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The Drift Chapter 2, THE ORIGIN OF THE DRIFT NOT KNOWN.

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART I

The Drift

CHAPTER II

THE ORIGIN OF THE DRIFT NOT 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."[1]

Louis Figuier says, [2]after considering one of the proposed 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 mysterious episode in the history of our globe. . . . Nevertheless, 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." [3]

A recent scientific writer, after summing up all the facts and all the arguments, makes this confession:

[1. "American Cyclopia," vol. vi, p. 112.

2. "The World before the Deluge," pp. 435, 463.

3. "The Great Ice Age," p. 370.]

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." [1]

The reader will therefore understand that, in advancing into this argument, he is not invading a realm where Science has already set up her walls and bounds and landmarks; 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 attempted 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.

IV. The action of a continental ice-sheet.

We will consider these several theories in their order.

[1. "Popular Science Monthly," July, 1876, p. 290.]

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Conclusions ch. 7, THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART IV

Conclusions

CHAPTER VII

THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES

IF the reader is satisfied, from my reasoning and the facts I have adduced, that the so-called Glacial Age really represents a collision of the earth with one of these wandering luminaries of space, the question can not but occur to him, Was this the first and only occasion, during all the thousands of millions of years that our planet has been revolving on its axis and circling around the sun, that such a catastrophe has occurred?

The answer must be in the negative.

We find that all through the rocky record of our globe the same phenomena which we have learned to recognize as peculiar to the Drift Age are, at distant intervals, repeated.

The long ages of the Palzoic Time passed with few or no disturbances. The movements of the earth's crust oscillated at a rate not to exceed one foot in a century. [1]It was an age of peace. Then came a tremendous convulsion. It has been styled by the geologists "the epoch of the Appalachian revolution."

"Strata were upraised and flexed into great (olds, some of the folds a score or more of miles in span. Deep fissures were opened in the earth's crust," like the fiords or great rock-cracks which accompanied the Diluvial or Drift Age.

[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 150.]

"Rocks were consolidated; and over some parts sandstones and shales were crystallized into gneiss, mica-schist, and other related rocks, and limestone into architectural and statuary marble. Bituminous coal was turned into anthracite in Pennsylvania." [1]

I copy from the same work (p. 153) the following cut, showing the extent to which the rocks were crushed out of shape:



SECTION ON THE SCHUYLKILL, PENNSYLVANIA.

P, Pottsville on the coal-measures; 2, Calciferous formation; 3, Trenton; 4, Hudson River; 5, Oneida and Niagara; 7, Lower Helderberg; 8, 10, 11, Devonian; 12, 13, Subcarboniferous; 14, Carboniferous, or coal-measures.

These tremendous changes were caused by a pressure of some kind which came from the east, from where the Atlantic Ocean now rolls.

"It was due to a lateral pressure, the folding having taken place just as it might in paper or cloth under a lateral or pushing movement."[2]

"It was accompanied by great heat which melted and consolidated the rocks, changed their condition, drove the volatile gases out of the bituminous coal and changed it into anthracite, in some places altered it to graphite, as if it had been passed through a furnace."[3]

It also made an almost universal slaughter of all forms of life:

"The extermination of life which took place at this time was one of the most extensive in all geological history; . . . no fossils of the Carboniferous formation occur in later rocks." [4]

[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 152.

2. Ibid., p. 155.

3. Ibid., p. 155.

4. Ibid., p. 157.]

it was accompanied or followed, as in the Drift Age, by tremendous floods of water; the evaporated seas returned to the earth in wasting storms:

"The waters commenced the work of denudation, which has been continued to the present time."[1]

Is not all this a striking confirmation of my theory?

Here we find that, long before the age of man, a fearful catastrophe happened to the earth. Its rocks were melted--not merely decomposed, as in the Drift Age,--but actually melted and metamorphosed; the heat, as in the Drift Age, sucked up the waters of the seas, to cast them down again in great floods; it wiped out nearly all the life of the planet, even as the Drift Age exterminated the great mammals; whatever drift then fell probably melted with the burning rocks.

Here are phenomena which no ice-sheet, though it were a thousand miles thick, can explain; here is heat, not ice; combustion, not cold; and yet all these phenomena are but the results which we have seen would naturally follow the contact of the earth with a comet.

But while, in this particular case, the size of the comet, or its more fiery nature, melted the surface of the globe, and changed the very texture of the solid rocks, we find in the geological record the evidences of repeated visitations when Drift was thrown upon the earth in great quantities; but the heat, as in the last Drift Age, was not great enough to consume all things.

In the Cambrian formation, conglomerates are found, combinations of stones and hardened clay, very much like the true "till."

In the Lower Silurian of the south of Scotland, large blocks and bowlders (from one foot to five feet in diameter) are found, "of gneiss, syenite, granite, etc., none of which belong to the rocks of that neighborhood."

[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 156.]

Geikie says:

"Possibly these bowlders may have come from some ancient Atlantis, transported by ice."[1]

The conglomerates belonging to the Old Red Sandstone formation in the north of England and in Scotland, we are told, "closely resemble a consolidated bowlder drift."[2]

Near Victoria, in Australia, a conglomerate was found nearly one hundred feet in thickness.

"Great beds of conglomerate occur at the bottom of the Carboniferous, in various parts of Scotland, which it is difficult to believe are other than ancient morainic dris. They are frequently quite unstratified, and the stones often show that peculiar blunted form which is so characteristic of glacial work." [3]

Professor Ramsay found well-scratched and blunted stones in a Permian conglomerate.

In the north of Scotland, a coarse, bowlder-conglomerate is associated with the Jurassic strata. The Cretaceous formation has yielded great stones and bowlders. In the Eocene of Switzerland, erratics have been found, some angular and some rounded. They often attain great size; one measured one hundred and five feet in length, ninety feet in breadth, and forty-five feet in height. Some of the blocks consist of a kind of granite not known to occur anywhere in the Alps.

Geikie says:

"The occurrence in the Eocene of huge ice-carried blocks seems incomprehensible when the general character of the Eocene fossils is taken into account, for these have a somewhat tropical aspect.

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 478.

2. Ibid., p. 479.

3. Ibid.]

So, likewise, the appearance of ice-transported blocks in the Miocene is a sore puzzle,as the fossils imbedded in this formation speak to us of tropical and sub-tropical climates having prevailed in Central Europe."[1]

It was precisely during the age when a warm climate prevailed in Spitzbergen and North Greenland that these erratics were dropped down on the plains of Italy!

And, strange to say, just as we have found the Drift-deposits of Europe and America unfossiliferous,--that is to say, containing no traces of animal or vegetable life,--so these strange stone and clay deposits of other and more ancient ages were in like manner unfossiliferous.[2]

In the "flysch" of the Eocene of the Alps, few or no fossils have been found. In the conglomerates of Turin, belonging to the Upper Miocene period, not a single organic remain has been found.

What conclusion is forced upon us?

That, written in the rocky pages of the great volume of the planet, are the records of repeated visitations from the comets which then rushed through the heavens.

No trace is left of their destructive powers, save the huge, unstratified, unfossiliferous deposits of clay and stones and bowlders, locked away between great layers of the sedimentary rocks.

Can it be that there wanders through immeasurable space, upon an orbit of such size that millions of years are required to complete it, some monstrous luminary, so vast that when it returns to us it fills a large part of the orbit which the earth describes around the sun, and showers down upon us deluges of dris, while it fills the world with flame? And are these recurring strata of stones and clay and bowlders, written upon these widely separated pages of the geologic volume, the record of its oft and regularly recurring visitations?

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 480.

2. Ibid., p. 481.]

Who shall say? Science will yet compare minutely the composition of these different conglomerates. No secret can escape discovery when the light of a world's intelligence is brought to bear upon it.

