Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel. Ignatius Donnelly

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 an ancient forest, "showing stumps of trees standing erect with their roots penetrating an ancient soil."[4] In this soil occur the remains of many extinct species of animals, together with those of others still living; among these may be mentioned the hippopotamus, three species of elephant, the mammoths, rhinoceros, bear, horse, Irish elk, etc.

      In Ireland remains of trees have been found in sand-beds below the till.[5]

      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."[6] Mr. C. Whittlesey refers to decayed

      [1. "Smithsonian Contributions," vol. xv.

      2. "Geology of Illinois," vol. iv, p. 179.

      3. "The Great Ice Age," p. 387.

      4. Ibid., p. 340. "Dublin Quarterly Journal of Science," vol. vi, p. 249.

      5. "Acadian Geology," p. 63.]

      {p. 49}

      leaves and remains of the elephant and mastodon found below and in the drift in America.[1]

      "The remains of the mastodon, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and elephant are found in the pre-glacial beds of Italy."[2]

      These animals were slaughtered outright, and so suddenly that few escaped:

      Admiral Wrangel tells us that the remains of elephants, 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."[3]

      We have seen that the Drift itself has all the appearance of having been the product of some sudden catastrophe:

      "Stones and bowlders alike are scattered higgledy-piggledy, pell-mell, through the clay, so as to give it a highly 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-antlers, and fragments of wood have from time to time been discovered. They almost invariably afford marks of having been subjected to the same action as the stones and bowlders by which they are surrounded."[4]

      Another says:

      "Logs and fragments of wood are often got at great depths in the buried gorges."[5]

      [1. "Smithsonian Contributions," vol. xv.

      2. "The Great Ice Age," p. 492.

      3. Agassiz, "Geological Sketches," p. 209.

      4. "The Great Ice Age," p. 150.

      5. "Illustrations of Surface Geology," "Smithsonian Contributions."]

      {p. 50}

      Mr. Geikie says:

      "Below a deposit of till, at Woodhill Quarry, near Kilmaurs, in Ayrshire (Scotland), the remains of mammoths and reindeer and certain marine shells have several times been detected during the quarrying operations. … Two elephant-tasks were got at a depth of seventeen and a half feet from the surface. … The mammalian remains, obtained 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."[1]

      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."[2]

      Professor Winchell says

      "Buried tree-trunks are often exhumed from the glacial 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."[3]

      These citations place it beyond question that the Drift came suddenly upon the world, slaughtering the animals,

      [1. The Great Ice Age," p. 149.

      2. Ibid., p. 150.

      3. Winchell, "Sketches of Creation," p. 259.]

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      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 extraordinary 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 apalling 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 northern lands; they are great canals--hewn, as it were, in the rock--with high walls penetrating from the sea far into the interior of the land. They are found in Great Britain, 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."[1] 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

      [1. "Geological Survey of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota," p. 142.]

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      radiating southwestwardly from Lake Superior, as if that was the seat of the disturbance which caused them."[1]

      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 СКАЧАТЬ