markings. They pass over mountains and down into the deepest valleys ; they are * "Climate and Time," p. 282. IG THE DRIFT. universal within very large areas ; they cover the face of continents and disappear under the waves of the sea. It is simply impossible that the Drift was caused by icebergs. I repeat, when they floated clear of the rocks, of course they would not mark them ; when the water was too shallow to permit them to float at all, and so move onward, of course they could not mark them. The stria- tions would occur only when the water was just deep enough to float the berg, and not deep enough to raise the berg clear of the rocks ; and but a small part of the bottom of the sea could fulfill these conditions. Moreover, when the waters were six thousand feet deep in ISTew England, and four thousand feet deep in Scotland, and over the tops of the Rocky Mountains, where was the rest of the world, and the life it contained ? WAS IT CAUSED BY GLACIERS? 17 CHAPTER V. IT GAUSED B7 GLACIERS? WHAT is a glacier? It is a river of ice, crowded by the weight of mountain-ice clown into some valley, along which it descends by a slow, almost imperceptible mo tion, due to a power of the ice, under the force of gravity, to rearrange its molecules. It is fed by the mountains and melted by the sun. The glaciers arc local in character, and comparatively few in number ; they are confined to valleys having some general slope downward. The whole Alpine mass doea not move down upon the plain. The movement down ward is limited to these glacier-rivers. The glacier complies with some of the conditions of the problem. We can suppose it capable of taking in its giant paw a mass of rock, and using it as a graver to carve deep grooves in the rock below it ; and we can see in it a great agency for breaking up rocks and carrying the detritus down upon the plains. But here the resem blance ends. That high authority upon this subject, James Geikie, says : " But we can not fail to remark that, although scratched and polished stones occur not infrequently in the frontal moraines of Alpine glaciers, yet at the same time these moraines <7o not at all resemble till. The moraine con sists for the most part of a confused heap of rough angu lar stones and blocks, and loose sand and debris ; scratched 2 13 THE DRIFT. stones are "decidedly in the minority, and indeed a dose search will often fail to show them. Clearly, then, the till is not of the nature of a terminal moraine. Each stone in the ' till ' gives evidence of having been subjected to a grinding process. . . . " We look in vain, however, among the glaciers of the Alps for such a deposit. The scratched stones we may occasionally find, but inhere is the clay ? ... It is clear that the conditions for the gathering of a stony clay like the ' till ' do not obtain (as far as we know) among the Alpine glaciers. There is too much water circulating below the ice there to allow any considerable thickness of such a deposit to accumulate." * But it is questionable whether the glaciers do press with a steady force upon the rocks beneath so as to score them. As a rule, the base of the glacier is full of wa ter ; rivers flow from under them. The opposite picture, from Professor "Winchell's " Sketches of Creation," page 223, does not represent a mass of ice, hugging the rocks, holding in its grasp great gravers of stone with which to cut the face of the rocks into deep grooves, and to de posit an even coating of rounded stones and clay over the face of the earth. On the contrary, here are only angular masses of rock, and a stream which would certainly wash away any clay which might be formed. Let Mr. Dawkins state the case : " The hypothesis upon which the southern extension is founded—that the bowlder-clays have been formed by ice melting on the land—is open to this objection, that no similar clays have been proved to 7iavebeen soforined, either in the Arctic regions, where the ice-sheet has re treated, or in the districts forsaken by the glaciers in the Alps or Pyrenees, or in any other mountain-chain. . . . " The Knglish bowlder-clays, as a whole, differ from * " The Great Ice Age," pp. 70-72. WAS IT CAUSED BY GLACIERS? 19 the moraine prof onde in their softness, and the large area which they cover. Strata of bowlder-clay at all compar able to the great clay mantle covering the lower grounds of Britain, north of the Thames, are conspicuous by their absence from the glaciated regions of Central Europe and the Pyrenees, which were not depressed beneath the sea." * A BlVEK IS8UINÖ FROM A SWISS GLACIER. Moreover, the Drift, especially the " till," lies in great continental sheets of clay and gravel, of comparatively uniform thickness. The glaciers could not form such sheets ; they deposit their material in long ridges called " terminal moraines." Agassiz, the great advocate of the ice-origin of the Drift, says : " All these moraines are the land-marks, so to speak, by which we trace the height and extent, as well as the * Dawkina'a "Early Man in Britain," pp. 116, 11Ï. 20 THE DRIFT. progress and retreat, of glaciers in former times. Sup pose, for instance, that a glacier were to disappear en tirely. For ages it has been a gigantic ice-raft, receiving all sorts of materials on its surface as it traveled onward, and bearing them along with it ; while the hard particles of rocks set in its lower surface have been polishing and fashioning the whole surface over which it extended. As it now melts it drops its various burdens to the ground ; bowlders are the milestones marking the different stages of its journey ; the terminal and lateral moraines are the frame-work which it erected around itself as it moved forward, and which define its boundaries centuries after it has vanished." * TERMINAL MORAINE. And Professor Agassiz gives us, on page 307 of the same work, the above representation of a " terminal mo raine." The reader can see at once that these semicircular * " Geological Sketches," p. 308. WAS IT GAUSED BY GLACIERS? 21 ridges bear 110 resemblance whatever to the great drift- deposits of the world, spread out in vast and nearly uni form sheets, without stratification, over hills and plains alike. And here is another perplexity : It might naturally be supposed that the smoothed, scratched, and smashed appearance of the underlying rocks was due to the rub bing and rolling of the stones under the ice of the gla ciers ; but, strange to say, we find that— " The scratched and polished rock-surfaces are by no means confined to till-covered districts. They are met •with everywhere and at all leads throughout the country, from the sea-coast up to neai the tops of some of our higher mountains. The lower hill-ranges, such as the Sidlaws, the Ochils, the Pcntlands, the Kilbarchan and Paisley Hills, and others, exhibit polished and smoothed rock-surfaces on their very crest. Similar markings streak and score the rocks up to a great height in the deep val leys of the Highlands." * "We can realize, in our imagination, the glacier of the mountain-valley crushing and marking the bed in which it moves, or even the plain on which it discharges itself ; but it it> impossible to conceive of a glacier upon the bare top of a mountain, without walls to restrain it or direct its flow, or higher ice accumulations to feed it. Again : "If glaciers descended, as they did, on both sides of the great Alpine ranges, then wo would expect to find the same results on the plains of Northern Italy that present themselves on the low grounds of Switzerland. But this is not the case. On the plains of Italy there are no traces of the stony clay found in Switzerland and all over Europe. Neither are' any of the stones of the drift of Italy scratched or striated." f * " The Great Ice Age," p. 73. t Ibid., pp. 491,492. 22 THE DRIFT. But, strange to say, while, as Geikie admits, no true " till " or Drift is now being formed by or under the gla ciers of Switzerland, nevertheless " till " is found in that country dissociated from the glaciers. Geikie says : " In the low grounds of Switzerland we get a dark, tough clay, packed with scratched and well-rubbed stones, and containing here and there some admixture of sand and irregular beds and patches of earthy gravel. This clay is quite unstratified, and the strata upon which it rests frequently exhibit much confusion, being turned up on end and bent over, exactly as in thi» country the rocks are sometimes broken and disturbed below till. The whole deposit has experienced much denudation, but even yet it covers considerable areas, and attains a thickness varying from a few feet up to not less than thirty feet in thickness." * Here, then, are the objections to this theory of the glacier-origin of the Drift : I. The glaciers do not produce striated stones. u. The glaciers do not produce drift-clay. III. The glaciers could not have formed continental sheets of "till." IV. The glaciers could not have existed upon, and consequently could not have striated, the mountain-tops. V. The glaciers could not have reached to the great plains of the continents far remote from valleys, where we still find the Drift and drift-markings. VI. The glaciers are limited in number and confined in their operations, and were utterly inadequate to have produced the thousands of square miles of àriît-dubrts which we find enfolding the world. * " The Great Ice Age," p. 373. CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS? 2-°. CHAPTER VI. WAS IT GAISED BY CONTINENTAL IGE-SHEETS? WE come now to the theory which is at present most generally accepted : It being apparent that glaciers wero not adequate to produce the results which we find, the glacialists have fallen back upon an extraordinary hypothesis—to wit, that the whole north and south regions of the globe, extending from the poles to 35° or 40° of north and south latitude, were, in the Drift age, covered with enor mous, continuous sheets of ice, from one mile thick at its southern margin, to three or five miles thick at the poles. As they find drift-scratches upon the tops of mountains in Europe three to four thousand feet high, and in New England upon elevations six thousand feet high, it follows, according to this hypothesis, that the ice-sheet must have been considerably higher than these mountains, for the ice must have been thick enough to cover their tops, and high enough and heavy enough above their tops to press down upon and groove and scratch the rocks. And as the striæ in Northern Europe were found to dis regard the conformation of the continent and the inlands of the sea, it became necessary to suppose that this polar ice-sheet filled up the bays and seas, so that one could have passed dry-shod, in that period, from France to the north pole, over a steadily ascending plane of ice. No attempt has been made to explain where all this I l THE ice came from ; or what force lifted the moisture into the air which, afterward descending, constituted these world- cloaks of frozen water. It is, perhaps, easy to suppose that such world-cloaks might have existed ; we can imagine the water of the seas falling on the continent«!, and freezing as it fell, until, in the course of ages, it constituted such gigantic ice-sheets ; but something moro than this* is needed. This does not account for these hundreds of feet of clay, bowlders, and gravel. But it is supposed that these were torn from the sur face of the rocks by the pressure of the ice-sheet moving southward. But what would make it move southward ? "We know that some of our mountains are covered to-day with immense sheets of ice, hundreds and thousands of feet in thickness. Do these descend upon the flat coun try ? No ; they lie there and melt, and are renewed,— kept in equipoise by the contending forces of heat and cold. Why should the ice-sheet move southward ? Because, say the " glacialists," the lands of the northern parts of Europe and America were then elevated fifteen hundred feet higher than at present, and this gave the ice a suffi cient descent. But what became of that elevation after ward ? Why, it went down again. It had accommodat ingly performed its function, and then the land resumed its old place ! But did the land rise up in this extraordinary fashion ? Groll says : " The greater elevation of the land (in the Ice period) is simply assumed as an hypothesis to account for the cold. The facts of geology, however, are fast establish ing the opposite conclusion, viz., that when the country was covered with ice, the land stood in relation to the sea at a lower level than at present, and that the continental periods or times, Avhen the land stood in relation to the CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS? 25 sea at a higher level than now, were the warm inter-gla cial periods, when