And even here we stumble over a still more tremendous fact:

It has been supposed that the primeval granite was the molten crust of the original glowing ball of the earth, when it first hardened as it cooled.

But, lo! the microscope, (so Professor Whichell tells us,) reveals that this very granite, this foundation of all our rocks, this ancient globe-crust, is itself made up of sedimentary rocks, which were melted, fused, and run together in some awful conflagration which wiped out all life on the planet.

Beyond the granite, then, there were seas and shores, winds and rains, rivers and sediment carried into the waters to form the rocks melted up in this granite; there were countless ages; possibly there were animals and man; but all melted and consumed together. Was this, too, the result of a comet visitation?

Who shall tell the age of this old earth? Who shall count the ebbs and flows of eternity? Who shall say how often this planet has been developed up to the highest forms of life, and how often all this has been obliterated in universal fire?

The earth is one great tomb of life:

"All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom."

In endless series the ages stretch along--birth, life, development, destruction. And so shall it be till time is no more.

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Conclusions ch. 5, BIELA'S COMET

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART IV

Conclusions

CHAPTER V

BIELA'S COMET

HUMBOLDT Says:

"It is probable that the vapor of the tails of comets mingled with our atmosphere in the years 1819 and 1823."[1]

There is reason to believe that the present generation has passed through the gaseous prolongation of a comet's tail, and that hundreds of human beings lost their lives, somewhat as they perished in the Age of Fire and Gravel, burned up and poisoned by its exhalations.

And, although this catastrophe was upon an infinitely smaller scale than that of the old time, still it may throw some light upon the great cataclysm. At least it is a curious story, with some marvelous features:

On the 27th day of February, 1826, (to begin as M. Dumas would commence one of his novels,) M. Biela, an Austrian officer, residing at Josephstadt, in Bohemia, discovered a comet in the constellation Aries, which, at that time, was seen as a small round speck of filmy cloud. Its course was watched during the following month by M. Gambart at Marseilles and by M. Clausen at Altona, and those observers assigned to it an elliptical orbit, with a period of six years and three quarters for its revolution.

[1. "Cosmos," Vol. i, p. 100.]

M. Damoiseau subsequently calculated its path, and announced that on its next return the comet would cross the orbit of the earth, within twenty thousand miles of its track, and but about one month before the earth would have arrived at the same spot!

This was shooting close to the bull's-eye!

He estimated that it would lose nearly ten days on its return trip, through the retarding influence of Jupiter and Saturn; but, if it lost forty days instead of ten, what then?

But the comet came up to time in 1832, and the earth missed it by one month.

And it returned in like fashion in 1839 and 1846. But here a surprising thing occurred. Its proximity to the earth had split it in two; each half had a head and tail of its own; each had set up a separate government for itself; and they were whirling through space, side by side, like a couple of race-horses, about sixteen thousand miles apart, or about twice as wide apart as the diameter of the earth. Here is a picture of them, drawn from life.



BIELA'S COMET, SPLIT IN TWO, (From Guillemin's "The Heavens," page 247.)

Did the Fenris-Wolf, the Midgard-Serpent, and the Dog-Garm look like this?

In 1852, 1859, and 1866, the comet SHOULD have returned, but it did not. It was lost. It was dissipated. Its material was banging around the earth in fragments somewhere. I quote from a writer in a recent issue of the "Edinburgh Review":

The puzzled astronomers were left in a state of tantalizing uncertainty as to what had become of it. At the beginning of the year 1866 this feeling of bewilderment gained expression in the Annual Report of the Council of the Royal Astronomical Society. The matter continued, nevertheless, in the same state of provoking uncertainty for another six years. The third period of the perihelion passage had then passed, and nothing had been seen of the missing luminary. But on the night of November 27, 1872, night-watchers were startled by a sudden and a very magnificent display of falling stars or meteors, of which there had been no previous forecast, and Professor Klinkerflues, of Berlin, having carefully noted the common radiant point in space from which this star-shower was discharged into the earth's atmosphere, with the intuition of ready genius jumped at once to the startling inference that here at last were traces of the missing luminary. There were eighty of the meteors that furnished a good position for the radiant point of the discharge, and that position, strange to say, was very much the same as the position in space which Biela's comet should have occupied just about that time on its fourth return toward perihelion. Klinkerflues, therefore, taking this spot as one point in the path of the comet, and carrying the path on as a track into forward space, fixed the direction there through which it should pass as a 'vanishing-point' at the other side of the starry sphere, and having satisfied himself of that further position he sent off a telegram to the other side of the world, where alone it could be seen--that is to say, to Mr. Pogson, of the Madras Observatory--which may be best told in his own nervous and simple words.

Herr Klinkerflues's telegram to Mr. Pogson, of Madras, was to the following effect:

"'November 30th--Biela touched the earth on the 27th of November. Search for him near Theta Centauri.'

"The telegram reached Madras, through Russia, in one hour and thirty-five minutes, and the sequel of this curious passage of astronomical romance may be appropriately told in the words in which Mr. Pogson replied to Herr Klinkerflues's pithy message. The answer was dated Madras, the 6th of December, and was in the following words:

"'On the 30th of November, at sixteen hours, the time of the comet rising here, I was at my post, but hopelessly; clouds and rain gave me no chance. The next morning I had the same bad luck. But on the third trial, with a line of blue break, about 17 hours mean time, I found Biela immediately! Only four comparisons in successive minutes could be obtained, in strong morning twilight, with an anonymous star; but direct motion of 2.5 seconds decided that I had got the comet all right. I noted it--circular, bright, with, a decided nucleus, but NO TAIL, and about forty-five seconds in diameter. Next morning I got seven good comparisons with an anonymous star, showing a motion of 17.9 seconds in twenty-eight minutes, and I also got two comparisons with a Madras star in our current catalogue, and with 7,734 Taylor. I was too anxious to secure one good place for the one in hand to look for the other comet, and the fourth morning was cloudy and rainy.'

"Herr Klinkerflues's commentary upon this communication was that he forthwith proceeded to satisfy himself that no provoking accident had led to the discovery of a comet altogether unconnected with Biela's, although in this particular place, and that he was ultimately quite confident of the identity of the comet observed by Mr. Pogson with one of the two heads of Biela. It was subsequently settled that Mr. Pogson had, most probably, seen both heads of the comet, one on the first occasion of his successful search, and the second on the following day; and the meteor-shower experienced in Europe on November 27th was unquestionably due to the passage near the earth of a meteoric trail traveling in the track of the comet. When the question of a possible collision was mooted in 1832, Sir John Herschel remarked that such an occurrence might not be unattended with danger, and that on account of the intersection of the orbits of the earth and the comet a rencontre would in all likelihood take place within the lapse of some millions of years. As a matter of fact the collision did take place on November 27, 1872, and the result, so far as the earth was concerned, was a magnificent display of aial fireworks! But a more telling piece of ready-witted sagacity than this prompt employment of the telegraph for the apprehension of the nimble delinquent can scarcely be conceived. The sudden brush of the comet's tail, the instantaneous telegram to the opposite side of the world, and the glimpse thence of the vagrant luminary as it was just whisking itself off into space toward the star Theta Centauri, together constitute a passage that stands quite without a parallel in the experience of science."

But did the earth escape with a mere shower of fireworks?

I have argued that the material of a comet consists of a solid nucleus, giving out fire and gas, enveloped in a great gaseous mass, and a tail made up of stones, possibly gradually diminishing in size as they recede from the nucleus, until the after-part of it is composed of fine dust ground from the pebbles and bowlders; while beyond this there may be a still further prolongation into gaseous matter.

