LET ME consider, briefly, those objections to my theory which have probably presented themsevles {sic} to some of my readers.
First, it may be said:
"We don't understand you. You argue that there could not have been such an ice-age as the glacialists affirm, and yet you speak of a period of cold and ice and snow."
True: 'but there is a great difference between such a climate as that of Scotland, damp and cold, snowy and blowy, and a continental ice-sheet, a mile or two thick, reaching from John o' Groat's House to the Mediterranean. We can see that the oranges of Spain can grow to-day within a comparatively short distance of Edinburgh; but we can not realize that any tropical or semitropical plant could have survived in Africa when a precipice of ice, five thousand feet high, frowned on the coast of Italy; or that any form of life could have survived on earth when the equator in South America was covered with a continental ice-sheet a mile in thickness, or even ten feet in thickness. We can conceive of a glacial age of snow-storms, rains, hail, and wind--a terribly trying and disagreeable climate for man and beast--but we can not believe that the whole world was once in the condition that the dead waste of ice-covered Greenland is in now.
{p. 390}
Secondly, it may be said--
"The whole world is now agreed that ice produced the Drift; what right, then, has any one man to set up a different theory against the opinions of mankind? "
One man, Mohammed said, with God on his side, is a majority; and one man, with the truth on his side, must become a majority.
All recognized truths once rested, solitary and alone, in some one brain.
Truth is born an acorn, not an oak.
The Rev. Sydney Smith once said that there was a kind of men into whom you could not introduce a new idea without a surgical operation. He might have added that, when you had once forced an idea into the head of such a man, you could not deliver him of it without instruments.
The conservatism of unthinkingness is one of the potential forces of the world. It lies athwart the progress of mankind like a colossal mountain-chain, chilling the atmosphere on both sides of it for a thousand miles. The Hannibal who would reach the eternal city of Truth on the other side of these Alps must fight his way over ice and hew his way through rocks.
The world was once agreed that the Drift was due to the Deluge. It abandoned this theory, and then became equally certain that it came from icebergs. This theory was, in turn, given up, and mankind were then positive that glaciers caused the Drift. But the glaciers were found to be inadequate for the emergency; and so the continents were lifted up fifteen hundred feet, and the ice-sheets were introduced. And now we wait to hear that the immense ice-masses of the Himalayas have forsaken their elevations and are moving bodily over the plains of India, grinding up the rocks into clay and gravel
{p. 391}
as they go, before we accept a theory which declares that they once marched over the land in this fashion from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn, from Spitzbergen to Spain.
The universality of an error proves nothing, except that the error is universal. The voice of the people is only the voice of God in the last analysis. We can safely appeal from Caiaphas and Pilate to Time.
But, says another:
"We find deep grooves or striations under the glaciers of to-day; therefore the glaciers caused the grooves."
But we find striations on level plains far remote from mountains, where the glaciers could not have been; therefore the glaciers did not cause the striations. "A short horse is soon curried." Superposition is not paternity. A porcelain nest-egg found under a hen is no proof that the hen laid it.
But, says another
"The idea of a comet encountering the earth, and covering it with débris, is so stupendous, so out of the usual course of nature, I refuse to accept it."
Ah, my friend, you forget that those Drift deposits, hundreds of feet in thickness, are there. They are out of the usual course of nature. It is admitted that they came suddenly from some source. If you reject my theory, you do not get clear of the phenomena. The facts are a good deal more stupendous than the theory. Go out and look at the first Drift deposit; dig into it a hundred feet or more; follow it for a few hundred miles or more; then come back, and scratch your head, and tell me where it came from! Calculate how many cart-loads there are of it, then multiply this by the area of your own continent, and multiply that again by the area of two or three more continents, and then again tell me where it came from!
{p. 392}
Set aside my theory as absurd, and how much nearer are you to solving the problem? If neither waves, nor icebergs, nor glaciers, nor ice-sheets, nor comets, produced this world-cloak of débris, where did it come from?
Remember the essential, the incontrovertible elements of the problem:
1. Great heat.
2. A sudden catastrophe.
3. Great evaporation of the seas and waters.
4. Great clouds.
5. An age of floods and snows and ice and torrents.
6. The human legends.
Find a theory that explains and embraces all these elements, and then, and not until then, throw mine aside.