the country was free of snow and ice, and a mild and equable condition of climate prevailed. This is the conclusion toward which we are being led by the more recent revelations of surface-geology, and also by certain facts connected with the geographical distribution of plants and animals during the Glacial epoch." * H. B. Norton says : " When we come to study the cause of these phenom ena, we find many perplexing and contradictory theories in the field. A favorite one is that of vertical elevation. But it seems impossible to admit that the circle inclosed within the parallel of 40°—some seven thousand miles in diameter—could have been elevated to such a height as to produce this remarkable result. This would be a sup position hard to reconcile with the present proportion of land and water on the surface of the globe and with the phenomena of terrestrial contraction and gravitation." f We have seen that the surface-rocks underneath the Drift are scored and grooved by some external force. Now we find that these markings do not all run in the same direction ; on the contrary, they cross each other in an extraordinary manner. The cut on the following page illustrates this. If the direction of the motion of the ice-sheets, which caused these markings, was,—as the glacialists allege,— always from the elevated region ill the north to the lower ground in the south, then the markings must always have been in the same direction : given a fixed cause, we must have always a fixed result. We shall see, as we go on in this argument, that the deposition of the "till" was instan- taneoiis; and, as the^e markings were made before or at the same time the "till" was laid down, how could the land * "Climate and Time," p. 391. t "Popular Science Monthly," October, 1879, p. 833. THE DRIFT. possibly have bobbed up and down, now here, now there, so that the elevation from which the ice-sheet descended SKETCH or GLACIEK-FÜRKOWS AITD SOBATOHES AT STOUT POINT, LAKE Eure, MICHIGAN. a a, deep water-line ; A ä, border of the bank of earthy materials ; a e, deep parallel grooves four and a half feet apart and twenty-five feet lona, ticaring north 60° east ; d, a set of grooves and scratches bearing north 60" west ; e, a natural bridge. [Winchell's "Sketches of Creation," p. 213.] was one moment in the northeast, and the next moment had whirled away into the northwest ? As the poet says : "... Will these trees, That have outlived the eagle, page thy steps And skip, when thou point'st out ? " CA USED BY CONTINENTAL IGE-SHEETS? 27 But if the point of elevation was whisked, away from east to west, how could an ice-sheet a mile thick instan taneously adapt itself to the change ? For all these mark ings took place in the interval between the time when the external force, whatever it was, struck the rocks, and the time when a sufficient body of " till " had been laid down to shield the rocks and prevent further wear and tear. Neither is it possible to suppose an ice-sheet, a mile in thickness, moving in two diametrically opposite directions at the same time. Again : the ice-sheet theory requires an elevation in the north and a descent southwardly ; and it is this de scent southwardly which is supposed to have given the momentum and movement by which the weight of the superincumbent mass of ice tore up, plowed up, ground up, and smashed up the face of the surface-rocks, and thus formed the Drift and made the strice. But, unfortunately, when we come to apply this theory to the facts, we find that it is the north sides of the hills and mountains that are striated, while the south sides have ¡jone scot-free ! Surely, if weight and motion made the Drift, then the groovings, caused by weight and motion, must have been more distinct upon a declivity than upon an as cent. The school-boy toils patiently and slowly up the hill with his sled, but when he descends he comes down with railroad-speed, scattering the snow before him in all direc tions. But here we have a school-boy that tears and scat ters things going w/>hill, and sneaks down-hill snail-fashion. "Professor Hitchcock remarks, that Mount Monad- nock, New Hampshire, 3,250 feet high, is scarified from top to bottom on its northern side and western side, but not on the southern:" * __This state of things is universal in North America. * Dana'a " Manual of Geology," p. 537. 4 I 28 THE DRIFT. But let us look at another point : If the vast deposits of sand, gravel, clay, and bowl ders, which are found in Europe and America, were placed there by a great continental ice-sheet, reaching down from the north pole to latitude 35° or 40° ; if it was the ice that tore and scraped up the face of the rocks and rolled the stones and striated them, and left them in great sheets and heaps all over the land—then it follows, as a matter of course, that in all the regions equally near the pole, and equally cold in climate, the ice must have formed a similar sheet, and in like manner have torn up the rocks and ground them into gravel and clay. This conclusion is irresistible. If the cold of the north caused the ice, and the ice caused the Drift, then in all the cold north-lands there must have been ice, and consequently there ought to have been Drift. If we can find, therefore, any extensive cold region of the earth where the Drift is not, then we can not escape the conclusion that the cold and the ice did not make the Drift. Let us see : One of the coldest regions of the earth is Siberia. It is a vast tract reaching to the Arctic Circle ; it is the north part of the Continent of Asia ; it is inter sected by great mountain-ranges. Here, if anywhere, we should find the Drift ; here, if anywhere, was the ice-field, " the sea of ice." It is more elevated and more mountain ous than the interior of North America where the drift- deposits are extensive ; it is nearer the pole than New York and Illinois, covered as these are with hundreds of feet of debris, and yet there is no Drift in Siberia ! I quote from a high authority, and a firm believer in the theory that glaciers or ice-sheets caused the drift ; James Geikie says : "It is remarkable that nowhere in the, yreat plains of Siberia do any traces of glacial action appear to haue \ CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS? 29 been observed. If cones and mounds of gravel and great erratics like those that sprinkle so wide an area in North ern America and Northern Europe had occurred, they would hardly have failed to arrest the attention of ex plorers. Middendorff does, indeed, mention the occur rence of trains of large erratics which he observed along the banks of some of the rivers, but these, he has no doubt, were carried down by river-ice. The general char acter of the ' tundras ' is that of wide, flat plains, covered for the most part with a grassy and mossy vegetation, but here and there bare and sandy. Frequently nothing intervenes to break the monotony of the landscape. . . . It would appear, then, that in Northern Asia represent atives of the glacial deposits which are met with in simi lar latitudes in Europe and America do not occur. The northern drift of Russia and Germany ; the asar of Swe den ; the kames, eskers, and erratics of Britain ; and the iceberg-drift of Northern America have, apparently, no equivalent in Siberia. Consequently we find the great river-deposits, with their mammalian remains, which tell of a milder climate than now obtains in those high lati tudes, still lying undisturbed ai, the surface." * Think of the significance of all this. There is no Drift in Siberia ; no " till," no " bowlder-clay," no strati fied masses of gravel, sand, and stones. There was, then, no Drift age in all Northern Asia, up to the Arctic Circle t How pregnant is this admission. It demolishes at one blow the whole theory that the Drift came of the ice. For surely if we could expect to find ice, during the so- called Glacial age, anywhere on the face of our planet, it would be in Siberia. But, if there was an ice-sheet there, it did not grind up the rocks ; it did not striate them ; it did not roll the fragments into bowlders and pebbles ; it rested so quietly on the face of the land that, as Geikie tells us, the pre-glacial deposits throughout Siberia, with their mammalian remains, are still found " lying undis- * " The Great Ice Age," p. 4(iO, published in 1873. 30 THE DRIFT. turbed on the surface " ; and he even thinks that the great mammals, the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, " may have survived in Northern Asia down to a comparatively recent date," * ages after they were crushed out of exist ence by the Drift of Europe and America. Mr. Geikie seeks to account for this extraordinary state of things by supposing that the climate of Siberia was, during the Glacial age, too dry to furnish snow to make the ice-sheet. But when it is remembered that there was moisture enough, we are told, in Northern Eu rope and America at that time to form a layer of ice from one to three miles in thickness, it would certainly seem that enough ought to have blown across the eastern line of European Russia to give Siberia a fair share of ice and Drift. The explanation is more extraordinary than the thing it explains. One third of the water of all the oceans must have been carried up, and was circulating around in the air, to descend upon the earth in rain and snow, and yet none of it fell on Northern Asia ! And as the line of the continents separating Europe and Asia had not yet been established, it can not be supposed that the Drift re fused to enter Asia out of respect to the geographical lines. But not alone is the Drift absent from Siberia, and, probably, all Asia ; it does not extend even over all Eu rope. Louis Figuier says that the traces of glacial ac tion " are observed in all the north of Europe, in Russia, Iceland, Norway, Prussia, the British Islands, part of Ger many in the north, and even in some parts of the south of Spain." f M. Edouard Collomb finds only a " a shred " of the glacial evidences in France, and thinks they were absent from part of Russia ! * "The Great Ice Age," p. 461. t "The World before the Deluge," p. 451. CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS? 31 And, even in North America, the Drift is not found everywhere. There is a remarkable region, embracing a large area in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, which Pro fessor J. D. Whitney * calls " the driftless region," in which no drift, no clays, no gravel, no rock striæ or fur rows are found. The rock-surfaces have not been ground down and polished. " This is the more remarkable," says Geikie, " seeing that the regions to the north, west, east, and south are all more or less deeply covered with drift- deposits." t And, in this region, as in Siberia, the remains of the large, extinct mammalia are found imbedded in the surf ace-wash, or in cracks or crevices of the limestone. If the Drift of North America was due to the ice-sheet, why is there no drift-deposit in " the driftless region " of the Northwestern States of America ? Surely this region must have been as cold as Illinois, Ohio, etc. It is now the coldest part of the Union. Why should the ice have left this oasis, and refused to form on it ? Or why, if it did form on it, did it refuse to tear up the rock-surfaces and form Drift ? Again, no traces of northern drift are found in Cali fornia, which is surrounded by high mountains, in some of which fragments of glaciers are found even to this day. t According to Foster, the Drift did not extend to Ore gon ; and, in the opinion of some, it does not reach much beyond the western boundary of Iowa. Nor can it be supposed that the driftless regions of Siberia, Northwestern America, and the Pacific coast are due to the absence of ice upon them during the Glacial * "Report of the Geological Survey of Wisconsin," vol. i, p. 114. t " The Great Ice Age," p. 465. J Whitney, " Proceedings of the California Academy of Natural Sciences." 