Now, we have seen that Biela's comets lost their tails. What became of them? There is no evidence to show whether they lost them in 1852, 1859, 1866, or 1872. The probabilities are that the demoralization took place before 1852, as otherwise the comets would have been seen, tails and all, in that and subsequent years. It is true that the earth came near enough in 1872 to attract some of the wandering gravel-stones toward itself, and that they fell, blazing and consuming themselves with the friction of our atmosphere, and reached the surface of our planet, if at all, as cosmic dust. But where were the rest of the assets of these bankrupt comets? They were probably scattered around in space, disjecta membra, floating hither and thither, in one place a stream of stones, in another a volume of gas; while the two heads had fled away, like the fugitive presidents of a couple of broken banks, to the Canadian refuge of "Theta Centauri"--shorn of their splendors and reduced to first principles.

Did anything out of the usual order occur on the face of the earth about this time?

Yes. In the year 1871, on Sunday, the 8th of October, at half past nine o'clock in the evening, events occurred which attracted the attention of the whole world, which caused the death of hundreds of human beings, and the destruction of millions of property, and which involved three different States of the Union in the wildest alarm and terror.

The summer of 1871 had been excessively dry; the moisture seemed to be evaporated out of the air; and on the Sunday above named the atmospheric conditions all through the Northwest were of the most peculiar character. The writer was living at the time in Minnesota, hundreds of miles from the scene of the disasters, and he can never forget the condition of things. There was a parched, combustible, inflammable, furnace-like feeling in the air, that was really alarming. It felt as if there were needed but a match, a spark, to cause a world-wide explosion. It was weird and unnatural. I have never seen nor felt anything like it before or since. Those who experienced it will bear me out in these statements.

At that hour, half past nine o'clock in the evening, at apparently the same moment, at points hundreds of miles apart, in three different States, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, fires of the most peculiar and devastating kind broke out, so far as we know, by spontaneous combustion.

In Wisconsin, on its eastern borders, in a heavily timbered country, near Lake Michigan, a region embracing four hundred square miles, extending north from Brown County, and containing Peshtigo, Manistee, Holland, and numerous villages on the shores of Green Bay, was swept bare by an absolute whirlwind of flame. There were seven hundred and fifty people killed outright, besides great numbers of the wounded, maimed, and burned, who died afterward. More than three million dollars' worth of property was destroyed. [1]

It was no ordinary fire. I quote:

"At sundown there was a lull in the wind and comparative stillness. For two hours there were no signs of danger; but at a few minutes after nine o'clock, and by a singular coincidence, precisely the time at which the Chicago fire commenced, the people of the village heard a terrible roar. It was that of a tornado, crushing through the forests. Instantly the heavens were illuminated with a terrible glare. The sky, which had been so dark a moment before, burst into clouds of flame. A spectator of the terrible scene says the fire did not come upon them gradually from burning trees and other objects to the windward, but the first notice they had of it was a whirlwind of flame in great clouds from above the tops of the trees, which fell upon and entirely enveloped everything. The poor people inhaled it, or the intensely hot air, and fell down dead. This is verified by the appearance of many of the corpses.

[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, pp. 393, 394, etc.]

They were found dead in the roads and open spaces, where there were no visible marks of fire near by, with not a trace of burning upon their bodies or clothing. At the Sugar Bush, which is an extended clearing, in some places four miles in width, corpses were found in the open road, between fences only slightly burned. No mark of fire was upon them; they lay there as if asleep. This phenomenon seems to explain the fact that so many were killed in compact masses. They seemed to have huddled together, in what were evidently regarded at the moment as the safest places, far away from buildings, trees, or other inflammable material, and there to have died together." [1]

Another spectator says:

"Much has been said of the intense heat of the fires which destroyed Peshtigo, Menekaune, Williamsonville, etc., but all that has been said can give the stranger but a faint conception of the reality. The heat has been compared to that engendered by a flame concentrated on an object by a blow-pipe; but even that would not account for some of the phenomena. For instance, we have in our possession a copper cent taken from the pocket of a dead man in the Peshtigo Sugar Bush, which will illustrate our point. This cent has been partially fused, but still retains its round form, and the inscription upon it is legible. Others, in the same pocket, were partially melted, and yet the clothing and the body of the man were not even singed. We do not know in what way to account for this, unless, as is asserted by some, the tornado and fire were accompanied by electrical phenomena." [2]

"It is the universal testimony that the prevailing idea among the people was, that the last day had come. Accustomed as they were to fire, nothing like this had ever been known. They could give no other interpretation to this ominous roar, this bursting of the sky with fame, and this dropping down of fire out of the very heavens, consuming instantly everything it touched.

"No two give a like description of the great tornado as it smote and devoured the village. It seemed as if 'the fiery fiends of hell had been loosened,' says one. 'It came in great sheeted flames from heaven,' says another. 'There was a pitiless rain of fire and SAND.'

[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 372.

2. Ibid., p. 373.]

'The atmosphere was all afire.' Some speak of 'great balls of fire unrolling and shooting forth, in streams.' The fire leaped over roofs and trees, and ignited whole streets at once. No one could stand before the blast. It was a race with death, above, behind, and before them." [1]

A civil engineer, doing business in Peshtigo, says

"The heat increased so rapidly, as things got well afire, that, when about four hundred feet from the bridge and the nearest building, I was obliged to lie down behind a log that was aground in about two feet of water, and by going under water now and then, and holding my head close to the water behind the log, I managed to breathe. There were a dozen others behind the same log. If I had succeeded in crossing the river and gone among the buildings on the other side, probably I should have been lost, as many were."

We have seen Ovid describing the people of "the earth" crouching in the same way in the water to save themselves from the flames of the Age of Fire.

In Michigan, one Allison Weaver, near Port Huron, determined to remain, to protect, if possible, some mill-property of which he had charge. He knew the fire was coming, and dug himself a shallow well or pit, made a thick plank cover to place over it, and thus prepared to bide the conflagration.

I quote:

"He filled it nearly full of water, and took care to saturate the ground around it for a distance of several rods. Going to the mill, he dragged out a four-inch plank, sawed it in two, and saw that the parts tightly covered the mouth of the little well. 'I kalkerated it would be tech and go,' said he, 'but it was the best I could do.' At midnight he had everything arranged, and the roaring then was awful to hear.

[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 374.]

The clearing was ten to twelve acres in extent, and Weaver says that, for two hours before the fire reached him, there was a constant flight across the ground of small animals. As he rested a moment from giving the house another wetting down, a horse dashed into the opening at full speed and made for the house. Weaver could see him tremble and shake with excitement and terror, and felt a pity for him. After a moment the animal gave utterance to a snort of dismay, ran two or three times around the house, and then shot on into the woods like a rocket."

We have, in the foregoing pages, in the legends of different nations, descriptions of the terrified animals flying with the men into the caves of the earth to escape the great conflagration.

'I Not long after this the fire came. Weaver stood by his well, ready for the emergency, yet curious to see the breaking-in of the flames. The roaring increased in volume, the air became oppressive, a cloud of dust and cinders came showering down, and he could see the flame through the trees. It did not run along the ground, or leap from tree to tree, but it came on like a tornado, a sheet of flame reaching from the earth to the tops of the trees. As it struck the clearing he jumped into his well, and closed over the planks. He could no longer see, but he could hear. He says that the flames made no halt whatever, or ceased their roaring for an instant, but he hardly got the opening closed before the house and mill were burning tinder, and both were down in five minutes. The smoke came down upon him powerfully, and his den was so hot he could hardly breathe.

