Discoveries At Nineveh
by
Austen Henry Layard, Esq., D.C.L.

A Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh. Austen Henry Layard. J. C. Derby. New York. 1854.

Chapter 1

During the autumn of 1839 and winter of 1840, I had been wandering through Asia Minor and Syria, scarcely leaving untrod one spot hallowed by tradition, or unvisited one ruin consecrated by history. I was accompanied by one no less curious and enthusiastic than myself. 1 We were both equally careless of comfort and unmindful of danger. We rode alone; our arms were our only protection; a valise behind our saddles was our wardrobe, and we tended our own horses, except when relieved from the duty by the hospitable inhabitants of a Turcoman village or an Arab tent. Thus unembarrassed by needless luxuries, and uninfluenced by the opinions and prejudices of others, we mixed among the people, acquired without effort their manners, and enjoyed without alloy those emotions which scenes so novel, and spots so rich in varied association, can not fail to produce.

I look back with feelings of grateful delight to those happy days when, free and unheeded, we left at dawn the humble cottage or cheerful tent, and lingering as we listed, unconscious of distance and of the hour, found ourselves, as the sun went down, under some hoary ruin tenanted by the wandering Arab, or in some crumbling village still bearing a well known name. No experienced dragoman measured our distances, and appointed our stations. We were honored with no conversations by pashaws, nor did we seek any civilities from governors. We neither drew tears nor curses from villagers by seizing their horses, or searching their houses for provisions: their welcome was sincere; their scanty fare was placed before us; we ate, and came, and went in peace.

I had traversed Asia Minor and Syria, visiting the ancient seats of civilization, and the spots which religion has made holy. I now felt an irresistible desire to penetrate to the regions beyond the Euphrates, to which history and tradition point as the birth place of the wisdom of the West. Most travelers, after a journey through the usually frequented parts of the East, have the same longing to cross the great river, and to explore those lands which are separated on the map from the confines of Syria by a vast blank stretching from Aleppo to the banks of the Tigris. A deep mystery hangs over Assyria, Babylonia, and Chaldea. With these names are linked great nations and great cities dimly shadowed forth in history; mighty ruins, in the midst of deserts, defying, by their very desolation and lack of definite form, the description of the traveler; the remnants of mighty races still roving over the land; the fulfilling and fulfillment of prophecies; the plains to which the Jew and the Gentile alike look as the cradle of their race. After a journey in Syria, the thoughts naturally turn eastward; and without treading on the remains of Nineveh and Babylon our pilgrimage is incomplete.

I left Aleppo, with my companion, on the 18th of March. We still traveled as we had been accustomed - without guide or servants. The road across the desert is at all times impracticable, except to a numerous and well-armed caravan, and offers no object of interest. We preferred that through Bir and Orfa. From the latter city we traversed the low country at the foot of the Kurdish hills, a country little known, and abounding in curious remains. The Egyptian frontier, at that time, extended to the east of Orfa, and the war between the sultan and Mohammed Ali Pasha being still unfinished, the tribes took advantage of the confusion, and were plundering on all sides. With our usual good fortune, we succeeded in reaching Nisibin unmolested, although we ran daily risks, and more than once found ourselves in the midst of foraging parties, and of tents, which, an hour before, had been pillaged by the wandering bands of Arabs. We entered Mosul on the 10th of April.

During a short stay in this town, we visited the great ruins on the east bank of the river, which have been generally believed to be the remains of Nineveh. 2 We rode also into the desert, and explored the mound of Kalah Sherghat, a vast ruin on the Tigris, about fifty miles below its junction with the Zab. As we journeyed thither, we rested for the night at the small Arab village of Hammum Ali, around which are still the vestiges of an ancient city. From the summit of an artificial eminence we looked down upon a broad plain, separated from us by the river. A line of lofty mounds bounded it to the east, and one of a pyramidical form rose high above the rest. Beyond it could be faintly traced the waters of the Zab. Its position rendered its identification easy. This was the pyramid which Xenophon had described, and near which the ten thousand had encamped: the ruins around it were those which the Greek general saw twenty-two centuries before, and which were even then the remains of an ancient city. Although Xenophon had confounded a name, spoken by a strange race, with one familiar to a Greek ear, and had called the place Larissa, tradition still points to the origin of the city, and, by attributing its foundation to Nimrod, whose name the ruins now bear, connect it with one of the first settlements of the human race. 3