32 THE DRIFT. age, for in Siberia the remains of the great mammalia, the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the bison, and the horse, are found to this day imbedded in great masses of ice, which, as we shall see, are supposed to have been formed around them at the very coming of the Drift age. But there is another difficulty : Let us suppose that on all the continents an ice-belt came down from the north and south poles to 35° or 40° of latitude, and there stood, massive and terrible, like the ice-sheet of Greenland, frowning over the remnant of the world, and giving oat continually fogs, snow-storms, and tempests ; what, under such circumstances, must have been the climatic conditions of the narrow belt of land which these ice-sheets did not cover ? Louis Figuier says : " Such masses of ice could only have covered the earth when the temperature of the air was lowered at least some degrees below zero. But organic life is incompati ble with such a temperature ; and to this cause must we attribute the disappearance of certain species of animals and plants—in particular the rhinoceros and the elephant —which, before this sudden and extraordinary cooling of the globe, appeared to have limited themselves, in im mense herds, to Northern Europe, and chiefly to Siberia, where their remains have been found in such prodigious quantities." * But if the now temperate region of Europe and Amer ica was subject to a degree of cold great enough to de stroy these huge animals, then there could not have been a tropical climate anywhere on the globe. If the line of 35° or 40°, north and south, was several degrees below zero, the equator must have been at least below the frost- point. And, if so, how can we account for the survival, * " The World before the Deluge," p. 462. GAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEßTS? 33 to oar own time, of innumerable tropical plants that can not stand for one instant the breath of frost, and whose fossilized remains are found in the rocks prior to the Drift ? As they lived through the Glacial age, it could not have been a period of great and intense cold. And this conclusion is in accordance with the results of the latest researches of the scientists :— " In his valuable studies upon the diluvial flora, Count Gaston de Saporta concludes that the climate in this pe riod was marked rather by extreme moisture than extreme cold." Again : where did the clay, which is deposited in such gigantic masses, hundreds of feet thick, over the conti nents, come from? We have seen (p. 18, ante) that, ac cording to Mr. Dawkins, " no such clay has been proved to have been formed, either in the A.rctio regions, whence the ice-stieet has retreated, or in the districts forsaken by the glaciers." If the Arctic ice-sheet docs not create such a clay now, why did it create it centuries ago on the plains of England or Illinois ? The other day I traveled from Minnesota to Cape May, on the shore of the Atlantic, a distance of about fifteen hundred miles. At scarcely any point was I out of sight of the red clay and gravel of the Drift : it loomed up amid the beach-sands of New Jersey ; it was laid bare by railroad-cuts in the plains of New York and Pennsylvania ; it covered the highest tops of the Alle- ghanies at Altoona ; the farmers of Ohio, Indiana, Illi nois, and Wisconsin were raising crops upon it ; it was everywhere. If one had laid down a handful of the Wis consin Drift alongside of a handful of the New Jersey deposit, he could scarcely have perceived any difference between them. 34 THE DRIFT. Here, then, is a geological formation, almost identical in character, fifteen hundred miles long from east to west, and reaching through the whole length of North and South America, from the Arctic Circle to Patagonia. Did ice grind this out of the granite ? Where did it get the granite ? The granite reaches the surface only in limited areas ; as a rule, it is buried many miles in depth under the sedimentary rocks. How did the ice pick out its materials so as to grind nothing but granite ? This deposit overlies limestone and sandstone. The ice-sheet rested upon them. Why were they not ground up with the granite ? Did the ice intelligently pick out a particular kind of rock, and that the hardest of them all ? Cut here is another marvel—this clay is red. The red is due to the grinding up of mica and hornblende. Granite is composed of quartz, feldspar, and mica. In syenitic granite the materials are quartz, feldspar, and hornblende. Mica and hornblende contain considerable oxide of iron, while feldspar has none. When mica and hornblende are ground up, the result is blue or red clays, as the oxida tion of the iron turns the clay red ; while the clay made of feldspar is light yellow or white. Now, then, not only did the ice-sheet select for grind ing the granite rocks, and refuse to touch the others, but it put the granite itself through some mysterious process by which it separated the feldspar from the mica and horn blende, and manufactured a white or yellow clay out of the one, which it deposited in great sheets by itself, as west of the Mississippi ; while it ground up the mica and hornblende and made blue or red clays, which it laid down elsewhere, as the red clays are spread over that great stretch of fifteen hundred miles to which I have referred. CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS? 35 Can any one suppose that ice could so discriminate ? And if it by any means effected this separation of the particles of granite, indissolubly knit together, how could it perpetuate that separation while moving over the land, crushing all beneath and before it, and leave it on the face of the earth free from commixture with the surface rocks ? Again : the ice-sheets which now exist in the remote north do not move with a constant and regular motion southward, grinding up the rocks as they go. A recent writer, describing the appearance of things in Greenland, says : " The coasts are deeply indented with numerous bays and fiords or firths, which, when traced inland, are almost invariably found to terminate against glaciers. Thick ice frequently appears, too, crowning the exposed sea-cliffs, from the edges of which it droops in thick, tongue-like, and staLictitieprojections, until its own weight forces it to break away and topple down the precipices into the sea." * This does not represent an ice-sheet moving down continuously from the high grounds and tearing up the rocks. It rather breaks off like great icicles from the oaves of a house. Again : the ice-sheets to-day do not striate or groove the rocks over which they move. Mr. Campbell, author of two works in defense of the iceberg theory—" Fire and Frost," and " A Short Ameri can Tramp"—went, in 1804, to the coasts of Labrador, the Strait of Belle Isle, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, for the express purpose of witnessing the effects of ice bergs, and testing the theory he had formed. On the coast of Labrador he reports that at Ilanly Harbor, where * " Popular Science Monthly," April, 1874, p. 046. 30 THE DRIFT. the whole strait is blocked up with ice each winter, and the great mass swung bodily up and down, " grating along the bottom at all depths," he "found the rocks ground smooth, but not striated.'" * At Cape Charles and Cattle Harbor, he reports, " the rocks at the water-line are not striated."\ At St. Francis Harbor, "the water-line is much rubbed smooth, but not striated.'1'' J At Sea Islands, he says, "No striæ are to be seen at the land-wash in these sounds or on open sea-coasts near the present water- line." * Again : if these drift-deposits, these vast accumula tions of sand, clay, gravel, and bowlders, were caused by a great continental ice-sheet scraping and tearing the rocks on which it rested, and constantly moving toward the sun, then not only would we find, as Ï have suggested in the case of glaciers, the accumulated masses of rub bish piled up in great windrows or ridges along the lines where the face of the ice-sheet melted, but we would naturally expect that the farther north we went the less we would find of these materials ; in other words, that the ice, advancing southwardly, would sweep the north clear of dibris to pile it up in the more southern regions. But this is far from being the case. On the contrary, the great masses of the Drift extend as far north as the land itself. In the remote, barren grounds of North America, we are told by various travelers who have visited those regions, " sand-hills and erratics appear to be as common as in the countries farther south." || Captain Bach tells USA that he saw great chains of sand-hills, stretching * " A Short American Tramp," pp. 68, 107. t Ibid., p. 68. t Ibid., p. 72. * Ibid., p. 76. I " The Great Ice Age," p. 391. A" Narrative of Aictic Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great Fish River," pp. 140, 346. \> CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS? 37 away from each side of the valley of the Great Fish River, in north latitude CG°, of great height, and crowned with gigantic bowlders. Why did not the advancing ice-sheet drive these de posits southward over the plains of the United States? Can we conceive of a force that was powerful enough to grind up the solid rocks, and yet was not able to remove its own debris? But there is still another reason which ought to sat isfy us, once for all, that the drift-depobits were not due to the pressure of a great continental ice-sheet. It is this : If the presence of the Drift proves that the country in which it is found was once covered with a body of ice thick and heavy enough by its pressure and weight to grind up the surface-rocks into clay, sand, gravel, and bowlders, then the tropical regions of the world must have been covered with such a great ice-sheet, upon the very equator ; for Agassiz found in Brazil a vast sheet of " ferruginous clay with pebbles," which covers the whole country, " a sheet of drift," says Agassiz, " consisting of the same homogeneous, unstratified paste, and containing loose materials of all sorts and sizes," deep red in color, and distributed, as in the north, in uneven hills, while sometimes it is reduced to a thin deposit. It is recent in time, although overlying rocks ancient geologically. Agassiz had no doubt whatever that it was of glacial origin. Professor Hartt, who accompanied Professor Agassiz in his South American travels, and published a valuable work called "The Geology of Brazil," describes drift- deposits as covering the province of Pai'a, Brazil, upon the equator itself. The whole valley of the Amazon is covered with stratified aid unstratified and unfossiliferous •j 38 THE DRIFT. GAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS? 39 Drift,* and also with a peculiar drift-clay (argile plas tique bigarrée), plastic and streaked. Professor Hartt gives a cut from which I copy the following representation of drift-clay and pebbles overly ing a gneiss hillock of the Serra do Mar, Brazil : DRIFT-DEPOSITS ITT THE TROPICS. a, drift-clay ; ff, angular fragments of quartz ; c. aheet of pebbles ; d d, gneiaa in situ ; g y, quartz and granito veina traversing the gneisa. But here is the dilemma to whic-h the glacialists are reduced : If an ice-sheet a mile in thickness, or even one hundred feet in thickness, was necessary to produce the Drift, and if it covered the equatorial regions of Brazil, then there is no reason why the same climatic conditions should not have produced the same results in Africa and Asia ; and the result would be that the entire globe, from pole to pole, must have rolled for days, years, or centu ries, wrapped in a continuous casing, mantle, or shroud of ice, under which all vegetable and animal life must have utterly perished. * " Geology of Brazil," p. 488. And we are not without evidences that the drift- deposits arc found in Africa. We know that they extend in Europe to the Mediterranean. The "Journal of the Geographical Society " (British) has a paper by George Man, F. G. S., on the geology of Morocco, in which he says : " Glacial moraines may be seen on this range nearly eight thousand feet above the sea, forming gigantic ridges and mounds of porphyritic blocks, in some places dam ming up tlie ravines, and at the foot of Atlas are enor mous mounds of bowlders." These mounds oftentimes rise two thousand feet above the level of the plain, and, according to Mr. Man, were pro duced by glaciers. We shall see, hereafter, that the sands bordering Egypt belong to the Drift age. The diamond-bearing gravels of South Africa extend to within twenty-two degrees of the equator. It is even a question whether that great desolate land, the Desert of Sahara, covering a third of the Continent of Africa, is not the direct result of this signal catastro phe. Henry W. Haynes tells us that drift-deposits are found in the Desert of Sahara, and that— " In the bottoms of the dry ravines, or wadys, which pierce the hills that bound the valley of the Nile, I have found numerous specimens of flint axes of the type of St. Acheul, which have "been adjudged to be true palæo- lithic implements by some of the most eminent cultiva tors of prehistoric science."* The sand and gravel of Sahara are underlaid by a de posit of clay. Bayard Taylor describes in the center of Africa * " The Palæolithie Implements of the Valley of the Delaware," Cambridge, 1881. 40 THE DRIFT. great plains of coarse gravel, dotted with gray granite bowlders.