"He knew that the planks above him were on fire, but, remembering their thickness, he waited till the roaring of the flames had died away, and then with his head and hands turned them over and put out the fire by dashing up water with his hands. Although it was a cold night, and the water had at first chilled him, the heat gradually warmed him up until he felt quite comfortable. He remained in his den until daylight, frequently turning over the planks and putting out the fire, and then the worst had passed. The earth around was on fire in spots, house and mill were gone, leaves, brush, and logs were swept clean away as if shaved off and swept with a broom, and nothing but soot and ashes were to be seen." [1]

In Wisconsin, at Williamson's Mills, there was a large but shallow well on the premises belonging to a Mr. Boorman. The people, when cut off by the flames and wild with terror, and thinking they would find safety in the water, leaped into this well. "The relentless fury of the flames drove them pell-mell into the pit, to struggle with each other and die--some by drowning, and others by fire and suffocation. None escaped. Thirty-two bodies were found there. They were in every imaginable position; but the contortions of their limbs and the agonizing expressions of their faces told the awful tale."[2]

The recital of these details, horrible though they may be, becomes excusable when we remember that the ancestors of our race must have endured similar horrors in that awful calamity which I have discussed in this volume.

James B. Clark, of Detroit, who was at Uniontown, Wisconsin, writes:

"The fire suddenly made a rush, like the flash of a train of gunpowder, and swept in the shape of a crescent around the settlement. It is almost impossible to conceive the frightful rapidity of the advance of the flames. The rushing fire seemed to eat up and annihilate the trees."

They saw a black mass coming toward them from the wall of flame:

[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 390.

2. Ibid., p. 386.]

"It was a stampede of cattle and horses thundering toward us, bellowing moaning, and neighing as they galloped on; rushing with fearful speed, their eyeballs dilated and glaring with terror, and every motion betokening delirium of fright. Some had been badly burned, and must have plunged through a long space of flame in the desperate effort to escape. Following considerably behind came a solitary horse, panting and snorting and nearly exhausted. He was saddled and bridled, and, as we first thought, had a bag lashed to his back. As he came up we were startled at the sight of a young lad lying fallen over the animal's neck, the bridle wound around his hands, and the mane being clinched by the fingers. Little effort was needed to stop the jaded horse, and at once release the helpless boy. He was taken into the house, and all that we could do was done; but he had inhaled the smoke, and was seemingly dying. Some time elapsed and he revived enough to speak. He told his name--Patrick Byrnes--and said: 'Father and mother and the children got into the wagon. I don't know what became of them. Everything is burned up. I am dying. Oh! is hell any worse than this?'"[1]

How vividly does all this recall the book of Job and the legends of Central America, which refer to the multitudes of the burned, maimed, and wounded lying in the caverns, moaning and crying like poor Patrick Byrnes, suffering no less in mind than in body!

When we leave Wisconsin and pass about two hundred and fifty miles eastward, over Lake Michigan and across the whole width of the State of Michigan, we find much the same condition of things, but not so terrible in the loss of human life. Fully fifteen thousand people were rendered homeless by the fires; and their food, clothing, crops, horses, and cattle were destroyed. Of these five to six thousand were burned out the same night that the fires broke out in Chicago and Wisconsin. The total destruction of property exceeded one million dollars; not only villages and cities, but whole townships, were swept bare.

[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 383.]

But it is to Chicago we must turn for the most extraordinary results of this atmospheric disturbance. It is needless to tell the story in detail. The world knows it by heart:

Blackened and bleeding, helpless, panting, prone,
On the charred fragments of her shattered throne,
Lies she who stood but yesterday alone."

I have only space to refer to one or two points.

The fire was spontaneous. The story of Mrs. O'Leary's cow having started the conflagration by kicking over a lantern was proved to be false. It was the access of gas from the tail of Biela's comet that burned up Chicago!

The fire-marshal testified:

"I felt it in my bones that we were going to have a burn."

He says, speaking of O'Leary's barn:

"We got the fire under control, and it would not have gone a foot farther; but the next thing I knew they came and told me that St. Paul's church, about two squares north, was on fire."[1]

They checked the church-fire, but--

"The next thing I knew the fire was in Bateham's planing-mill."

A writer in the New York "Evening Post" says he saw in Chicago "buildings far beyond the line of fire, and in no contact with it, burst into flames from the interior."

[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 163.]

It must not be forgotten that the fall of 1871 was marked by extraordinary conflagrations in regions widely separated. On the 8th. of October, the same day the Wisconsin, Michigan, and Chicago fires broke out, the States of Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, and Illinois were severely devastated by prairie-fires; while terrible fires raged on the Alleghanies, the Sierras of the Pacific coast, and the Rocky Mountains, and in the region of the Red River of the North.

"The Annual Record of Science and Industry" for 1876, page 84, says:

"For weeks before and after the great fire in Chicago in 1872, great areas of forest and prairie-land, both in the United States and the British Provinces, were on fire."

The flames that consumed a great part of Chicago were of an unusual character and produced extraordinary effects. They absolutely melted the hardest building-stone, which had previously been considered fire-proof. Iron, glass, granite, were fused and run together into grotesque conglomerates, as if they had been put through a blast-furnace. No kind of material could stand its breath for a moment.

I quote again from Sheahan & Upton's Work:

"The huge stone and brick structures melted before the fierceness of the flames as a snow-flake melts and disappears in water, and almost as quickly. Six-story buildings would take fire and disappear for ever from sight in five minutes by the watch. . . . The fire also doubled on its track at the great Union Depot and burned half a mile southward in the very teeth of the gale--a gale which blew a perfect tornado, and in which no vessel could have lived on the lake. . . . Strange, fantastic fires of blue, red, and green played along the cornices of buildings." [1]

[1. "History of the Chicago Fire," pp. 85, 86.]

Hon. William B. Ogden wrote at the time:

"The fire was accompanied by the fiercest tornado of wind ever known to blow here." [1]

"The most striking peculiarity of the fire was its intense heat. Nothing exposed to it escaped. Amid the hundreds of acres left bare there is not to be found a piece of wood of any description, and, unlike most fires, it left nothing half burned. . . . The fire swept the streets of all the ordinary dust and rubbish, consuming it instantly."[2]

The Athens marble burned like coal!

"The intensity of the heat may be judged, and the thorough combustion of everything wooden may be understood, when we state that in the yard of one of the large agricultural-implement factories was stacked some hundreds of tons of pig-iron. This iron was two hundred feet from any building. To the south of it was the river, one hundred and fifty feet wide. No large building but the factory was in the immediate vicinity of the fire. Yet, so great was the heat, that this pile of iron melted and run, and is now in one large and nearly solid mass."[3]

The amount of property destroyed was estimated by Mayor Medill at one hundred and fifty million dollars; and the number of people rendered houseless, at one hundred and twenty-five thousand. Several hundred lives were lost.

All this brings before our eyes vividly the condition of things when the comet struck the earth; when conflagrations spread over wide areas; when human beings were consumed by the million; when their works were obliterated, and the remnants of the multitude fled before the rushing flames, filled with unutterable consternation; and as they jumped pell-mell into wells, so we have seen them in Job clambering down ropes into the narrow-mouthed, bottomless pit.

[1. "History of the Chicago Fire," p. 87.

2. Ibid., p. 119.

3. Ibid., p. 121.]

Who shall say how often the characteristics of our atmosphere have been affected by accessions from extraterrestrial sources, resulting in conflagrations or pestilences, in failures of crops, and in famines? Who shall say how far great revolutions and wars and other perturbations of humanity have been due to similar modifications? There is a world of philosophy in that curious story, "Dr. Ox's Hobby," wherein we are told how he changed the mental traits of a village of Hollanders by increasing the amount of oxygen in the air they breathed.

• September 19, 2011
• 0
• Published in Ragnarok
• Written by LC Geerts

Conclusions ch. 1, WAS PRE-GLACIAL MAN CIVILIZED ?