Another will say:
"But in one place you give us legends about an age of dreadful and long-continued heat, as in the Arabian tale, where no rain is said to have fallen for seven years; and in another place you tell us of a period of constant rains and snows and cold. Are not these statements incompatible?"
Not at all. This is a big globe we live on: the tropics are warmer than the poles. Suppose a tremendous heat to be added to our natural temperature; it would necessarily make it hotter on the equator than at the poles, although it would be warm everywhere. There can be no clouds without condensation, no condensation without some degree of cooling. Where would the air cool first? Naturally at the points most remote from the equator, the poles. Hence, while the sun was still blazing in the uncovered heavens of the greater part of the earth, small caps of cloud would form at the north and south poles, and shed their moisture in gentle rain. As the heat brought to the earth by the comet was accidental and
{p. 393}
adventitious, there would be a natural tendency to return to the pre-comet condition. The extraordinary evaporation would of itself have produced refrigeration. Hence the cloud-caps would grow and advance steadily toward the equator, casting down continually increasing volumes of rain. Snow would begin to form near the poles, and it too would advance. We would finally have, down to say the thirty-fifth degree of north and south latitude, vast belts of rain and snow, while the equator would still be blazing with the tropical heat which would hold the condensation back. Here, then, we would have precisely the condition of things described in the "Younger Edda" of the Northmen:
"Then said Jafnhar: 'All that part of Ginungagap' (the Atlantic) 'that turns toward the north was filled with thick, heavy ice and rime,' (snow,) 'and everywhere within were drizzling gusts and rain. But the south part of Ginungagap was lighted up by the glowing sparks that flew out of Muspelheim' (Africa?). Added Thride: 'As cold and all things grim proceeded from Niflheim, so that which bordered on Muspelheim was hot and bright, and Ginungagap' (the Atlantic near Africa?) 'was as warm and mild as windless air.'"
Another may say:
"But how does all this agree with your theory that the progenitors of the stock from which the white, the yellow, and the brown races were differentiated, were saved in one or two caverns in one place? How did they get to Africa, Asia, and America?"
In the first place, it is no essential part of my case that man survived in one place or a dozen places; it can not, in either event, affect the question of the origin of the Drift. It is simply an opinion of my own, open to modification upon fuller information. If, for instance, men dwelt in Asia at that time, and no Drift deposits
{p. 394}
fell upon Asia, races may have survived there; the negro may have dwelt in India at that time; some of the strange Hill-tribes of China and India may have had no connection with Lif and Lifthraser.
But if we will suppose that the scene of man's survival was in that Atlantic island, Atlantis, then this would follow:
The remnant of mankind, whether they were a single couple, like Lif and Lifthraser; or a group of men and women, like Job and his companions; or a numerous party, like that referred to in the Navajo and Aztec legends, in any event, they would not and could not stay long in the cave. The distribution of the Drift shows that it fell within twelve hours; but there were probably several days thereafter during which the face of the earth was swept by horrible cyclones, born of the dreadful heat. As soon, however, as they could safely do so, the remnant of the people must have left the cave; the limited nature of their food-supplies would probably drive them out. Once outside, their condition was pitiable indeed. First, they encountered the great heat; the cooling of the atmosphere had not yet begun; water was a pressing want. Hence we read in the legends of Mimer's well, where Odin pawned his eye for a drink. And we are told, in an American legend, of a party who traveled far to find the life-giving well, and found the possessor sitting over it to hide it. It was during this period that the legends originated which refer to the capture of the cows and their recovery by demi-gods, Hercules or Rama.
Then the race began to wander. The world was a place of stones. Hunger drove them on. Then came the clouds, the rains, the floods, the snows, the darkness; and still the people wandered. The receded ocean laid bare the great ridges, if they had sunk in the catastrophe,
{p. 395}
and the race gradually spread to Europe, Africa, and America.
"But," says one, "how long did all this take?
Who shall say? It may have been days, weeks, months, years, centuries. The Toltec legends say that their ancestors wandered for more than a hundred years in the darkness.