* In the United States Professor "VVinchell shows that the drift-deposits extend to the Gulf of Mexico. At Jackson, in Southern Alabama, he found deposits of peb bles one hundred feet in thickness, f If there are no drift-deposits except where the great ice-sheet ground them out of the rocks, then a shroud of death once wrapped the entire globe, and all life ceased. But we know that all life,—vegetable, animal, and human,—is derived from pre-glacial sources ; therefore animal, vegetable, and human life did not perish in the Drift age ; therefore an ice-sheet did not wrap the world in its death-pall ; therefore the drift-deposits of the tropics were not due to an ice-sheet ; therefore the drift- deposits of the rest of the world were not due to ice- sheets : therefore we must look elsewhere for their ori gin. There is no escaping these conclusions. Agassiz him self says, describing the Glacial age : " All the springs were dried np ; the rivera ceased to flow. To the movements of a numerous and animated creation succeeded the silence of doath." If the verdure was covered with ice a mile in thick ness, all animals that lived on vegetation of any kind must have perished ; consequently, all carnivores which lived on these must have ceased to exist ; and man him self, without animal or vegetable food, must have disap peared for ever. • A writer, describing Greenland wrapped in such an ice- sheet, says : * " Travels in Africa," p. 188. t "Sketches of Creation," pp. 222, 223. CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS? 41 "The whole interior seems to be buried beneath a great depth of snow and ice, which loads up the valleys and wraps over the hills. The scene opening to view in the interior is desolate in the extreme—nothing but one dead, dreary expanse of white, so far as the eye can reach —no living creature frequents this wilderness—neither bird, beast, nor insect. The silence, deep as death, is broken only when the roaring storm arises to sweep be fore it the pitiless, blinding snow." * And yet the glacialists would have us believe that Brazil and Africa, and the whole globe, were once wrapped in such a shroud of death ! Here, then, in conclusion, are the evidences that the de posits of the Drift are not due to continental ice-sheets : I. The present ice-sheets of the remote north create no such deposits and make no such markings. II. A vast continental elevation of land-surfaces at the north was necessary for the ice to slide down, and this did not exist. III. The ice-sheet, if it made the Drift markings, must have scored the rocks going up-hill, while it did not score them going down-hill. IV. If the cold formed the ice and the ice formed the Drift, why is there no Drift in the coldest regions of the earth, where there must have been ice ? V. Continental ice-belts, reaching to 40° of latitude, would have exterminated all tropical vegetation. It was not exterminated, therefore such ice-sheets could not have existed. VI. The Drift is found in the equatorial regions of the world. If it was produced by an ice-sheet in those regions, all pre-glacial forms of life must have perished ; but they did not perish ; therefore the ice-sheet could not * " Popular Science Monthly," April, 1874, p. 646. 3 43 THE DRIFT. have covered these regions, and could not have produced the drift-deposits there found. In brief, the Drift is not found where ice must have been, and is found where ice could not have been ; the conclusion, therefore, is irresistible that the Drift is not due to ice. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE. 43 CHAPTER VII. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC! CATASTROPHE. IN the first place, the Drift fell upon a fair and lovely world, a world far better adapted to give happiness to its inhabitants than this storm-tossed planet on which we now live, with its endless battle between heat and cold, between sun and ice. The pre-glacial world was a garden, a paradise ; not excessively warm at the equator, and yet with so mild and equable a climate that the plants we now call tropical flourished within the present Arctic Circle. If some fu ture daring navigator reaches the north pole and finds solid laud there, he will probably discover hi the rocks at his feet the fossil remains of the oranges and bananas of the pre-glacial age. That the reader may not think this an extravagant statement, let me cite a few authorities. A recent writer says : " This was, indeed, for America, the golden age of animals and plants, and in all respects but one—the ab sence of man—the country was more interesting and pict uresque than now. We must imagine, therefore, that the hills and valleys about the present site of New York were covered with noble trees, and a dense undergrowth of species, for the most part different from those now living there ; and that these were the homes and feeding- grounds of many kinds of quadrupeds and birds, which have long since become extinct. The broad plain which «loped gently seaward from the highlands must have been 44 THE DRIFT. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE. 45 covered with a sub-tropical forest of giant trees and tan gled vines teeming with animal life. This state of things doubtless continued through many thousands of years, but ultimately a change came over the fair face of Nature more complete and terrible than we have language to de scribe." * Another says : " At the close of the Tertiary age, which ends the long series of geological epochs previous to the Quater nary, the landscape of Europe had, in the main, assumed its modern appearance. The middle era of this age—the Miocene—was characterized by tropical plants, a varied and imposing fauna, and a genial climate, so extended as to nourish forests of beeches, maples, walnuts, poplars, and magnolias in Greenland and Spitzbergen, while an exotic vegetation hid the exuberant valleys of England." f Dr. Dawson says : " This delightful climate was not confined to the pres ent temperate or tropical regions. It extended to the very shores of the Arctic Sea. In JVbrtfi Greenland, at Atane-Kerdluk, in latitude 70° north, at an elevation of more than a thousand feet above the sea, were found the remains of beeches, oaks, pines, poplars, maples, walnuts, magnolias, limes, and vines. The remains of similar plants were found in Spitzbergen, in latitude 78° 56'." J Dr. Dawson continues : " Was the Miocene period on the whole a better aga of the world than that in which we live ? In some re spects it was. Obviously, there was in the northern hemisphere a vast surface of land under a mild and cqna- ' ble climate, and clothed with a rich and varied vegetation. Had we lived in the Miocene we might have sat under our own vine and fig-tree equally in Greenland and Spitz bergen and in those more southern climes to which this * " Popular Science Honthly," October, 1878, p. 648. f L. P. Gratacap, in " American Antiquarian," July, 1881, p. 280. Í Dawson, " Earth and Man," p. 261. privilege is now restricted. . . . Some reasons have been adduced for the belief that in the Miocene and Eocene there were intervals of cold climate ; but the evidence of this may be merely local and exceptional, and does not interfere with the broad characteristics of the age." * Sir Edward Belcher brought away from the dreary shores of "Wellington Channel (latitude 73° 32' north) por tions of a tree which there can be no doubt whatever had actually grown where he found it. The roots were in place, in a frozen mass of earth, the stump standing up right where it was probably overtaken by the great win- ter.f Trees have been found, in situ, on Prince Pat rick's Island, in latitude 76° 12' north, four feet in cir cumference. They were so old that the wood had lost its combustible quality, and refused to burn. Mr. Geikie thinks that it is possible these trees were pre-glacial, and belonged to the Miocene age. They may have been the remnants of the great forests which clothed that far north ern region when the so-called glacial age came on and brought the Drift. We shall seo hereafter that man, possibly civilized man, dwelt in this fair and glorious world—this world that knew no frost, no cold, no ice, no snow ; that he had dwelt in it for thousands of years ; that he witnessed the appalling and sudden calamity which fell upon it ; and that he has preserved the memory of this catastrophe to the present day, in a multitude of myths and legends scattered all over the face of the habitable earth. But was it sudden ? Was it a catastrophe ? Again I call the witnesses to the stand, for I ask you, good reader, to accept nothing that is not proved. In the first place, was it sudden ? *" Earth and Man," p. 264. f " The Last of the Arctic Voyages," vol. i, p. 380. 46 THE DRIFT. One writer says : " The glacial action, in the opinion of the land-glaeial- ista, was limited to a definite period, and operated simul taneously over a vast area." * And again : " The drift was accumulated where it is by some vio lent action." f Louis Figuier says : " The two cataclysms of which we have spoken sur prised Europe at the moment of the development of an important creation. The whole scope of animated nature, the evolution of animals, was suddenly arrested in that part of our hemisphere over which these gigantic convul sions spread, followed by the brief but sudden submersion of entire continents. Organic life had scarcely recovered from the violent shock, when a second, and perhaps se verer blow assailed it. The northern and central parts of Europe, the vast countries which extend from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and the Danube, were visited by a period of sudden and severe cold ; the temperature of the polar regions seized them. The plains of Europe, but now ornamented by the luxurious vegetation developed by the heat of a burning climate, the boundless pastures on which herds of great elephants, the active horse, the ro bust hippopotamus, and great carnivorous animals grazed and roamed, became covered with a mantle of ice and snow." I M. Ch. Martins says : "The most violent convulsions of the solid and liquid elements appear to have been themselves only the effects due to a cause much more powerful than the mere expan sion of the pyrosphere ; and it is necessary to recur, in order to explain them, to some new and bolder hypothesis than has yet been hazarded. Some philosophers have be- * "American Cyclopædia," vol. vi, p. 114. f Ibid., vol. vi, p. 111. t " The World before the Deluge," p. 435. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC! CATASTROPHE. 47 lief in an astronomical revolution which may have over taken our globe in the first age of its formation, and have modified its position in relation to the sun. They admit that the poles have not always been as they are now, and that some terrible shock displaced tliem, changing at the same time the inclination of the axis of the rotation of the earth." * Louis Figuier says : " We can not doubt, after such testimony, of the exist ence, in the frozen north, of the almost entire remains of the mammoth. The animals seem to have perished sud- denly ; enveloped in ice at the moment of their death, their bodies have been preserved from decomposition by the continual action of the cold." f Cuvier says, speaking of the bodies of the quadru peds which the ice had seized, and which have been pre served, with their hair, flesh, and skin, down to our own times : " If they had not been frozen as soon as killed, putre faction would have decomposed them ; and, on the other hand, this eternal frost could not have previously pre vailed in the place where they died, for they could not have lived in such a temperature. It was, therefore, at the same instant when these animals perished that the country they inhabited was rendered glacial. These events must have been sudden, instantaneous, and loithoiit any gradation." J There is abundant evidence that the Drift fell upon a land covered with forests, and that the trunks of the trees were swept into the mass of clay and gravel, where they are preserved to this day. Mr. TVhittlesey gives an account of a log found forty feet below the surface, in a bed of blue clay, resting * " The World before the Deluge," p. 463. t Ibid., p. 396. t " Ossements fosales, Discours sur les Révolutions du Globe." 48 THE DRIFT. upon the "hard-pan" or "till," in a -well dug at Colum bia, Ohio.* At Bloornington, Illinois, pieces of wood were found one hundred and twenty-three feet below the surface, in sinking a shaft, f And it is a very remarkable fact that none of these Illinois clays contain any fossils.