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART IV

Conclusions

CHAPTER I

WAS PRE-GLACIAL MAN CIVILIZED ?

WE come now to another and very interesting question:

In what stage of development was mankind when the Drift fell upon the earth?

It is, of course, difficult to attain to certainties in the consideration of an age so remote as this. We are, as it were, crawling upon our hands and knees into the dark cavern of an abysmal past; we know not whether that which we encounter is a stone or a bone; we can only grope our way. I feel, however, that it is proper to present such facts as I possess touching this curious question.

The conclusion at which I have arrived is, that mankind, prior to the Drift, had, in some limited localities, reached a high stage of civilization, and that many of our most important inventions and discoveries were known in the pre-glacial age. Among these were pottery, metallurgy, architecture, engraving, Carving, the use of money, the domestication of some of our animals, and even the use of an alphabet. I shall present the proofs of this startling conclusion, and leave the reader to judge for himself.

While this civilized, cultivated race occupied a part of the earth's surface, the remainder of the world was peopled by races more rude, barbarous, brutal, and animal-like than anything we know of on our earth to-day.

In the first place, I shall refer to the legends of mankind, wherein they depict the condition of our race in the pre-glacial time. If these statements stood alone, we might dismiss them from consideration, for there would be a strong probability that later ages, in repeating the legends, would attribute to their remote ancestors the civilized advantages which they themselves enjoyed; but it will be seen that these statements are confirmed by the remains of man which have been dug out of the earth, and upon which we can rely to a much greater extent.

First, as to the legends:

If I have correctly interpreted Job as a religious drama, founded on the fall of the Drift, then we must remember that Job describes the people overtaken by the catastrophe as a highly civilized race. They had passed the stage of worshiping sticks and stones and idols, and had reached to a knowledge of the one true God; they were agriculturists; they raised flocks of sheep and camels; they built houses; they had tamed the horse; they had progressed so far in astronomical knowledge as to have mapped out the heavens into constellations; they wrote books, consequently they possessed an alphabet; they engraved inscriptions upon the rocks.

But it may be said truly that the book of Job, although it may be really a description of the Drift catastrophe, was not necessarily written at the time of, or even immediately after, that event. So gigantic and terrible a thing must have been the overwhelming consideration and memory of mankind for thousands of years after it occurred. We will see that its impress still exists on the imagination of the race. Hence we may assign to the book of Job an extraordinary antiquity, and nevertheless it may have been written long ages after the events to which it refers occurred; and the writer may have clothed those events with the associations and conditions of the age of its composition. Let us, then, go forward to the other legends, for in such a case we can prove nothing. We can simply build up cumulative probabilities.

In Ovid we read that the Earth, when the dread affliction fell upon her, cried out:

"O sovereign of the gods, if thou approvest of this, if I have deserved it, why do thy lightnings linger? . . . And dost thou give this as my recompense? This as the reward of my fertility and of my duty, in that I endure wounds from the crooked plow and harrows, and am harassed all the year through? In that I supply green leaves to the cattle, and corn, a wholesome food for mankind, and frankincense for yourselves? "

Here we see that Ovid received from the ancient traditions of his race the belief that when the Drift Age came man was already an agriculturist; he had invented the plow and the barrow; he had domesticated the cattle; he had discovered or developed some of the cereals; and he possessed a religion in which incense was burned before the god or gods. The legend of Phaon further indicates that man had tamed the horse and had invented wheeled vehicles.

In the Hindoo story of the coming of the demon Ravana, the comet, we read that he carried off Sita, the wife of Rama, the sun; and that her name indicates that she represented "the furrowed earth," to wit, a condition of development in which man plowed the fields and raised crops of food.

When we turn to the Scandinavian legends, we see that those who transmitted them from the early ages believed that pre-glacial man was civilized. The Asas, the godlike, superior race, dwelt, we are told, "in stone houses."

In describing, in the Elder Edda, the corrupt condition of mankind before the great catastrophe occurred, the world, we are told, was given over to all manner of sin and wickedness. We read:

"Brothers will fight together,
And become each other's bane
Sisters' children
Their sib shall spoil.
Hard is the world;
Sensual sins grow huge.
There are axe-ages, sword-ages
Shields are cleft in twain,
There are wind-ages,
murder-ages,
Ere the world falls dead."[1]

When the great day of wrath comes, Heimdal blows in the Gjallar-horn, Odin rides to Mimer's well, Odin puts on his golden helmet, the Asas hold counsel before their stone doors.

All these things indicate a people who had passed far beyond barbarism. Here we have axes, swords, helmets, shields, musical instruments, domesticated horses, the use of gold, and stone buildings. And after the great storm was over, and the remnant of mankind crept out of the caves, and came back to reoccupy the houses of the slain millions, we read of the delight with which they found in the grass "the golden tablets" of the Asas--additional proof that they worked in the metals, and possessed some kind of a written language; they also had "the runes," or runic letters of Odin.

[1. "The Vala's Prophecy," 48, 49.]

In the Norse legends we read that Loke, the evil genius, carried off Iduna, and her apples.

And when we turn to the American legends, similar statements present themselves.

We see the people, immediately after the catastrophe, sending a messenger to the happy eastern land, over the sea, by a bridge, to procure drums and other musical instruments; we learn from the Aztecs that while the darkness yet prevailed, the people built a sumptuous palace, a masterpiece of skill, and on the top of it they placed an axe of copper, the edge being uppermost, and on this axe the heavens rested.[1]

The Navajos, shut up in their cave, had flute-players with them. The Peruvians were dug out of their cave with a golden spade. In the Tahoe legend, we read that the superior race compelled the inferior to build a great temple for their protection from floods; and the oppressed people escaped in canoes, while the world blazes behind them.

Soon after the Navajos came out of the cave, we find them, according to the legend, possessed of water-jars, and we have references to the division of the heavens into constellations.

In the Arabian legend of the City of Brass, we are told that the people who were destroyed were great architects, metallurgists, agriculturists, and machinists, and that they possessed a written language.

We turn now to the more reliable evidences of man's condition, which have been exhumed from the caves and the Drift.

In the seventeenth century, Fray Pedro Simon relates that some miners, running an adit into a hill near Callao, "met with a ship, which had on top of it the great mass of the hill, and did not agree in its make and appearance with our ships."

[1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 71.]

Sir John Clerk describes a canoe found near Edinburgh, in 1726. "The washings of the river Carron discovered a boat thirteen or fourteen feet under ground; it is thirty-six feet long and four and a half broad, all of one piece of oak. There were several strata above it, such as loam, clay, shells, moss, sand, and gravel."

Boucher de Perthes found remains of man thirty to forty feet below the surface of the earth.

In the following we have the evidence that the pre-glacial race was acquainted with the use of fire, and cooked their food:

"In the construction of a canal between Stockholm and Gothenburg, it was necessary to cut through one of those hills called osars, or erratic blocks, which were deposited by the Drift ice during the glacial epoch. Beneath an immense accumulation of osars, with shells and sand, there was discovered in the deepest layer of subsoil, at a depth of about sixty feet, a circular mass of stones, forming a hearth, in the middle of which there were wood-coals. No other hand than that of man could have performed the work."[2]

In the State of Louisiana, on Petite Anse Island, remarkable discoveries have been made. [3]

At considerable depths below the surface of the earth, fifteen to twenty feet, immediately overlying the salt-rocks, and underneath what Dr. Foster believes to be the equivalent of the Drift in Europe, "associated with the bones of elephants and other huge extinct quadrupeds," "incredible quantities of pottery were found"; in some cases these remains of pottery formed "veritable strata, three and six inches thick"; in many cases the bones of the mastodon were found above these strata of pottery. Fragments of baskets and matting were also found.

[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 330.

