Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel. Ignatius Donnelly

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      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 catastrophe. 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 palæolithic implements by some of the most eminent cultivators of prehistoric science."[1]

      The sand and gravel of Sahara are underlaid by a deposit of clay.

      Bayard Taylor describes in the center of Africa

      [1. "The Palæolithic Implements of the Valley of the Delaware," Cambridge, 1881.]

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      great plains of coarse gravel, dotted with gray granite bowlders.[1]

      In the United States Professor Winchell shows that the drift-deposits extend to the Gulf of Mexico. At Jackson, in Southern Alabama, be found deposits of pebbles one hundred feet in thickness.[2]

      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 origin.

      There is no escaping these conclusions. Agassiz himself says, describing the Glacial age:

      "All the springs were dried up; the rivers ceased to flow. To the movements of a numerous and animated creation succeeded the silence of death."

      If the verdure was covered with ice a mile in thickness, 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 himself, without animal or vegetable food, must have disappeared for ever.

      A writer, describing Greenland wrapped in such an ice-sheet, says

      [1. "Travels in Africa," p. 188.

      2. "Sketches of Creation," pp. 222, 223.]

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      "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 before it the pitiless, blinding snow."[1]

      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 deposits 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

      [1. "Popular Science Monthly," April, 1874, p. 646.]

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      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.

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      CHAPTER VII.

      THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE.

      IN the first place, the Drift fell upon a fair and lovely world, a world far better adapted to give happiness to its inhabitants than this storm-tossed planet on which we now live, with its endless battle between heat and cold, between sun and ice.

      The pre-glacial world was a garden, a paradise; not excessively warm at the equator, and yet with so mild and equable a climate that the plants we now call tropical flourished within the present Arctic Circle. If some future daring navigator reaches the north pole and finds solid land there, he will probably discover in 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 absence of man--the country was more interesting and picturesque 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 sloped gently seaward from the highlands must have been

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      covered with a sub-tropical forest of-giant trees and tangled 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 describe."[1]

      Another says:

      "At the close of the Tertiary age, which ends the long series of geological epochs previous to the Quaternary, 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."[2]

      Dr. Dawson says:

      "This delightful climate was not confined to the present СКАЧАТЬ