^ The inference, therefore, is irresistible that the clay, thus unfossiliferous, fell upon and inclosed the trees •«•hile they were yet growing. These facts alone would dispose of the theory that the Drift was deposited upon lands already covered with water. It is evident, on the contrary, that it was dry land, inhabited land, land embowered in forests. On top of the Norwich crag, in England, are found the remains of -in ancient forest, "showing stumps of trees standing erect with their roots penetrating an an cient soil." * In this soil occur the remains of many ex tinct species of animals, together with those of others still living ; among these may be mentioned the hippo potamus, three species of elephant, the mammoths, rhi noceros, bear, horse, Irish elk, etc. In Ireland remains of trees have been found in sand- bed a below the till.|| Dr. Dawson found a hardened peaty bed under the bowlder-clay, in Canada, which " contained many small roots and branches, apparently of coniferous trees allied to the spruces."A Mr. C. Whittlesey refers to decayed * " Smithsonian Contributions," vol. xv. f " Geology of Illinois," vol. iv, p. 179. t "The Great Ice Ago," p. 387. * Ibid., p. 340. | " Dublin Quarterly Journal of Science," vol. vi, p. 249. A "Acadian Geology," p. 63. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIG CATASTROPHE. 49 leaves and remains of the elephant and mastodon found below and in the drift in America.* "The remains of the mastodon, rhinoceros, hippo potamus, and elephant are found in the pre-glacial beds of Italy." t These animals were slaughtered outright, and so sud denly that few escaped : Admiral Wrangel tells us that the remains of ele phants, rhinoceroses, etc., are heaped up in such quantities in certain parts of Siberia that " he and his men climbed over ridges and mounds composed entirely of their bones." J "We have seen that the Drift itself has all the appear ance of having been the product of some sudden catas trophe : "Stones and bowlders alike are scattered higgledy- piggledy, pell-mell, through the clay, so as to give it a higlily confused and tumultuous appearance." Another writer says : "In the mass of the 'till' itself fossils sometimes, but very rarely, occur. Tusks of the mammoth, reindeer-ant lers, and fragments of wood have from time to time been discovered. They almost invariably afford marks of hav ing been subjected to the same action as the stones and bowlders by which they are surrounded." * Another says : " Logs and fragments of wood are often got at great depths in the buried gorges." || * " Smithsonian Contributions," vol. xv. t "The Great Ice Age," p. 492. Í Agassiz, " Geological Sketches," p. 209. * " The Great Ice Age," p. 150. ] " Illustrations of Surface Geology," " Smithsoniau Contributions." 50 THE DRIFT. Mr. Geikie says : " Below a deposit of till, at "Woodhill Quarry, near Kil- maurs, in Ayrshire (Scotland), the remains of mammoths and reindeer and certain marine shells have several times been detected during the quarrying operations. . . . Two elephant-tusks were got at a depth of seventeen and a half feet from the surface. . . . The mammalian remains, ob tained from this quarry, occurred in a peaty layer between two thin beds of sand and gravel which lay beneath a mass of ' till,' and rested directly on the sandstone rock." * And again : "Remains of the mammoth have been met with at Chapelhall, near Airdrie, where they occurred in a bed of laminated sand, underlying 'till.' Reindeer-antlers have also been discovered in other localities, as in the valley of the Endrick, about four miles from Loch Lomond, where an antler was found associated with marine shells, near the bottom of a bed of blue clay, and close to the underlying rock—the blue clay being covered with twelve feet of tough, stony clay." f Professor Winchell says : "Buried tree-trunks are often exhumed from the gla cial drift at a depth of from twenty to sixty feet from the surface. Dr. Locke has published an account of a mass of buried drift-wood at Salem, Ohio, forty-three feet below the surface, imbedded in ancient mud. The museum of the University of Michigan contains several fragments of well-preserved tree-trunks exhumed from wells in the vicinity of Ann Arbor. Such occurrences are by no means uncommon. The encroachments of the waves upon the shores of the Great Lakes reveal whole forests of the buried trunks of the white cedar." f These citations place it beyond question that the Drift came suddenly upon the world, slaughtering the animals, * " The Great Ice Age," p. 149. f Ibid., p. 150. t Winchell, " Sketches of Creation," p. 259. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE. 51 breaking up the forests, and overwhelming the trunks and branches of the trees in its masses of débris. Let us turn to the next question : Was it an extraor dinary event, a world-shaking cataclysm ? The answer to this question is plain : The Drift marks probably the most awful convulsion and catastrophe that has ever fallen upon the globe. The deposit of these continental masses of clay, sand, and gravel was but one of the features of the apalliug event. In addition to this the earth at the same time was cleft with great cracks or fissures, which reached down through many miles of the planet's crust to the central fires and released the boiling rocks imprisoned in its bosom, and these poured to the surface, as igneous, intrusive, or trap-rocks. Where the great breaks were not deep enough to reach the central fires, they left mighty fissures in the surface, which, in the Scandinavian regions, are known as, fiords, and which constitute a striking feature of the scenery of these north ern lands ; they arc great canals—hewn, as it were, in the rock—with high walls penetrating fiom the sea far into the interior of the land. They are found in Great Brit ain, Maine, Nova Scotia, Labrador, Greenland, and on the Western coast of North America. David Dale Owen tells us that the outburst of trap- rock at the Dalles of the St. Croix came up through open fissures, breaking the continuity of strata, without tilting them into inclined planes." * It would appear as if the earth, in the first place, cracked into deep clefts, and the igneous matter within took advantage of these breaks to rise to the surface. It caught masses of the sandstone in its midst and hardened around them. These great clefts seem to be, as Owen says, "lines * " Geological Survey of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota," p. 142, 52 THE DRIFT. radiating southwestwardly from Lake Superior, as if that was the seat of the disturbance which caused them."* Moreover, when we come to examine the face of the rocks on which the Drift came, we do not find them merely smoothed and ground down, as we might suppose a great, heavy mass of ice moving slowly over them would leave them. There was something more than this. There was something, (whatever it was,) that fell upon them with awful force and literally smashed them, pounding, beat ing, pulverizing them, and turning one layer of mighty rock over vipon another, and scattering them in the wild est confusion. We can not conceive of anything terres trial that, let loose upon the bare rocks to-day, would or could produce such results. Geikie says : " When the ' till ' is removed from the underlying rocks, these almost invariably show either a well-smoothed, pol ished, and striated surface, or else a highly confused, broken, and smas/ied appearance." f Gratacap says : " ' Crushed ledges ' designate those plicated, overthrown, or curved exposures where p.irallel rocks, as talcose schist, usually vertical, are bent and fractured, as if bij a maul- like force, battering them from above. The strata are oftentimes tumbled over upon a cliff-side like a row of books, and rest upon heaps of fragments broken away by the strain upon the bottom layers, or crushed off from their exposed layers." J The Rev. O. Fisher, F. G. S., says he "Finds the covering beds to consist of two members —a lower one_, entirely destitute of organic remains, and * " Geological Survey of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota," p. 147. t "The Great Ice Age," p. 73. t " Popular Science Monthly," January, 18Ï8, p. 326. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC! CATASTROPHE. 53 generally unstratified, which has often been forcibly IN DENTED into the bed beneath it, sometimes exhibiting slick- ensides at the junction. There is evidence of this lower member having been pushed or dragged over the surface, from higher to lower levels, in a plastic condition; on which account he has named it ' The Trail '." * Now, all these details are incompatible with the idea of ice-action. What condition of ice can be imagined that would smash rocks, that would beat them like a maul, that would indent them ? And when we pass from the underlying rocks to the " till " itself, we find the evidences of tremendous force exerted in the wildest and most tumultuous manner. When the clay and stones were being deposited on those crushed and pounded rocks, they seem to have picked up the detritus of the earth in great masses, and whirled it wildly in among their own material, and de posited it in what are called "the intercalated beds." It would seem as if cyclonic winds had been at work among the mass. While the "till" itself is devoid of fossils, " the intercalated beds " often contain them. Whatever was in or on the soil was seized upon, carried up into the air, then cast down, and mingled among the " till." James Geikie says, speaking of these intercalated beds : " They are twisted, bent, crumpled, and confused often in the, wildest manner. Layers of clay, sand, and gravel, which were probably deposited in a nearly horizontal plane, are puckered into folds and sharply curved into vertical positions. I have seen whole beds of sand and clay which had all the appearance of having been pushed forward bodily for some distance, the bedding assuming the most fantastic appearance. . . . The intercalated beds are everywhere cut through by the overlying ' till,' and * "Journal of the Geological Society and Geological Magazine." THE DRIFT. large portions have been carried away. . . . They form but a small fraction of the drift-deposits." * In the accompanying cut we have one of these sand (s) and clay (c) patches, embosomed in the " till," ¿' and ¿2. STRATIFIED Bsog IN TILL, LEITHEIT WATER, PEEBLSSCHIRE, SCOTLAND. And again, the same writer says : "The intercalated beds are remarkable for having yielded an imperfect skull of the great extinct ox (Sos primigenias), and remains of the Irish elk or deer, and the horse, together with layers of peaty matter." f Several of our foremost scientists see in the phenomena of the Drift the evidences of a cataclysm of some sort. Sir John LubbockJ gives the following representa tion of a section of the Drift at Joinville, France, con- SECTION AT JOIKVILLE. * " The Great Ice Age," p. 149. f ftid-i p 149 \ " Prehistoric Times," p. 370. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE. 55 taining an immense sandstone block, eight feet six inches in length, with a width of two feet eight inches, and a thickness of three feet four inches. Discussing the subject, Mr. Lubbock says : " We must feel that a body of water, with power to move snch masses as these, must have been very different from any floods now occurring in those valleys, and might well deserve the name of a cataclysm. . . . But a flood which could bring down so great a mass-would certainly have swept away the comparatively light and movable gravel below. Wo can uot, therefore, account for the phenomena by aqueous action, because a flood which would deposit the sandstone blocks would remove the underlying gravel, and a flood which would deposit the gravel would not remove the blocks. The Dens ex ma- china has not only been called in most unnecessarily, but when examined turns out to be but an idol, after all." Sir John thinks that floating ice might have dropped these blocks ; but then, on the other hand, M. G. d'Or- bigny observes that all the fossils found in these beds belong to fresh-water or land animals. The sea has had nothing to do with them. And D'Orbigny thinks the Drift came from cataclysms. M. Boucher de Perthes, the first and most exhaustive investigator of these deposits, has always been of opinion that the drift-gravels of France were deposited by violent cataclysms.* This view seems to be confirmed by the fact that the gravel-beds in which these remains of man and extinct animals are found lie at an elevation of from eighty to two hundred feet above the present water-levels of the valleys. Sir John Lubboek says : "Our second difficulty still remains—namely, the height at which the upper-level gravels stand above the * "Mem. Soc. d'Em. 1'Abbeville," 1861, p. 475. 58 THE DRIFT. present water-line. "We can not wonder that these beds have generally been attributed to violent cataclysms."