Kalah Sherghat, like Nimroud, was an Assyrian ruin: a vast, shapeless mass, now covered with grass, and showing scarcely any traces of the work of man except where the winter rains had formed ravines down its almost perpendicular sides, and had thus laid open its contents. A few fragments of pottery and inscribed bricks, discovered after a careful search among the rubbish which had accumulated around the base of the great mound, served to prove that it owed its construction to the people who had founded the city of which Nimroud is the remains. There was a tradition current among the Arabs, that strange figures, carved in black stone, still existed among the ruins; but we searched for them in vain, during the greater part of a day in which we were engaged in exploring the heaps of earth and bricks, covering a considerable extent of country on the right bank of the Tigris. At the time of our visit, the country had been abandoned by the Bedouins, and was only occasionally visited by a few plunderers from the Shammar or Aneyza tents. We passed the night in the jungle which clothes the banks of the river, and wandered during the day undisturbed by the tribes of the desert. A cawass, who had been sent with us by the Pashaw of Mosul, alarmed at the solitude, and dreading the hostile Arabs, left us in the wilderness, and turned homeward. But he fell into the danger he sought to avoid. Less fortunate than ourselves, at a short distance from Kalah Sherghat, he was met by a party of horsemen, and fell a victim to his timidity.

Were the traveler to cross the Euphrates to seek for such ruins in Mesopotamia and Chaldea as he had left behind him in Asia Minor or Syria, his search would be vain. The graceful column rising above the thick foliage of the myrtle, ilex, and oleander; the gradines of the amphitheater covering a gentle slope, and overlooking the dark blue waters of a lake-like bay; the richly-carved cornice or capital half hidden by luxuriant herbage, - are replaced by the stern, shapeless mound rising like a hill from the scorched plain, the fragments of pottery, and the stupendous mass of brick-work occasionally laid bare by the winter rains. He has left the land where nature is still lovely, where, in his mind's eye, he can rebuild the temple or the theater, half doubting whether they would have made a more grateful impression upon the senses than the ruin before him. He is now at a loss to give any form to the rude heaps upon which he is gazing. Those of whose works they are the remains, unlike the Roman and the Greek, have left no visible traces of their civilization, or of their arts: their influence has long since passed away. The more he conjectures, the more vague the results appear. The scene around is worthy of the ruin he is contemplating; desolation meets desolation: a feeling of awe succeeds to wonder; for there is nothing to relieve the mind, to lead to hope, or to tell of what has gone by. These huge mounds of Assyria made a deeper impression upon me, gave rise to more serious thoughts, and more earnest reflection, than the temples of Balbec, and the theaters of Ionia.

In the middle of April I left Mosul for Baghdad. As I descended the Tigris on a raft, I again saw the ruins of Nimroud, and had a better opportunity of examining them. It was evening as we approached the spot. The spring rains had clothed the mound with the richest verdure, and the fertile meadows, which stretched around it, were covered with flowers of every hue. Amid this luxuriant vegetation were partly concealed a few fragments of bricks, pottery, and alabaster, upon which might be traced the well defined wedges of the cuneiform character. Did not these remains mark the nature of the ruin, it might have been confounded with a natural eminence. A long line of consecutive narrow mounds, still retaining the appearance of walls or ramparts, stretched from its base, and formed a vast quadrangle. The river flowed at some distance from them: its waters, swollen by the melting of the snows on the Armenian hills, were broken into a thousand foaming whirlpools by an artificial barrier, built across the stream. On the eastern bank, the soil had been washed away by the current; but a solid mass of masonry still withstood its impetuosity. The Arab, who guided my small raft, gave himself up to religious ejaculations as we approached this formidable cataract, over which we were carried with some violence. Once safely through the danger, he explained to me that this unusual change in the quiet face of the river was caused by a great dam which had been built by Nimrod, 4 and that in the autumn, before the winter rains, the huge stones of which it was constructed, squared, and united by cramps of iron, were frequently visible above the surface of the stream. 5 It was, in fact, one of those monuments of a great people, to be found in all the rivers of Mesopotamia, which were undertaken to insure a constant supply of water to the innumerable canals, spreading like net-work over the surrounding country, and which, even in the days of Alexander, were looked upon as the works of an ancient nation. 6 No wonder that the traditions of the present inhabitants of the land should assign them to one of the founders of the human race! The Arab explained the connection between the dam and the city, built by Athur, the lieutenant of Nimrod, the vast ruins of which were then before us, and its purpose as a causeway for the mighty hunter to cross to the opposite palace, now represented by the mound of Hammum Ali. He was telling me of the histories and fate of the kings of a primitive race, still the favorite theme of the inhabitants of the plains of Shinar, when the last glow of twilight faded away, and I fell asleep as we glided onward to Baghdad.

My curiosity had been greatly excited, and from that time I formed the design of thoroughly examining, whenever it might be in my power, these singular remains.

It was not until the summer of 1842 that I again passed through Mosul on my way to Constantinople. I was then anxious to reach the Turkish capital, and had no time to explore ruins. I had not, however, forgotten Nimroud. I had frequently spoken to others on the subject of excavations in this and another mound, to which a peculiar interest also attached; and at one time had reason to hope that some persons in England might have been induced to aid in the undertaking. I had even proposed an examination of the ruins to M. Coste, an architect who had been sent by the French government, with its embassy to Persia, to draw and describe the monuments of that country.