The torrent-torn face of the earth; the vast rearrangement of the Drift materials by rivers, compared with which our own rivers are rills; the vast continental regions which were evidently flooded, all testify to an extraordinary amount of moisture first raised up from the seas and then cast down on the lands. Given heat enough to raise this mass, given the cold caused by its evaporation, given the time necessary for the great battle between this heat and this condensation, given the time to restore this body of water to the ocean, not once but many times,--for, along the southern border of the floods, where Muspelheim. and Niflheim met, the heat must have sucked up the water as fast almost as it fell, to fall again, and again to be lifted up, until the heat-area was driven back and water fell, at last, everywhere on the earth's face, and the extraordinary evaporation ceased,--this was a gigantic, long-continued battle.
But it may be asked:
"Suppose further study should disclose the fact that the Drift is found in Siberia and the rest of Asia, and over all the world, what then? "
It will not disprove my theory. It will simply indicate that the débris did not, as I have supposed, strike the earth instantaneously, but that it continued to fall during twenty-four hours. If the comet was split into fragments, if there was the "Midgard-Serpent" as well as the
{p. 396}
"Fenris Wolf" and "the dog Garm," they need not necessarily have reached the earth at the same time.
Another says:
"You supposed in your book, 'Atlantis,' that the Glacial Age might have been caused by the ridges radiating from Atlantis shutting off the Gulf Stream and preventing the heated waters of the tropics from reaching the northern shores of the world."
True; and I have no doubt that these ridges did play an important part in producing climatic changes, subsequent to the Drift Age, by their presence or absence, their elevation or depression; but on fuller investigation I find that they are inadequate to account for the colossal phenomena of the Drift itself--the presence of the clay and gravel, the great heat and the tremendous downfall of water.
It may be asked,
"How does your theory account for the removal of great blocks, weighing many tons, for hundreds of miles from their original site?
The answer is plain. We know the power of the ordinary hurricanes of the earth. "The largest trees are uprooted, or have their trunks snapped in two; and few if any of the most massive buildings stand uninjured."[1] If we will remember the excessive heat and the electrical derangements that must have accompanied the Drift Age, we can realize the tremendous winds spoken of in many of the legends. We have but to multiply the hurricane of the West Indies, or the cyclone of the Mississippi Valley, a hundred or a thousand fold, and we shall have power enough to move all the blocks found scattered over the face of the Drift deposits or mixed with its material.
{p. 397}
Another asks:
"How do you account for the fact that this Drift material does not resemble the usual aërolites, which are commonly composed of iron, and unlike the stones of the earth?"
I nave shown that aërolites have fallen that did not contain any iron, and that could not be distinguished from the material native to the earth. And it must be remembered that, while the shining meteoroids that blaze in periodical showers from radiant points in the sky are associated with comets, and are probably lost fragments of comet-tails, these meteoroids do not reach the earth, but are always burned out, far up in our atmosphere, by the friction produced by their motion. The iron aërolite is of different origin. It may be a product of space itself, a condensation of metallic gases. The fact that it reaches the earth without being consumed would seem to indicate that it belongs at a lower level than the meteoric showers, and has, consequently, a less distance to fall and waste.
And these views are confirmed by a recent writer,[1] who, after showing that the meteoroids, or shooting-stars, are very different from meteorites or aërolites, and seldom or never reach the earth, proceeds to account for the former. He says:
"Many theories have been advanced in the past to account for these strange bodies, but the evidence now accumulated proves beyond reasonable doubt that they are near relatives, and probably the débris of comets.
"Tempel's comet is now known to be traveling in the same orbit as the November meteors, and is near the head of the train, and it appears, in like manner, that the second comet of 1862 (Swift's comet) is traveling in the orbit of the August meteors. And the first comet of 1881 seems to be similarly connected with the April meteors. . . .
{p. 398}
"Although few scientific men now question a relationship between comets and the ordinary meteors, there are those, and among them some of our ablest men, who think that the large meteors, or bolides, and aërolites, may be different astronomically, and perhaps physically, from the ordinary shooting-stars, and in the past some contended that they originated in our atmosphere others that they were ejected from terrestrial volcanoes. . . And at the present time the known facts, and all scientific thought, seem to point to the conclusion that the difference between them and ordinary shooting-stars is analogous to that between rain and mist, and, in addition to the reasons already given for connecting them with comets, may be mentioned the fact that meteorites bring with them carbonic acid, which is known to form so prominent a part of comets' tails; and if fragments of meteoric iron or stone be heated moderately in a vacuum, they yield up gases consisting of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and the spectrum of these gases corresponds to the spectrum of a cornet's coma and tail.