* In America, in Britain, and in Europe, the glacial deposits made clean work of nearly all animal life. The great mammalia, too large to find shelter in caverns, were some of them utterly swept away, while others never afterward returned to those regions. In like manner pa- læolithic man, man of the rude and unpolished flint imple ments, the contemporary of the great mammalia, the mam moth, the hippopotamus, and the rhinoceros, was also stamped out, and the cave-deposits of Europe show that there was a long interval before he reappeared in those regions. The same forces, whatever they were, which " smashed " and " pounded " and " contorted " the surface of the earth, crushed man and his gigantic associates out of existence.! But in Siberia, where, as we have seen, some of the large mammalia were caught and entombed in ice, and preserved even to our own day, there was no " smashing " and " crashing " of the earth, and many escaped the snow- sheets, and their posterity survived in that region for long ages after the Glacial period, and are supposed only to have disappeared in quite recent times. In fact, within the last two or three years a Russian exile declared that he had seen a group of living mammoths in a wild valley in a remote portion of that wilderness. These, then, good reader, to recapitulate, are points that seem to be established : I. The Drift marked a world-convulsing catastrophe. It was a gigantic and temblé event. It was something quite out of the ordinary course of Nature's operations. II. It was sudden and overwhelming. * "Prehistoric Times," p. 372. f " The Great Ice Age," p. 466. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE. 57 III. It fell upon land areas, much like our own in geographical conformation ; a forest-covered, inhabited land ; a glorious land, basking in perpetual summer, in the midst of a golden age. Let us go a step further. 58 THE DRIFT. GREAT HEAT A PREREQUISITE. 59 CHAPTER VIII. GREAT HEAT A PREREQUISITE. Now, it will be observed that the principal theories assigned for the Drift go upon the hypothesis that it was produced by extraordinary masses of ice—ice as ice bergs, ice as glaciers, or ice in continental sheets. The scientists admit that immediately preceding this Glacial age the climate was mild and equable, and these great formations of ice did not exist. Cut none of them pre tend to say how the ice came or what caused it. Even Agassiz, the great apostle of the ice-origin of Drift, is forced to confess : " We have, as yet, no clew to the source of this great and sudden change of climate. Various suggestions have been made—among others, that formerly the inclination of the earth's axis was greater, or that a submersion of the continents under water might have produced a decided increase of cold ; but none of these explanations are sat isfactory, and science has yet to find any cause which ac- counte for all the phenomena connected with it."* Some have imagined that a change in the position of the earth's axis of rotation, due to the elevation of ex tensive mountain-tracts between the poles and the equator, might have caused a degree of cold sufficient to produce the phenomena of the Drift ; but Geikie says— " It has been demonstrated that the protuberance of the earth at the equator so vastly exceeds that of any * "Geological Sketches," p. 210. possible elevation of mountain-masses between the equator and the poles, that any slight changes which may have resulted from such geological causes could have had only an infinitesimal effect upon the general climate of the globe." * Let us reason together :— The ice, say the glacialists, caused the Drift. What caused the ice ? Great rains and snows, they say, falling on the face of the land. Granted. What is rain in the first instance ? Vapor, clouds. Whence are the clouds derived ? From the waters of the earth, principally from the oceans. How is the water in the clouds transferred to the clouds from the seas ? By evaporation. What is necessary to evaporation ? Heat. Here, then, is the sequence : If there is no heat, there is no evaporation ; no evap oration, no clouds ; no clouds, no rain ; no rain, no ice ; no ice, no Drift. But, as the Glacial age meant ice on a stupendous scale, then it mast have been preceded by heat on a stu pendous scale. Professor Tyndall asserts that the ancient glaciers indicate the action of heat as much as cold. He says : " Cold will not produce glaciers. You may have the bitterest northeast winds here in London throughout the winter without a single flake of snow. Cold must have the fitting object to operate upon, and this object—the aqueous vapor of the air—is the direct product of heat. Let us put this glacier question in another form : the la tent heat of aqueous vapor, at the temperature of its pro duction in the tropics, is about 1,000° Fahr., for the latent heat augments as the temperature of evaporation descends. A pound of water thus vaporized at the equator has ab sorbed one thousand times the quantity of heat which * " The Great Ice Age," p. 98. 60 THE DRIFT. would raise a pound of tbe liquid one degree in tempera ture. ... It is perfectly manifest that by -weakening the sun's action, either through a defect of emission or by the steeping of the entire solar system in space of a low temperature, we should be cutting off the. glaciers at their source." * Mr. Croll says : " Heat, to produce evaporation, is just as essential to the accumulation of snow and ice as cold to produce con densation." f Sir John Lubbock says : " Paradoxical as it may appear, the primary cause of the Glacial epoch may be, after all, an elevation of the temperature in the tropics, causing a greater amount of evaporation in the equatorial regions, and consequently a greater supply of the raw material of snow in the temper ate regions during the winter months." J So necessary did it appear that heat must have come from some source to vaporize all this vast quantity of water, that one gentleman, Professor Frankland,* sug gested that the ocean must have been rendered hot by the internal fires of the earth, and thus the water was sent up in clouds to fall in ice and snow ; but Sir John Lubbock disposes of this theory by showing that the fauna of the seas during the Glacial period possessed an Arctic charac ter. We can not conceive of Greenland shells and fish and animals thriving in an ocean nearly at the boiling-point. A writer in " The Popular Science Monthly " || says : " These evidences of vast accumulations of ice and snow on the borders of the Atlantic have led some theo- * " Heat considered es a Modo of Motion," p. 192. f " Climate and Time," p. 74. j "Prehistoric Times," p. 401. * " Philosophical Magazine," 1864, p 328. || July, 1876, p. 288. GREAT HEAT A PREREQUISITE. 61 rists to suppose that the Ice period was attended, if not in part caused, by a far more abundant evaporation from the surface of the Atlantic than takes place at present ; and it has even been conjectured that submarine volcanoes in the tropics might have loaded the atmosphere with an un usual amount of moisture. This speculation seems to me, however, both improbable and superfluous ; improbable, because no traces of any such cataclysm have been dis covered, and it is more than doubtful whether the gener ation of steam in the tropics, however large the quantity, would produce glaciation of the polar regions. The as cent of steam and heated air loaded with vapor to the altitude of refrigeration would, as it seems to me, result in the rapid radiation of the heat into space, and the local precipitation of unusual quantities of rain ; and the effect of such a catastrophe would be slowly propagated and feebly felt in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. When we consider the magnitude of the ice-sheets which, it is claimed by the glacialists, covered the conti nents during the Drift age, it becomes evident that a vast proportion of the waters of the ocean must have been evaporated and carried into the air, and thence cast down as snow and rain. Mr. Thomas Belt, in a recent number of the " Quarterly Journal of Science," argues that the formation of ice-sheets at the poles must have lowered the level of the oceans of the world two thousand feet ! The mathematician can figure it out for himself : Take the area of the continents down to, say, latitude 40a, on both sides of the equator ; suppose this area to be cov ered by an ice-sheet averaging, say, two miles in thickness ; reduce this mass of ice to cubic feet of water, and esti mate what proportion of the ocean would be required to be vaporized to create it. Calculated upon any basis, and it follows that the level of the ocean must have been greatly lowered. What a vast, inconceivable accession of heat to our f I, «a THE DRIFT. atmosphere was necessary to lift this gigantic layer of ocean-water out of its bed and into the clouds ! The ice, then, was not the cause of the cataclysm ; it Mras simply one of the secondary consequences. We must look, then, behind the ice-age for some cause that would prodigiously increase the heat of our atmos phere, and, when we have found that, we shall have dis covered the cause of the drift-deposits as well as of the ice. The solution of the whole stupendous problem is, therefore, heat, not cold. PAKT n. lje dome t. CHAPTER I. A ÖOMET OAUSED TUE DRIFT. Now, good reader, we have reasoned together up to this point. To be sure, I have done most of the talking, while you have indulged in what the Rev. Sydney Smith called, speaking of Lord Macaulay, " brilliant flashes of silence." But I trust we agree thus far that neither water nor ice caused the Drift. Water and ice were doubtless asso ciated with it, but neither produced it. What, now, are the elements of the problem to be solved ? First, we are to find something that instantaneously increased to a vast extent the heat of our planet, vapor ized the seas, and furnished material for deluges of rain, and great storms of snow, and accumulations of iee north and south of the equator and in the high mountains. Secondly, we are to find something that, coming from above, smashed, pounded, and crushed " as with a maul," and rooted up as with a plow, the gigantic rocks of the surface, and scattered them for hundreds of miles from their original location. 04 THE COMET. Thirdly, we are to find something which brought to the planet vast, incalculable masses of clay and gravel, which did not contain any of the earth's fossils ; which, like the witches of Macbeth, " Look not like th' inhabitants of earth, And yet are on it ;" which are marked after a fashion which can not be found anywhere else on earth ; produced in a laboratory which has not yet been discovered on the planet. Fourthly, we are to find something that would pro duce cyclonic convulsions upon a scale for which the or dinary operations of nature furnish us no parallel. Fifthly, we are to find some external force so mighty that it would crack the crust of the globe like an egg shell, lining its surface with great rents and seams, through which the molten interior boiled up to the light. Would a comet meet all these prerequisites ? I think it would. Let us proceed in regular order. WHAT IS A COMET? Go CHAPTER II. WHAT IS A COXET? IN the first place, are comets composed of solid, liquid, or gaseous substances ? Are they something, or the next thing to nothing ? It has been supposed by some that they are made of the most attenuated gases, so imponderable that if the earth were to pass through one of them we would be un conscious of the contact. Others have imagined them to be mere smoke-wreaths, faint mists, so rarefied that the substance of one a hundred million miles long could, like the genie in the Arabian story, be inclosed in one of Solo mon's brass bottles. But the results of recent researches contradict these views : Padre Secchi, of Rome, observed, in Donati's comet, of 1838, from the loth to the 22d of October, that the nucleus threw out intermittingly from itself appendages having the form of brilliant, coma-shaped masses of in candescent substance twisted violently backward. He accounts for these very remarkable changes of configura tion by the influence first of the suu's heat upon the com et's substance as it approached toward perihelion, and afterward by the production in the luminous emanations thus generated of enormous tides and perturbation de rangements. Some of the most conspicuous of these lu minous developments occurred on October llth, when the comet was at its nearest approach to the earth, and on 4 60 THE COMET. October 17th, when it was nearest to the planet Venus. He has no doubt that the close neighborhood of the earth and Venus at those times was the effective cause of the sudden changes of aspect, and that those changes of aspect may be accepted as proof that the comefs sub stance