2. Maclean's "Manual of Antiquity of Man," p. 60; Buchner, p. 242.

3. Foster's "Prehistoric Races," p. 56, etc.]

Here we have evidence of the long-continued occupation of this spot by man prior to the Drift Age, and that the human family had progressed far enough to manufacture pottery, and weave baskets and matting.

The cave of Chaleux, Belgium, was buried by a mass of rubbish caused by the falling in of the roof, consequently preserving all its implements. There were found the split bones of mammals, and the bones of birds and fishes. There was an immense number of objects, chiefly manufactured from reindeer-horn, such as needles, arrow-heads, daggers, and hooks. Besides these, there were ornaments made of shells, pieces of slate with engraved figures, mathematical lines, remains of very coarse pottery, hearthstones, ashes, charcoal, and last, but not least, thirty thousand worked flints mingled with the broken bones. In the hearth, placed in the center of the cave, was discovered a stone, with certain but unintelligible signs engraved upon it. M. Dupont also found about twenty pounds of the bones of the water-rat, either scorched or roasted. [1]



EARTHEN VASE, FOUND IN THE CAVE OF FURFOOZ, BELGIUM.

[1. Maclean's "Antiquity of Man," p. 87.]

Here we have the evidence that the people who inhabited this cave, or some race with whom they held intercourse, manufactured pottery; that they wore clothing which they sewed with needles; that they used the bow and arrow; that they caught fish with hooks; that they ornamented themselves; that they cooked their food; that they engraved on stone; and that they had already reached some kind of primitive alphabet, in which signs were used to represent things.

We have already seen, (page 124, ante,) that there is reason to believe that pre-glacial Europe contained a very barbarous race, represented by the Neanderthal skull, side by side with a cultivated race, represented by the fine lines and full brow of the Engis skull. The latter race, I have suggested, may have come among the former as traders, or have been captured in war; precisely as today in Central Africa the skulls of adventurous, civilized Portuguese or Englishmen or Americans might be found side by side with the rude skulls of the savage populations of the country. The possession of a piece of pottery, or carving, by an African tribe would not prove that the Africans possessed the arts of engraving or manufacturing pottery, but it would prove that somewhere on the earth's surface a race had advanced far enough, at that time, to be capable of such works of art. And so, in the remains of the pre-glacial age of Europe, we have the evidence that some of these people, or their captives, or those with whom they traded or fought, had gone so far in the training of civilized life as to have developed a sense of art and a capacity to represent living forms in pictures or carvings, with a considerable degree of taste and skill. And these works are found in the most ancient caves, "the archaic caves," associated with the bones of the animals that ceased to exist in Europe at the time of the Drift deposits.



PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE MAMMOTH

Nay, more, a picture of a mammoth has been found engraved upon a piece of mammoth-tusk. The engraving on page 349 represents this most curious work of art.

The man who carved this must have seen the creature it represented; and, as the mammoth did not survive the Drift, that man must have lived before or during the Drift. And he was no savage. Says Sir John Lubbock:

"No representation, however rude, of any animal has yet been found in any of the Danish shell-mounds, or the Stone-Age lake-villages. Even on objects of the Bronze Age they are so rare that it is doubtful whether a single well-authenticated instance could be produced."[1]

In the Dordogne caves the following spirited drawing was found, representing a group of reindeer:



PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF REINDEER.

[1. "Prehistoric Times," p. 333.]

Here it would appear as if the reindeer were fastened together by lines or reins; if so, it implies that they were domesticated. In this picture they seem to have become entangled in their lines, and some have fallen to the ground.

And it does not follow from the presence of the reindeer that the climate was Lapland-like. The ancestors of all our so-called Arctic animals must have lived during the mild climate of the Tertiary Age; and those only survived after the Drift, in the north, that were capable of accommodating themselves to the cold; the rest perished or moved southwardly.

Another group of animals was found, engraved on a piece of the palm of a reindeer's horn, as follows:



PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE HORSE.

Here the man stands alongside the horse's head--a very natural position if the horse was domesticated, a very improbable one if he was not.

Pieces of pottery have also been found accompanying these pallithic remains of man.

The oldest evidence of the existence of man is probably the fragment of a cut rib from the Pliocenes of Tuscany, preserved in the museum at Florence; it was associated with flint-flakes and a piece of rude pottery. [1]

[1. Dawkins's "Early Man in Britain," p. 91.]

But the art-capacity of these people was not limited to the drawing of animals; they also carved figures out of hard substances. The following engraving represents a poniard cut from a reindeer's horn.



A SPECIMEN OF PRE-GLACIAL CARVING.

Sir John Lubbock says:

"The artist bas ingeniously adapted the position of the animal to the necessities of the case. The horns are thrown back on the neck, the fore-legs are doubled up under the belly, and the hind-legs are stretched out along the blade."[1]

These things seem to indicate quite an advanced condition; the people who made them manufactured pottery, possessed. domesticated animals, and were able to engrave and carve images of living objects. It is difficult to believe that they could have carved and engraved these hard substances without metallic gravers or tools of some kind.

The reader will see, on page 130, ante, a representation of a sienite plummet found thirty feet below the surface, in a well, in the San Joaquin Valley, California, which Professor Foster pronounces to be--

"A finer exhibition of the lapidary's skill than has yet been furnished by the Stone Age of either continent. "[2]

[1. "Prehistoric Times," p. 335.

2. Foster's "Prehistoric Races of the United States," p. 56.]

The following picture represents a curious image carved out of black marble, about twice as large as the cut, found near Marlboro, Stark County, Ohio, by some workmen, while digging a well, at a depth of twelve feet below the surface. The ground above it had never been disturbed. It was imbedded in sand and gravel. The black or variegated marble out of which this image is carved has not been found in place in Ohio.



STONE IMAGE FOUND IN OHIO

T. W. Kinney, of Portsmouth, Ohio, writes as follows:

"Last summer, while digging a vault for drainage, at the depth of twenty-seven feet, the workmen found the tusk of a mastodon. The piece was about four feet long and four inches in diameter at the thickest part. It was nearly all lost, having, crumbled very much when exposed to the air. I have a large piece of it; also several flakes of flint found near the same depth.

"I also have several of the flakes from other vaults, some of which show evidence of work.

"We also found a log at the depth of twenty-two feet. The log was burned at one end, and at the other end was a gap, the same as an axeman's kerf. Shell-banks below the level of the base of mound-builders' works, from six to fifteen feet." [1]

[1. "American Antiquarian," April, 1878, p. 36.]

{p. 354}

Was this burned log, thus found at a depth of twenty-two feet, a relic of the great conflagration? Was that axe-kerf made by some civilized man who wielded a bronze or iron weapon?

It is a curious fact that burned logs have, in repeated instances, been exhumed from great depths in the Drift clay.

While this work is going through the press, an article has appeared in "Harper's Monthly Magazine," (September, 1882, p. 609,) entitled "The Mississippi River Problem," written by David A. Curtis, in which the author says:

"When La Salle found out how goodly a land it was, his report was the warrant of eviction that drove out the red man to make place for the white, as the mound-builders had made place for the Indian in what we call the days of old. Yet it must have been only yesterday that the mound-builders wrought in the valley, for in the few centuries that have elapsed since then the surface of the ground has risen only a few feet--not enough to bury their works out of sight. How long ago, then, must it have been that the race lived there whose pavements and cisterns of Roman brick now lie seventy feet underground?"

Mr. Curtis does not mean that the bricks found in this prehistoric settlement had any historical connection with Rome, but simply that they resemble Roman bricks. These remains, I learn, were discovered in the vicinity of Memphis, Tennessee. The details have not yet, so far as I am aware, been published.