I found that M. Botta had, since my first visit, been named French consul at Mosul; and had already commenced excavations on the opposite side of the river in the large mound of Kouyunjik. These excavations were on a very small scale, and, at the time of my passage, only fragments of brick and alabaster, upon which were engraved a few letters in the cuneiform character, had been discovered.

While detained by unexpected circumstances at Constantinople, I entered into correspondence with a gentleman in England on the subject of excavations; but with this exception, no one seemed inclined to assist or take any interest in such an undertaking. I also wrote to M. Botta, encouraging him to proceed, notwithstanding the apparent paucity of results, and particularly calling his attention to the mound of Nimroud, which, however, he declined to explore on account of its distance from Mosul and its inconvenient position. I was soon called away from the Turkish capital to the provinces; and for some months numerous occupations prevented me turning my attention to the ruins and antiquities of Assyria.

In the meanwhile M. Botta, not discouraged by the want of success which had attended his first essay, continued his excavations in the mound of Kouyunjik; and to him is due the honor of having found the first Assyrian monument. This remarkable discovery owed its origin to the following circumstances. The small party employed by M. Botta were at work on Kouyunjik, when a peasant from a distant village chanced to visit the spot. Seeing that every fragment of brick and alabaster uncovered by the workmen was carefully preserved, he asked the reason of this, to him, strange proceeding. On being informed that they were in search of sculptured stones, he advised them to try the mound on which his village was built, and in which, he declared, many such things as they wanted had been exposed on digging the foundations of new houses. M. Botta, having been frequently deceived by similar stories, was not at first inclined to follow the peasant's advice, but subsequently sent an agent and one or two workmen to the place. After a little opposition from the inhabitants, they were permitted to sink a well in the mound; and at a small distance from the surface they came to the top of a wall which, on digging deeper, they found to be lined with sculptured slabs of gypsum. M. Botta, on receiving information of this discovery, went at once to the village, which was called Khorsabad. Directing a wider trench to be formed, and to be carried in the direction of the wall, he soon found that he had entered a chamber, connected with others, and surrounded by slabs of gypsum covered with sculptured representations of battles, sieges, and similar events. His wonder may easily be imagined. A new history had been suddenly opened to him - the records of an unknown people were before him. He was equally at a loss to account for the age and the nature of the monument. The style of art of the sculptures, the dresses of the figures, the mythic forms on the walls, were all new to him, and afforded no clew to the epoch of the erection of the edifice, or to the people who were its founders. Numerous inscriptions, accompanying the bas-reliefs, evidently contained the explanation of the events thus recorded in sculpture, and being in the cuneiform, or arrow headed, character, proved that the building belonged to an age preceding the conquests of Alexander; for it is generally admitted that after the subjugation of the west of Asia by the Macedonians, the cuneiform writing ceased to be employed. It was evident that the monument appertained to a very ancient and very civilized people; and it was natural from its position to refer it to the inhabitants of Nineveh, a city, which, although it could not have occupied a site so distant from the Tigris, must have been in the vicinity of these ruins. M. Botta had discovered an Assyrian edifice, the first, probably, which had been exposed to the view of man since the fall of the Assyrian empire.

M. Botta was not long in perceiving that the building which had been thus partly excavated, unfortunately owed its destruction to fire; and that the gypsum slabs, reduced to lime, were rapidly falling to pieces on exposure to the air. No precaution could arrest this rapid decay; and it was to be feared that this wonderful monument had only been uncovered to complete its ruin. The records of victories and triumphs, which had long attested the power and swelled the pride of the Assyrian kings, and had resisted the ravages of ages, were now passing away forever. They could scarcely be held together until an inexperienced pencil could secure an imperfect evidence of their former existence. Almost all that was first discovered thus speedily disappeared; and the same fate has befallen nearly every thing subsequently found at Khorsabad. A regret is almost felt that so precious a memorial of a great nation should have been exposed to destruction; but as far as the object of the monument is concerned, the intention of its founders will be amply fulfilled, and the records of their might will be more widely spread, and more effectually preserved, by modern art, than the most exalted ambition could have contemplated.

This remarkable discovery having been communicated by M. Botta, through M. Mohl, to the French Academy of Fine Arts, that body lost no time in applying to the Minister of Public Instruction for means to carry on the researches. The recommendation was attended to with that readiness and munificence which almost invariably distinguish the French government in undertakings of this nature. Ample funds for excavations were at once assigned to M. Botta, and an artist of acknowledged skill was placed under his orders to draw such objects as could not be removed. The work was carried on with activity and success, and by the beginning of 1845, the monument had been completely uncovered. M. Botta did not extend his researches beyond Khorsabad; but, having secured many fine specimens of Assyrian sculpture for his country, he returned to Europe with a rich collection of inscriptions, the most important result of his discovery.