consists of " really ponderable, material." Mr. Lockyer used the spectroscope to analyze the light of Coggia's comet, and he established beyond question that— " Some of the rays of the comet were sent either from solid particles, or from vapor in a state of very hiyh con densation, and also that beyond doubt other portions of the comet's light issue from the vapor shining by its own inherent light. The light coming from the more dense constituents, and therefore giving a continuous colored spectrum, was, however, deficient in blue rays, and was most probably emitted by material substance at the low reel and yellow stages of incandescence." Padre Secchi, at Rome, believed he saw in the comet " carbon, or an oxide of carbon, as the source of the bright luminous bands," and the Abbe Moigno asks whether this comet may not be, after all, "un gigantesque diamant volatilisé." " Whatever may be the answer hereafter given to that question, the verdict of the spectroscope is clearly to the effect that the comet is made up of a commingling of thin vapor and of denser particles, either compressed into the condition of solidification, or into some physical state ap proaching to that condition, and is therefore entirely in accordance with the notion formed on other grounds that the nucleus of the comet is a cluster of solid nodules or granules, and that the luminous coma and tail ara jets and jackets of vapor, associated with the more dense in gredients, and swaying and streaming about them as heat and gravity, acting antagonistic ways, deter mine." * * " Edinburgh Review," October, 1874, p. 210. WHAT IS A COMETÍ 67 If the comet shines by reflected light, it is pretty good evidence that there must be some material substance there to reflect the light. "A considerable portion of the light of the comet is, nevertheless, borrowed from the sun, for it has one prop erty belonging to it that only reflected light can mani fest. It is "capable of being polarized by prisms of double- refracting spar. Polarization of this character is only possible when the light that is operated upon has already been reflected from an imperfectly transparent medi- iim." * There is considerable difference of opinion as to whether the head of the comet is solid matter or inflam mable gas. " There is nearly always a point of superior brilliancy perceptible in the comet's head, which is termed its nu cleus, and it is necessarily a matter of pressing interest to determine what this bright nucleus is ; whether it is really a kernel of hard, sulid substance, or merely a whiff of somewhat more condensed vapor. Newton, from the first, maintained that the comet is macla pai-tly of solid sub stance., and partit/ of an investment of thin, elastic vapors. If this is the case, it is manifest that the central nodule of dense substance should .be capable of intercepting light when it passes in front of a more distant luminary, such as a fixed star. Comets, on this account, have been watched very narrowly whenever they have been making such a passage. On August 18, 1774, the astronomer Messier believed that he saw a second bright star burst into sight from behind the nucleus of a comet which had concealed it the instant before. Another observer, Wart- mann, in the year 1823, noticed that the light of an eighth- magnitude star was temporarily quenched as the nucleus of Enclos comet passed over it." \ Others, again, have held that stars have been seen through the comet's nucleus. * " Edinburgh Review," October, 1874, p. 207. f Ibid-, P- 206- II i i 68 THE COMET. Amédée Guillemin says : " Comets have been observed whose heads, instead of being nebulous, have presented the appearance of stars, with which, indeed, they have been confounded." * When Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Urania, he thought it was a comet. Mr. Richard A. Proctor says : "The spectroscopic observations made by Mr. Hug- gins on the light of three comets show that a certain por tion, at least, of the light of these objects is inherent. . . . The nucleus gave in each case three bands of light, indi cating that the substances of the nuclei consisted of glow ing vapor." f In one case, the comet-head seemed, as in the case of the comet examined by Padre Secchi, to consist of pure carbon. In the great work of Dr. H. Schellen, of Cologne, an notated by Professor Huggins, we read : " That the nucleus of a comet can not be in itself a dark and solid body, such as the planets are, is proved by its great transparency ; but this does not preclude the possibility of its consisting of innumerable solid particles separated from one another, which, when illuminated by the sun, give, by the reflection of the solar light, the im pression of a homogeneous mass. It has, therefore, been concluded that comets are either composed of a substance which, like gas in a state of extreme rarefaction, is perfectly transparent, or of small solid particles individually sepa rated by intervening spaces through which the light of a star can pass without obstruction, and which, held to gether by mutual attraction, as well as by gravitation toward a denser central conglomeration, moves through space like a cloud of dust. In any case the connection lately noticed by Schiaparelli, between comets and mete- * " The Heavens," p. 239. t Note to Gmllemm's " Heavens," p. 261. WHAT IS A COMETÍ 69 oric showers, seems to necessitate the supposition that in many comets a similar aggregation of particles seems to exist."* I can not better sum up the latest results of research than by giving Dr. Schellen's words in the work just cited : " By collating these various phenomena, the convic tion can scarcely be resisted that the nuclei of comets not only emit their own light, which is that of a glowing gas, but also, together with the coma and the tail, reflect the light of the sun. There seems nothing, therefore, to contradict the theory that the mass of a comet may be composed of -»dilute solid bodies, kept apart one from an other in the same way as the infinitesimal particles form ing a cloud of dust or smoke are held loosely together, and that, as the comet approaches the sun, the most easily fusible constituents of these small bodies become wholly or partially vaporized, and in a condition of white heat overtake the remaining solid particles, and surround the nucleus in a self-luminous cloud of glowing vapor." f Here, then, we have the comet : First, a more or less solid nucleus, on fire, blazing, glowing. Second, vast masses of gas heated to a white heat and enveloping the nucleus, and constituting the luminous head, which was in one case fifty times as large as the moon. Third, solid materials, constituting the tail (possibly the nucleus also), which are ponderable, which reflect the sun's light, and are carried along under the influence of the nucleus of the comet. « Fourth, possibly in the rear of all these, attenuated volumes of gas, prolonging the tail for great distances. What are these solid materials ? ' Spectrum Analysis," 1872. Ibid., p. 402. 70 THE COMET. Stones, and sand, the finely comminuted particles of stones ground off by ceaseless attrition. What is the proof of this ? Simply this : that it is now conceded that meteoric showers are shrerls and patches of cometió matter, dropped from the tail ; and meteoric showers are stones. " Sehiaparelli considers meteors to be dispersed por tions of the comet's original substance ; that is, of the sub stance with which the comet entered the solar domain. Thus comets« would come to be regarded as consisting of a multitude of relatively minute masses."* Now, what is the genesis of a comet ? How did it come to be ? How was it born ? In the first place, there are many things which would connect them with our planets. They belong to the solar system ; they revolve around the sun. Says Arnédée Guillemiu : " Comets form a part of our solar system. Like the planet1*, they revolve about the sun, traversing with very variable velocities extremely elongated orbits." f AVe shall see reason to believe that they contain the same kinds of substances of which the planets are com posed. Their orbits seem to be reminiscences of former plane tary conditions : "All the comets, having a period not exceeding seven years, travel in the same direction around the sun as the planets. Among^ comets with periods less than eighty years long, five sixths travel in the same direction as the planets." \ * " imeiiean Cvelopædia," vol. v, p. 141. f "The HeaienV p. 239. t "American Cyclopaedia," vol. v, p. 141. WHAT 13 A COMET? 71 It is agreed that this globe of ours was at first a gas eous mass ; as it cooled it condensed like cooling steam into a liquid mass ; it became in time a molten globe of red-hot matter. As it cooled still further, a crust or shell formed around it, like the shell formed on an egg, and on this crust we dwell. While the erus,t is still plastic it shrinks as the mass within grows smaller by further cooling, and the wrinkles so formed in the crust are the depths of the ocean and the elevations of the mountain-chains. Cut as ages go on and the process of cooling progresses, the crust reaches a density when it supports itself, like a couple of great arches ; it no longer wrinkles ; it no longer follow s downward the receding molten mass with in ; mountains cease to be formed ; and at length we have a red-hot ball revolving in a shell or crust, with a space between the two, like the space between the dried and shrunken kernel of the nut and the nut itself. Volcanoes are always found on sea-shores or on isl ands. Why ? Through breaks in the earth the sea-water finds its way occasionally down upon the breast of the molten mass ; it is at once converted into gas, steam ; and as it expands it blows itself out through the escape-pipe of the volcano ; precisely as the gas formed by the gun powder coming in contact with the fire of the percussion- cap, drives the ball out before it through the same passage by which it had entered. Hence, some one has said, "No water, no volcano." While the amount of water which so enters is small because of the smallness of the cavity between the shell of the earth and the molten globe within, this process is carried on upon a comparatively small scale, and is a safe one for the earth. But suppose the process of cooling to go on uninterruptedly until a vast space exists between the 72 THE COMET. crust and the core of the earth, and that some day a con vulsion of the surface creates a great chasm in the crust, and the ocean rushes in and fills up part of the cavity ; a tremendous quantity of steam is formed, too great to es cape by the aperture through which it entered, an explo sion takes place, and the crust of the earth is blown into a million fragments. t The great molten ball within remains intact, though sorely torn ; in its center is still the force we call gravity ; the fragments of the crust can not fly off into space ; they are constrained to follow the master-power lodged in the ball, which now becomes the nucleus of a comet, still blaz ing and burning, and vomiting flame5!, and wearing itself away. The catastrophe has disarranged its course, but it still revolves in a prolonged orbit around the sun, carry ing its broken dibris in a long trail behind it. This débris arranges itself in a regular order : the largest fragments are on or nearest the head ; the smaller are farther away, diminishing in regular gradation, until the farthest extremity, the tail, consists of sand, dust, and gases. There is a continual movement of the particles of the tail, operated upon by the attraction and repulsion of the sun. The fragments collide and crash against each other ; by a natural law each stone places itself so that its longest diameter coincides with the direction of the motion of the comet ; hence, as they scrape against each other they mark each other w ith lines or striœ, lengthwise of their longest diameter. The fine dust ground out by the^e perpetual collisions does not go off into space, or pack around tho stone?, but, still governed by the attrac tion of the head, it falls to the rear and takes its place, like the small men of a regiment, in the farther part of the tail. Now, all this agrees with what science tells us of the constitution of clay. WHAT IS A G OMET? 73 «It is a finely levigated silico - aluminous earth— formed by the disintegration of feldspathic or granite rocks."