"By studying their microscopical structure, Mr. Sorby has been able to determine that the material was at one time certainly in a state of fusion; and that the most remote condition of which we have positive evidence was that of small, detached, melted globules, the formation of which can not be explained in a satisfactory manner, except by supposing that their constituents were originally in the state of vapor, as they now exist in the atmosphere of the sun; and, on the temperature becoming lower, condensed into these "ultimate cosmical particles." These afterward collected into larger masses, which have been variously changed by subsequent metamorphic action, and broken up by repeated mutual impact, and often again collected together and solidified. The meteoric irons are probably those portions of the metallic constituents which were separated from the rest by fusion when the metamorphism was carried to that extreme point.'"
But if it be true, as is conceded, that all the planets and comets of the solar system were out-throwings from the sun itself, then all must be as much of one quality of
{p. 399}
material as half a dozen suits of clothes made from the same bolt of cloth. And hence our-brother-the-comet must be made of just such matter as our earth is made of. And hence, if a comet did strike the earth and deposited its ground-up and triturated material upon the earth's surface, we should find nothing different in that material from earth-substance of the same kind.
But, says another:
"If the Drift fell from a comet, why would not this clay-dust and these pebbles have been consumed before reaching the earth by the friction of our atmosphere just as we have seen the meteoroids consumed; or, if not entirely used up, why would these pebbles not show a fused surface, like the iron aërolites? "
Here is the difference: a meteorite, a small or large stone, is detached, isolated, lone-wandering, lost in space; it comes within the tremendous attractive power of our globe; it has no parental attraction to restrain it; and it rushes headlong with lightning-like rapidity toward the earth, burning itself away as it falls.
But suppose two heavenly bodies, each with its own center of attraction, each holding its own scattered materials in place by its own force, to meet each other; then there is no more probability of the stones and dust of the comet flying to the earth, than there is of the stones and dust of the earth flying to the comet. And the attractive power of the comet, great enough to bold its gigantic mass in place through the long reaches of the fields of space, and even close up to the burning eye of the awful sun itself, holds its dust and pebbles and bowlders together until the very moment of impact with the earth. In short, they, the dust and stones, do not continue to follow the comet, because the earth has got in their way and arrested them. It was this terrific force of the
{p. 400}
comet's attraction, represented in a fearful rate of motion, that tore and pounded and scratched and furrowed our poor earth's face, as shown in the crushed and striated rocks under the Drift. They would have gone clean through the earth to follow the comet, if it had been possible.
If we can suppose the actual bulk of the comet to have greatly exceeded the bulk of the earth, then the superior attraction of the comet may have shocked the earth out of position. It has already been suggested that the inclination of the axis of the earth may have been changed at the time of the Drift; and the Esquimaux have a legend that the earth was, at that time, actually shaken out of its position. But upon this question I express no opinion.
But another may say:
"Your theory is impossible; these dense masses of clay and gravel could not have fallen from a comet, because the tails of comets are composed of material so attenuated that sometimes the stars are seen through them."
Granted: but remember that the clay did not come to the earth as clay, but as a finely comminuted powder or dust; it packed into clay after having been mixed with water. The particles of this dust must have been widely separated while in the comet's tail; if they had not been, instead of a deposit of a few hundred feet, we should have had one of hundreds of miles in thickness. We have seen, (page 94, ante,) that the tail of one comet was thirteen million miles broad; if the particles of dust composing that tail had been as minute as those of clay-dust, and if they had been separated from each other by many feet in distance, they would still have left a deposit on the face of any object passing through them much greater than the Drift. To illustrate my meaning: you ride on a summer day a hundred miles in a railroad-car, seated by an open
{p. 401}
window. There is no dust perceptible, at least not enough to obscure the landscape; yet at the end of the journey you find yourself covered with a very evident coating of dust. Now, suppose that, instead of traveling one hundred miles, your ride had been prolonged a million miles, or thirteen million miles; and, instead of the atmosphere being perfectly clear, you had moved through a cloud of dust, not dense enough to intercept the light of the stars, and yet dense enough to reflect the light of the sun, even as a smoke-wreath reflects it, and you can readily see that, long before you reached the end of your journey, you would be buried alive under hundreds of feet of dust. To creatures like ourselves, measuring our stature by feet and inches, a Drift-deposit three hundred feet thick is an immense affair, even as a deposit a foot thick would be to an ant; but, measured on an astronomical scale, with the foot-rule of the heavens, and the Drift is no more than a thin coating of dust, such as accumulates on a traveler's coat. Even estimating it upon the scale of our planet, it is a mere wrapping of tissue-paper thickness. In short, it must be remembered that we are an infinitely insignificant breed of little creatures, to whom a cosmical dust-shower is a cataclysm.
