Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel. Ignatius Donnelly

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СКАЧАТЬ smashed them, pounding, beating, pulverizing them, and turning one layer of mighty rock over upon another, and scattering them in the wildest confusion. We can not conceive of anything terrestrial 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, polished, and striated surface, or else a highly confused, broken, and smashed appearance."[2]

      Gratacap says:

      "'Crushed ledges' designate those plicated, overthrown, or curved exposures where parallel rocks, as talcose schist, usually vertical, are bent and fractured, as if by 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."[3]

      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

      [1. "Geological Survey of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota," p. 147.

      2. "The Great Ice Age," p. 73.

      3. "Popular Science Monthly," January, 1878, p. 326.]

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      generally unstratified, which has often been forcibly INDENTED into the bed beneath it, sometimes exhibiting slickensides 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'."[1]

      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 deposited 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

      [1. "Journal of the Geological Society and Geological Magazine."]

      {p. 54}

      large portions have been carried away. … They form but a small fraction of the drift-deposits."[1]

      In the accompanying cut we have one of these sand (s) and clay (c) patches, embosomed in the "till," t¹ and t².

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      STRATIFIED BEDS IN TILL, LEITHEN WATER, PEEBLESSHIRE, SCOTLAND.

      And again, the same writer says:

      "The intercalated beds are remarkable for having yielded an imperfect skull of the great extinct ox (Bos primigenius), and remains of the Irish elk or deer, and the horse, together with layers of peaty matter."[2]

      Several of our foremost scientists see in the phenomena of the Drift the evidences of a cataclysm of some sort.

      Sir John Lubbock[3] gives the following representation of a section of the Drift at Joinville, France, containing

      ###

      SECTION AT JOINVILLE.

      [1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 149.

      2. Ibid., p. 149.

      3. "Prehistoric Times," p. 370.]

      {p. 55}

      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 such 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. We can not, 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 Deus ex machinâ 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. C. d'Orbigny 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.[1]

      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 Lubbock says:

      "Our second difficulty still remains--namely, the height at which the upper-level gravels stand above the

      [1. "Mém. Soc. d'Em. l'Abbeville," 1861, p. 475.]

      {p. 56}

      present water-line. We can not wonder that these beds have generally been attributed to violent cataclysms."[1]

      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 palæolithic man, man of the rude and unpolished flint implements, the contemporary of the great mammalia, the mammoth, the hippopotamus, and the rhinoceros, was also stamped out, and the cave-deposits of Europe show that there was a long interval before be 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.[2]

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