* The particles ground out of feldspar are finer than those derived from mica and hornblende, and we can readily understand how the great forces of gravity, act ing upon the dust of the comet's tail, might separate one from the other ; or how magnetic waves passing through the comet might arrange all the particles containing iron by themselves, and thus produce that marvelous separa tion of the constituents of the granite which we have found to exist ia the Drift clays. If the destroyed world possessed no sedimentary rocks, then the entire material of the comet would consist of granitic stones and dust such as constitutes clays. The stones are reduced to a small size by the constant attrition : " The stones of the ' till ' are not of the largest ; indeed, bowlders above four feet in diameter are comparatively seldom met with in the till." f And this theory is corroborated by the fact that the eminent German geologist, Dr. Hahn, has recently dis covered an entire series of organic remains in meteoric stones, of the class called chrondites, and which he iden tifies as belonging to classes of sponges, corals, and cri- noids. Dr. Weinland, another distinguished German, corroborates these discoveries ; and he has also found fragments in these stones very much like the youngest marine chalk in the Gulf of Mexico ; and he thinks he sees, under the microscope, traces of vegetable growth. Francis Birgham says : * " American Cyclopædia," article " Clay." t " The Great Ice Age," p. 10. /I ! 74 THE COJfÆT. "This entire ex-terrestrial fauna hitherto discoverer!, which already comprises about fifty different species, and which originates from different meteoric falls, even from some during the last century, conveys the impression that it doubtlessly once formed part of a simjle ex-terrestrial- celestial body with a unique creation, v/hich in by-gone ages seems to have been overtaken by a grand catastrophe, during which it was broken up into fragments."* When we remember that meteors are now generally believed to be the droppings* of comets, we come very near to proof of the supposition that comets are the debris of exploded planets ; for only on planets can wo suppose that life existed, for there was required, for the growth of these sponges, corals, and crinoids, rocks, earth, water, seas or lakes, atmosphere, sunshine, and a range of tem perature between the degree of cold where life is frozen up and the degree of heat in which it is burned up : hence, these meteors must be fragments of bodies pos sessing earth-like conditions. We know that the heavenly bodies are formed of the same materials as our globe. Dana says : "Meteoric stones exemplify the same chemical and crystallographic laws as the rocks of the earth, and have afforded no new element or principle of any kind." f It may be presumed, therefore, that the granite crust of the exploded globe from which some comet was cre ated was the source of • the finely triturated material which we know as clay. Cut the clays are of different colors—white, yellow, - red, and blue. * " Popular Science Monthly," November, ISS1, p. 86. f "Manual of Geology," p. 3. WHAT IS A COMET? 75 " The aluminous minerals contained in granite rocks are feldspar, mica, and hornblende. . . . Mica and horn blende generally contain considerable oxide of iron, while feldspar usually yields only a trace or none. Therefore clays which are derived from feldspar are light-colored or white, while those partially made up of decomposed mica or hornblende are dark, either bluish or red." * The tail of the comet seems to be perpetually in mo tion. It is, says one writer, " continually changing and fluctuating as vaporous masses of cloud-like structure might be conceived to do, and in some instances there has been a strong appearance even of an undulating move ment.."f The great comet of 1858, Donati's comet, which many now living will well remember, and which was of such size that when its head was near our horizon the extremity of the tail reached nearly to the zenith, illustrated this con tinual movement of the material of the tail ; that append age shrank and enlarged millions of miles in length. Mr. Lockyer believed that he saw in Coggia's comet the evidences of a whirling motion— "In which the regions of greatest brightness were caused by the different coils cutting, or appearing to cut, each other, and so in these parts leading to compression or condensation, and frequent collision of t/ie luminous particles." Olbers saw in a comet's tail— " A sudden flash and pulsation of light which vibrated for several seconds through it, and the tail appeared dur ing the continuance of the pulsations of light to be length ened by several degrees and then again contracted." * * "American Gyclopædia," article "Clay." t " Edinburgh Review," October, 1874, p. 208. t " Cosmos," vol. i, p. 143. I» f" I 70 THE COMET. Now, in this perpetual motion, this conflict, these great thrills of movement, we are to find the source of the clays which cover a large part of our globe to a depth of hun dreds of feet. Whei-e are those exposures of granite on the face of the earth from which ice or water could have ground them ? Granite, I repeat, comes to the surface only in limited areas. And it must be remembered that clay is the product exclusively of granite ground to pow der. The clays are composed exclusively of the products of disintegrated granite. They contain but a trace of lime or magnesia or organic matters, and these can be supposed to have been infiltrated into them after their arrival on the face of the earth.* Other kinds of rock, ground up, form sand. Moreover, we have seen that nei ther glaciers nor ice-sheets now produce such clays. We shall see, as we proceed, that the legends of man kind, in describing the comet that struck the earth, rep resent it as party-colored ; it is " speckled " in one legend ; spotted like a tiger in another ; sometimes it is a white boar in the heavens ; sometimes a blue snake ; sometimes it is red with the blood of the millions that are to perish. Doubtless these separate formations, ground out of the granite, from the mica, hornblende, or feldspar, respect ively, may, as I have said, under great laws, acted upon by magnetism or electricity, have arranged themselves in separate lines or sheets, in the tail of the comet, and hence we find that the clays of one region are of one color, while those of another are of a different hue. Again, we shall see that the legends represent the mon ster as "winding," undulating, writhing, twisting, fold over fold, precisely as the telescopes show us the comets do to-day. * " American Cyclopaedia," vol. iv, p. 650. WHAT IS A COMET! 77 The very fact that these waves of motion run through the tail of the comet, and that it is capable of expanding and contracting on an immense scale, is conclusive proof that it is composed of small, adjustable particles. The writer from whom I have already quoted, speaking of the extraordinary comet of 1843, says : "As the comet moves past the great luminary, it sweeps round its tail as a sword may be conceived to be held out at arm's-length, and then waved round the head, from one side to the opposite. But a sword with a blade one hun dred and fifty millions of miles long must be a somewhat awkward weapon to brandish round after this fashion. Its point would have to sweep through a curve stretching out more than six hundred millions of miles ; and, even with an allowance of two hours for the accomplishment of the movement, the flash of the weapon would be of such terrific velocity that it is not an easy task to con ceive how any blade of connected material substance could bear the strain of the stroke. Even with a blade that possessed the coherence and tenacity of iron or steel, the case would be one that it would be difficult for molecular cohesion to deal with. But that difficulty is almost infi nitely increased when it Ls a substance of much lower co hesive tenacity than either iron or steel that has to be subjected to the strain. "There would be, at least, some mitigation of this difficulty if it were lawful to assume that the substance which is subjected to this strain was not amenable to the laws of ponderable existence ; if there were room for the notion that comets and their tails, which have to be bran dished in such a stupendous fashion, were sky-spectres, immaterial phantoms, unreal visions of that negative shadow-kind which has been alluded to. This, however, unfortunately, is not a permissible alternative in the cir cumstances of the case. The great underlying and indis pensable fact that the comet comes rushing up toward the sun out of space, and then shoots round that great cen ter of attraction by the force of its own acquired and ever-increasing impetuosity ; the fact that it is obedient 78 THE COMET. WHAT IS A OOÍTET3 79 through this course to the law of elliptical, or, to speak more exactly, of conic-section, movement, permits of no doubt as to the condition of materiality. The comet is obviously drawn by the influence of the sun's mass, and is subservient to that all-pervading law of sympathetic gravitation that is the sustaining bond of the material universo. It is ponderable substance beyond all question, and held by that chain of physical connection which it was the glory of Newton to discover. If the comet were not a material and ponderable substance it would not gravitate round the sun, and it would not move with in creasing velocity as it neared the mighty mass until it had gathered the energy for its own escape in the enhanced and quickened momentum. In the first instance, the ready obedience to the attraction, and then the overshooting of the spot from which it is exerted, combine to establish the comet's right to stand ranked at least among the pon derable bodies of space." * And it is to the comet we must look for the source of a great part of those vast deposits of gravel which go to constitute the Drift. " They have been usually attributed to the action of waves ; but the mechanical work of the ocean is mostly confined to its shores and soundings, \\ here alone material exists in quantity within reach of the waves and currents.f . . . The eroding action is greatest for a short distance above the height of half-tide, and, except in violent storms, it is almost null below low-tide." \ But if any one will examine a sea-beach he will see, not a vast mass of pebbles perpetually rolling and grinding each other, but an expanse of sand. And this is to be expected ; for as soon as a part of the pebbles is, by the attrition of the waves, reduced to sand, the sand packs around the stones and arrests their further waste. To form such a mass of gravel as is found in the Drift we * "Edinburgh Review," October, 1874, p. 202. t Dana's "Text Book," p. 286. \ Ibid., p. 237. must conceive of some way whereby, as soon as the sand is formed, it is removed from the stones while the work of attrition goes on. This process we can conceive of in a comet, if the finer detritus is constantly carried back and arranged in the order of the size of its particles. To illustrate my meaning : let one place any hard sub stance, consisting of large fragments, in a mortar, and proceed to reduce it with a pestle to a fine powder. The work proceeds rapidly at first, until a portion of the ma terial is triturated ; you then find that the pulverized part has packed around and protected the larger frag ments, and the work is brought to a stand-still. You have to remove the finer material if you would crush the pieces that remain. The sea does not separate the sand from the gravel ; it places all together at elevations where the waves can not reach them : " Waves or shallow soundings have some transporting power ; and, as they always move toward the land, their action is landward. They thus beat back, little by little, any detritus in the waters, preventing that loss to conti nents or islands which would take place if it were carried out to sea." * The pebbles and gravel are soon driven by the waves up the shore, and beyond the reach of further wear ; f and " the rivers carry only silt to the ocean.'1'' \ The brooks and rivers produce much more gravel than the sea-shore : " The detritus brought down by rivers is vastly greater in quantity than the stones, sand, or clay produced by the wear of the coasts." * * Daua'a " Text Book," p. 2S8. f Ibid., p. 291. \ Ibid., p. 302. * Ibid., p. 290. J 80 THE COMET. But it would be absurd to suppose that the beds of rivers could have furnished the immeasurable volumes of gravel found over a great part of the world in the drift- deposits. And the drift-gravel is différent from the gravel of the sea or rivers. Geikie says, speaking of the " till " : " There is something very peculiar about the shape of the stones. They are neither round and oval, like the pebbles in river-gravel, or the shingle of the sea-shore, nor are they sharply angular like newly-fallen dibris at the base of a cliff, although they more closely resemble the latter than the former. They are, indeed, angular in shape, but the sharp corners and edges have invariably been smootlied aica