And that which is true of the clay-dust is true of the gravel. At a million miles' distance it, too, is dust; it runs in lines or streaks, widely separated; and the light shines between its particles as it does through the leaves of the trees
"And glimmering through the groaning trees
Kirk Alloway seems in a blaze;
Through every bore the beams are glancing."
But another says:
"Why do you think the finer parts of the material of the comet are carried farthest back from the head?"
{p. 402}
Because the attractive power lodged in the nucleus acts with most force on the largest masses; even as the rock is not so likely to leave the earth in a wind-storm as the dust; and in the flight of the comet through space, at the rate of three hundred and sixty-six miles per second, its lighter substances would naturally trail farthest behind it; for--
"The thing that's heavy in itself
Upon enforcement flies with greatest speed."
And it would seem as if in time this trailing material of the comet falls so far behind that it loses its grip, and is lost; hence the showers of meteoroids.
Another says:
"I can not accept your theory as to the glacial clays they were certainly deposited in water, formed like silt, washed down from the adjacent continents."
I answer they were not, because:--
1. If laid down in water, they would be stratified; but they are not.
2. If laid down in water, they would be full of the fossils of the water, fresh-water shells, sea-shells, bones of fish, reptiles, whales, seals, etc.; but they are non-fossiliferous.
3. If laid down in water, they would not be made exclusively from granite. Where are the continents to be found which are composed of granite and nothing but granite?
4. Where were the continents, of any kind, from which these washings came? They must have reached from pole to pole, and filled the whole Atlantic Ocean. And how could the washings of rivers have made this uniform sheet, reaching over the whole length and half the breadth of this continent?
5. If these clays were made from land-washings, how comes it that in some places they are red, in others blue, in others yellow? In Western Minnesota you penetrate
{p. 403}
through twenty feet of yellow clay until you reach a thin layer of gravel, about an inch thick, and then pass at once, without any gradual transition, into a bed of blue clay fifty feet thick; and under this, again, you reach gravel. What separated these various deposits? The glacialists answer us that the yellow clay was deposited in fresh water, and the blue clay in salt water, and hence the difference in the color. But how did the water change instantly from salt to fresh? Why was there no interval of brackish water, during which the blue and yellow clays would have gradually shaded into each other? The transition from the yellow clay to the blue is as immediate and marked as if you were to lay a piece of yellow cloth across a piece of blue cloth. You can not take the salt out of a vast ocean, big enough to cover half a continent, in a day, a month, a year, or a century. And where were the bowl-like ridges of land that inclosed the continent, and kept out the salt water during the ages that elapsed while the yellow clay was being laid down in fresh water? And, above all, why are no such clays, blue, yellow, or red, now being formed anywhere on earth, under sheet-ice, glaciers, icebergs, or anything else? And how about the people who built cisterns, and used coins and iron implements before this silt was accumulated in the seas, a million years ago, for it must have taken that long to create these vast deposits if they were deposited as silt in the bottom of seas and lakes.
It may be asked:
"What relation, in order of time, do you suppose the Drift Age to hold to the Deluge of Noah and Deucalion? "
The latter was infinitely later. The geologists, as I have shown, suppose the Drift to have come upon the earth--basing their calculations upon the recession of the
{p. 404}
Falls of Niagara--about thirty thousand years ago. We have seen that this would nearly accord with the time given in Job, when he speaks of the position of certain constellations. The Deluge of Noah probably occurred somewhere from eight to eleven thousand years ago. Hence, about twenty thousand years probably intervened between the Drift and the Deluge. These were the "myriads of years" referred to by Plato, during which mankind dwelt on the great plain of Atlantis.