Is it not more reasonable to suppose that civilized man existed on the American Continent thirty thousand years ago, (the age fixed by geologists for the coming of the Drift,) a comparatively short period of time, and that his works were then covered by the Drift-dris, than to believe that a race of human beings, far enough advanced in civilization to manufacture bricks, and build pavements and cisterns, dwelt in the Mississippi Valley, in a past so inconceivably remote that the slow increase of the soil, by vegetable decay, has covered their works to the depth of seventy feet?

I come now to the most singular and marvelous revelation of all:

Professor Alexander Winchell, in an interesting and recent work, [1] says:

"I had in my possession for some time a copper relic resembling a rude coin, which was taken from an artesian boring at the depth of one hundred and fourteen feet, at Lawn Ridge, Marshall County, Illinois.

"Mr. W. H. Wilmot, then of Lawn Ridge, furnished me, in a letter dated December 4, 1871, the following statement of deposits pierced in the boring:

Soil	3 feet.
Yellow clay	17 "
Blue clay	44 "
Dark vegetable matter	4 "
Hard purplish clay	18 "
Bright green clay	8 "
Mottled clay	18 "
Soil	2 "
Depth of coin	114 "
Yellow clay	1 "
Sand and clay.
Water, rising 60 feet.

"In a letter of the 27th of December, written from Chillicothe, Illinois, he stated that the bore was four inches for eighty feet, and three inches for the remainder of the depth. But before one hundred feet had been reached the four-inch portion was 'so plastered over as to be itself but three inches in diameter,' and hence the 'coin' could not have come from any depth less than eighty feet.

[1. "Sparks from a Geologist's Hammer," p. 170.]

"'Three persons saw "the coin" at the same instant, and each claims it.' This so-called coin was about the thickness and size of a silver quarter of a dollar, and was of remarkably uniform thickness. It was approximately round, and seemed to have been cut. Its two faces bore marks as shown in the figure, but they were not stamped as with a die nor engraved. They looked as if etched



COPPER COIN, FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN FEET UNDER GROUND IN ILLINOIS.

with acid. The character of the marks was partly unintelligible. On each side, however, was a rude outline of a human figure. One of these held in one hand an object resembling a child, while the other was raised as if in the act of striking. The figure wore a head-dress, apparently made of quills. Around the border were undecipherable hieroglyphics. The figure on the opposite side extended only to the waist, and had also one hand upraised. This was furnished with long tufts like mule's ears. Around the border was another circle of hieroglyphics. On this side also was a rude outline of a quadruped. I exhibited this relic to the Geological Section of the American Association, at its meeting at Buffalo in 1876. The general impression seemed to be that its origin could not date from the epoch of the stratum in which it is represented to have been found. One person thought he could detect a rude representation of the signs of the zodiac around the border. Another fancied he could discover numerals, and even dates. No one could even offer any explanation of the objects or the circumstances of its discovery. The figures bear a close resemblance to rude drawings executed on birch-bark and rock surfaces by the American Indians. But by what means were they etched? And by what means was the uniform thickness of the copper produced?

This object was sent by the owner to the Smithsonian Institution for examination, and Secretary Henry referred it to Mr. William E. Dubois, who presented the result of his investigation to the American Philosophical Society. Mr. Dubois felt sure that the object had passed through a rolling-mill, and he thought the cut edges gave further evidence of the machine-shop. 'All things considered,' he said, 'I can not regard this Illinois piece as ancient nor old (observing the usual distinction), nor yet recent; because the tooth of time is plainly visible.' He could suggest nothing to clear up the mystery. Professor J. P. Lesley thought it might be an astrological amulet. He detected upon it the signs of Pisces and Leo. He read the date 1572. He said, 'The piece was placed there as a practical joke.' He thought it might be Hispano-American or French-American in origin. the suggestion of 'a practical joke' is itself something which must be taken as a joke. No person in possession of this interesting object would willingly part with it; least of all would he throw so small an object into a hole where not one chance in a thousand existed that it would ever be seen again by any person.

"If this object does not date from the age of the stratum from which obtained, it can only be a relic of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, buried beneath the alluvium deposited more recently by the Illinois River. The country is a level prairie, and 'Peoria Lake' is an expansion of the river ten miles long and a mile and a half broad. It is certainly possible that in such a region deep alluvial deposits may have formed since the visits of the French in the latter part of the seventeenth century. But it is not easy to admit an accumulation of one hundred and fourteen or one hundred and twenty-feet, since such a depth extends too much below the surface of the river. In Whiteside County, fifty miles northwest from Peoria County, about 1851, according to Mr. Moffat, a large copper ring was found one hundred and twenty feet beneath the surface, as also something which has been compared to a boat-hook. Several other objects have been found at less depths, including stone pipes and pottery, and a spear-shaped hatchet, MADE OF IRON. If these are not 'ancient,' their occurrence at depths of ten, forty, fifty, and one hundred and twenty feet must be explained as I have suggested in reference to the 'coin.' An instrument of iron is a strong indication of the civilized origin of all."

This is indeed an extraordinary revelation. Here we have a copper medal, very much like a coin, inscribed with alphabetical or hieroglyphical signs, which, when placed under the microscope, in the hands of a skeptical investigator, satisfies him that it is not recent, and that it passed through a rolling-mill and was cut by a machine.

If it is not recent, if the tooth of time is plainly seen on it, it is not a modern fraud; if it is not a modern fraud, then it is really the coin of some pre-Columbian people. The Indians possessed no currency or alphabet, so that it dates back of the red-men. Nothing similar has been found in the hundreds of American mounds that have been opened, so that it dates back of the mound-builders.

It comes from a depth of not less than eighty feet in glacial clay, therefore it is profoundly ancient.

It is engraved after a method utterly unknown to any civilized nation on earth, within the range of recorded history. IT IS ENGRAVED WITH ACID!

It belongs, therefore, to a civilization unlike any we know of. If it had been derived from any other human civilization, the makers, at the same time they borrowed the round, metallic form of the coin, would have borrowed also the mold or the stamp. But they did not; and yet they possessed a rolling-mill and a machine to cut out the coin.

What do we infer? That there is a relationship between our civilization and this, but it is a relationship in which this represents the parent; and the round metallic coins of historical antiquity were derived from it, but without the art of engraving by the use of acid.

It does not stand alone, but at great depths in the same clay implements of copper and of IRON are found.

What does all this indicate?

That far below the present level of the State of Illinois, in the depths of the glacial clays, about one hundred or one hundred and twenty feet below the present surface of the land, there are found the evidences of a high civilization. For a coin with an inscription upon it implies a high civilization:--it implies an alphabet, a literature, a government, commercial relations, organized society, regulated agriculture, which could alone sustain all these; and some implement like a plow, without which extensive agriculture is not possible; and this in turn implies domesticated animals to draw the plow. The presence of the coin, and of implements of copper and iron, proves that mankind had passed far beyond the Stone Age. And these views are confirmed by the pavements and cisterns of brick found seventy feet below the surface in the lower Mississippi Valley.

There is a Pompeii, a Herculaneum, somewhere, underneath central and northwestern Illinois or Tennessee, of the most marvelous character; not of Egypt, Assyria, or the Roman Empire, things of yesterday, but belonging to an inconceivable antiquity; to pre-glacial times; to a period ages before the flood of Noah;--a civilization which was drowned and deluged out of sight under the immeasurable clay-flood of the comet.

Man crawled timidly backward into the history of the past over his little limit of six thousand years; and at the farther end of his tether he found the perfect civilization of early Egypt. He rises to his feet and looks still backward, and the vista of history spreads and spreads to antediluvian times. Here at last he thinks he has reached the beginning of things: here man first domesticated the animals; here he first worked in copper and iron; here he possessed for the first time an alphabet, a government, commerce, and coinage. And, lo! from the bottom of well-holes in Illinois, one hundred and fourteen feet deep, the buckets of the artesian-well auger bring up copper rings and iron hatchets and engraved coins--engraved by a means unknown to historical mankind--and we stand face to face with a civilization so old that man will not willingly dare to put it into figures.

Here we are in the presence of that great, but possibly brutal and sensual development of man's powers, "the sword-ages, the axe-ages, the murder-ages of the Goths," of which God cleared the earth when he buried the mastodon under the Drift for ever.

How petty, how almost insignificant, how school-boy-like are our historians, with their little rolls of parchment under their arms, containing their lists of English, Roman, Egyptian, and Assyrian kings and queens, in the presence of such stupendous facts as these!

Good reader, your mind shrinks back from such conceptions, of course. But can you escape the facts by shrinking back? Are they not there? Are they not all of a piece--Job, Ovid, Rama, Ragnarok, Genesis, the Aztec legends; the engraved ivory tablets of the caves, the pottery, the carved figures of pre-glacial Europe; the pottery-strata of Louisiana under the Drift; the copper and iron implements, the brick pavements and cisterns, and this coin, dragged up from well-holes in Illinois?

And what do they affirm?

That this catastrophe was indeed THE FALL OF MAN.

Think what a fall!

From comfort to misery; from plowed fields to the thistles and the stones; from sunny and glorious days in a stormless land to the awful trials of the Drift Age; the rains, the cold, the snow, the ice, the incessant tempests, the darkness, the poverty, the coats of hides, the cave-life, the cannibalism, the Stone Age.

Here was a fall indeed.

There is nothing in antiquity that has not a meaning. The very fables of the world's childhood should be sacred from our laughter.

Our theology, even where science has most ridiculed it, is based on a great, a gigantic truth. Paradise, the summer land of fruits, the serpent, the fire from heaven, the expulsion, the waving sword, the "fall of man," the "darkness on the face of the deep," the age of toil and sweat--all, all, are literal facts.

And could we but penetrate their meaning, the trees of life and knowledge and the apples of paradise probably represent likewise great and important facts or events in the history of our race.

And with what slow steps did mankind struggle upward! In some favored geographical center they recovered the arts of metallurgy, the domestication of animals, and the alphabet.

"All knowledge," says the Hindoo Krishna, "was originally bestowed on mankind by God. They lost it. They recovered it as a recollection."

The poor barbarian Indians of America possess traditions of this ancient civilization, traditions in forms as rude as their own condition.

It was represented by the Great Hare, Manibozho, or Nanaboshu.

Do we not find his typical picture, with those great mule-tufts, (referred to by Professor Winchell,) the hare-like ears, on this coin of Illinois?

Read what the Indians tell of this great being

"From the remotest wilds of the Northwest," says Dr. Brinton, "to the coast of the Atlantic, from the southern boundaries of Carolina to the cheerless swamps of Hudson's Bay, the Algonquins were never tired of gathering around the winter fire and repeating the story of Manibozho or Michabo, the Great Hare. With entire unanimity their various branches, the Powhatans of Virginia, the Lenni-Lenape of the Delaware, the warlike hordes of New England, the Ottawas of the far North, and the Western tribes, perhaps without exception, spoke of this 'chimerical beast,' as one of the old missionaries calls it as their common ancestor. The totem or clan which bore his name was looked up to with peculiar respect. . . .

"What he really was we must seek in the accounts of older travelers, in the invocations of the jossakeeds or prophets, and in the part assigned to him in the solemn mysteries of religion. In these we find him portrayed as the patron and founder of the Meda worship, the inventor of picture-writing, the father and guardian of their nation, the ruler of the winds, even the maker and preserver of the world and creator of the sun and moon. From a grain of sand brought from the bottom of the primeval ocean, he fashioned the habitable land, and set it floating on the waters till it grew to such a size that a strong young wolf, running constantly, died of old age ere he reached its limits. . . . He was the founder of the medicine-hunt. . . . He himself was a mighty hunter of old. . . . Attentively watching the spider spread its web to trap unwary flies, he devised the art of knitting nets to catch fish."[1]

This is a barbarian's recollection of a great primeval civilized race who established religion, invented nets, and, as the other legends concerning him show, first made the bow and arrow and worked in the metals.

[1. "Myths of the New World," p. 175.]

There is every reason to think the division of the people into several classes, or families, who take the name of some animal whose picture is their totem, dates back to the very beginning of the human race. The animal fables, as I have suggested, grew out of these animal totems; we find them everywhere among the American tribes; and in some cases they are accompanied by mental and physical traits which may be supposed to indicate that they originated in primal race differences. This is the belief of Warren, the native historian of the Ojibways. I am indebted to Hon. H. Al. Rice, of St. Paul, for an opportunity to examine his valuable manuscript history of that tribe of Indians.

The great totem of the Algonquins is the Hare; he represents a ruling class, and is associated with recollections of this Great Hare, this demi-god, this man or race, who taught them all the arts of life with which they are acquainted. Then there is a turtle totem, associated with myths of the turtle or tortoise, which are the images all over the world of an island. [1]

And when we cross the Atlantic we find [2]that the Arabs are divided up in the same way into tribes bearing animal names.

"Asad, lion; 'a number of tribes.' Aws, wolf; 'a tribe of the Ancar, or Defenders.' Badau, ibex; 'a tribe of the Kalb and others.' Tha'laba, she-fox; 'a name of tribes.' Garad, locusts; 'a sub-tribe of the Azol.' Thawr, bull; 'a sub-tribe of Hamdan and of Abel Manah.' Gahah, colt of an ass; 'a sub-tribe of the Arabs.' Hida', kite; 'a sub-tribe of Murad.'

"The origin of all names is referred, in the genealogical system of the Arabs, to an ancestor who bore the tribal or gentile name. Thus the Kalb or dog-tribe consists of the Beni-Kalb--sons of Kalb (the dog), who is in turn son of Wabra (the female rock-badger), son of Tha'laba

[1. Tylor's "Early History of Mankind."

2. W. J. F. Maclennan, "Fortnightly Review," 1869 and 1870.]

(the she-fox), great-grandson of Quoda'a, grandson of Saba', the Sheba of Scripture. A single member of the tribe is Kalbi--a Kalbite--Caninus."

"The same names which appear as totem tribes reach through Edom, Midian, and Moab, into the land of Canaan."[1]

Among the Jews there was the stock of the serpent, Nashon, to which David belonged; and there is no doubt that they were once divided into totemic families.

And in all this we see another proof of the race-identity of the peoples on the opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Permit me to close this chapter with a suggestion:

Is there not energy enough among the archlogists of the United States to make a thorough examination of some part of the deep clay deposits of Central Illinois or of those wonderful remains referred to by Mr. Curtis?

If one came and proved that at a given point he had found indications of a coal-bed or a gold-mine, he would have no difficulty in obtaining means enough to dig a shaft and excavate acres. Can not the greed for information do one tenth as much as the greed for profit?

Who can tell what extraordinary revelations wait below the vast mass of American glacial clay? For it must be remembered that the articles already found have been discovered in the narrow holes bored or dug for wells. How small is the area laid bare by such punctures in the earth compared with the whole area of the country in which they are sunk! How remarkable that anything should have been found under such circumstances! How probable, therefore, that the remains of man are numerous at a certain depth!

[1. W. J. F. Maclennan, "Fortnightly Review," 1869 and 1870.]

Where a coin is found we might reasonably expect to find other works of copper, and all those things which would accompany the civilization of a people working in the metals and using a currency,--such as cities, houses, temples, etc. Of course, such things might exist, and yet many shafts might be sunk without coming upon any of them. But is not the attempt worth making?

• September 19, 2011
• 0
• Published in Ragnarok
• Written by LC Geerts