And this order of events agrees with all the legends.
In the Bible a long interval elapsed between the fall of man, or his expulsion from paradise, and the Deluge of Noah; and during this period mankind rose to civilization; became workers in the metals, musicians, and the builders of cities.
In the Egyptian history, as preserved by Plato, the Deluge of Deucalion, which many things prove to have been identical with the Deluge of Noah, was the last of a series of great catastrophes.
In the Celtic legends the great Deluge of Ogyges preceded the last deluge.
In the American legends, mankind have been many times destroyed, and as often renewed.
But it may be asked:
"Are you right in supposing that man first rose to civilization in a great Atlantic island?
We can conceive, as I have shown, mankind at some central point, like the Atlantic island, building up anew, after the Drift Age, the shattered fragments of pre-glacial civilization, and hence becoming to the post-glacial ancient world the center and apparent fountain of all cultivation. But in view of the curious discoveries made, as I have shown, in the glacial clays of the United
{p. 405}
States, further investigations may prove that it was on the North American Continent civilization was first born, and that it was thence moved eastward over the bridge-like ridges to Atlantis.
And it is, in this connection, remarkable that the Bible tells us (Genesis, chap. ii, v. 8):
"And the Lord God planted a garden eastward, in Eden; and there he put the man that he had formed."
He had first (v. 7) "formed man of the dust of the ground," and then he moves him eastward to Eden, to the garden.
And, as I have shown, when the fall of man came, when the Drift destroyed the lovely Tertiary conditions, man was again moved eastward; he was driven out of Eden, and the cherubims guarded the eastern extremity of the garden, to prevent man's return from (we will say) the shores of Atlantis. In other words, the present habitat of men is, as I have shown, according to the Bible, east of their former dwelling-place.
In the age of man's declension he moved eastward. In the age of his redemption he moves westward.
Hence, if the Bible is to be relied on, before man reached the garden of Eden, he had been created in some region west of the garden, to wit, in America; and here he may have first developed the civilization of which we find traces in Illinois, showing a metal-working race sufficiently advanced to have an alphabet and a currency.
But in all this we do not touch upon the question of where man was first formed by God.
The original birthplace of the human race who shall tell? It was possibly in some region now under the ocean, as Professor Winchell has suggested; there he was evolved during the mild, equable, gentle, plentiful,
406 CONCLUSIONS.
garden-age of the Tertiary; in the midst of the most favorable conditions for increasing the vigor of life and expanding it into new forms. It showed its influence by developing mammalian life in one direction into the monstrous forms of the mammoth and the mastodon, the climax of animal growth; and in the other direction into the more marvelous expansion of mentality found in man.
There are two things necessary to a comprehension of that which lies around us--development and design, evolution and purpose; God's way and God's intent. Neither alone will solve the problem. These are the two limbs of the right angle which meet at the first life-cell found on earth, and lead out until we find man at one extremity and God at the other.
Why should the religious world shrink from the theory of evolution? To know the path by which God has advanced is not to disparage God.
Could all this orderly nature have grown up out of chance, out of the accidental concatenation of atoms? As Bacon said:
"I would rather believe all the fables in the Talmud and the Koran than that this universal frame is without a mind!"
Wonderful thought! A flash of light through the darkness.
And what greater guarantee of the future can we have than evolution? If God has led life from the rudest beginnings, whose fossils are engraved, (blurred and obscured,) on the many pages of the vast geological volume, up to this intellectual, charitable, merciful, powerful world of to-day, who can doubt that the same hand will guide our posterity to even higher levels of development?
{p. 407}
If our thread of life has expanded from Cain to Christ, from the man who murders to him who submits to murder for the love of man, who can doubt that the Cain-like in the race will gradually pass away and the Christ-like dominate the planet?
Religion and science, nature and spirit, knowledge of God's works and reverence for God, are brethren, who should stand together with twined arms, singing perpetual praises to that vast atmosphere, ocean, universe of spirituality, out of which matter has been born, of which matter is but a condensation; that illimitable, incomprehensible, awe-full Something, before the conception of which men should go down upon the very knees of their hearts in adoration.
{p. 408}