The success of M. Botta had increased my anxiety to explore the ruins of Assyria. It was evident that Khorsabad could not stand alone. It did not represent ancient Nineveh, nor did it afford us any additional evidence as to the site of that city. If the edifice discovered had been one of its palaces, surely other buildings of a vaster and more magnificent character must exist nearer the seat of government, on the banks of the river Tigris. It was true that M. Botta had labored unsuccessfully for above three months in the great mound opposite Mosul, which was usually identified with the Assyrian capital; but that mound much exceeded in extent any other known ruin; and it was possible that in the part hitherto explored the traces of the buildings which it once contained were as completely lost as they were in many parts of the mound of Khorsabad. My thoughts still went back to Nimroud, and to the traditions which attached to it. I spoke to others, but received little encouragement. At last, in the autumn of 1845, Sir Stratford Canning offered to incur, for a limited period, the expense of excavations in Assyria, in the hope that, should success attend the attempt, means would be found to carry it out on an adequate scale.

It was now in my power to prosecute a work which I had so long desired to undertake; and the reader will not, I trust, be disinclined to join with me in feelings of gratitude toward one who, while he has maintained so successfully the honor and interests of England by his high character and eminent abilities, has acquired for his country so many great monuments of ancient civilization and art. 7 It is to Sir Stratford Canning we are mainly indebted for the collection of Assyrian antiquities with which the British Museum has been enriched; without his liberality and public spirit the treasures of Nimroud would have been reserved for the enterprise of those who have appreciated the value and importance of the discoveries at Khorsabad.

It was deemed prudent that I should leave Constantinople without acquainting any one with the object of my journey. I was furnished with the usual documents given to travelers when recommended by the Embassy, and with letters of introduction to the authorities at Mosul and in the neighborhood. My preparations were soon completed, and I started from Constantinople by steamer to Samsoun in the middle of October. Anxious to reach the end of my journey, I crossed the mountains of Pontus and the great steppes of the Usun Yilak as fast as post horses could carry me, descended the high lands into the valley of the Tigris, galloped over the vast plains of Assyria, and reached Mosul in twelve days.

1 My traveling companion, during a long journey from England to Hamadan, was Edward Ledwich Mitford, Esq., now of her Majesty's civil service in the island of Ceylon.
2 These ruins include the mounds of Kouyunjik and Nebbi Yunus.
3 "He (Nimrod) went out into Assyria and builded Nineveh, the city Rehoboth and Calah, and Resen, between Nineveh and Calah; the same is a great city." (Gen. 10:11, 12.)
4 This dam is called by the Arabs, either Sukr el Nimroud, from the tradition, or El Awayee, from the noise caused by the breaking of the water over the stones. Large rafts are obliged to unload before crossing it, and accidents frequently happen to those who neglect this precaution.
5 Diodorus Siculus, it will be remembered, states that the stones of the bridge built by Semiramis across the Euphrates were united by similar iron cramps, while the interstices were filled up with molten lead.
6 These dams greatly impeded the fleets of the conqueror in their navigation of the rivers of Susiana and Mesopotamia, and he caused many of them to be removed. (Strabo, p. 1051. ed. Ox. 1807.) By Strabo they were believed to have been constructed to prevent the ascent of the rivers by hostile fleets; but their use is evident. Tavernier mentions, in his Travels (vol. i. p. 226), this very dam. He says that his raft went over a cascade twenty-six feet high; but he must have greatly exaggerated.
7 I need scarcely remind the reader that it is to Sir S. Canning we owe the marbles of Halicarnassus now in the British Museum. The difficulties which stood in the way of the acquisition of these valuable relics, and the skill which was required to obtain them, are not generally known. I can testify to the efforts and labor which were necessary for nearly three years before the repugnance of the Ottoman government could be overcome, and permission obtained to extract the sculptures from the walls of a castle which was more jealously guarded than any similar edifice in the empire. Their removal, notwithstanding the almost insurmountable difficulties raised by the authorities and inhabitants of Budroon was most successfully effected by Mr. Alison. The Elgin marbles, and all other remains from Turkey or Greece now in Europe, were obtained with comparative ease.

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART IV

Conclusions

CHAPTER VIII

THE AFTER-WORD

WHEN that magnificent genius, Francis Bacon, sent forth one of his great works to the world, he wrote this prayer:

"Thou, O Father, who gavest the visible light as the first-born of thy creatures, and didst pour into man the intellectual light as the top and consummation of thy workmanship, be pleased to protect and govern this work, which coming from thy goodness returneth to thy glory. . . . We humbly beg that this mind may be steadfastly in us; and that thou, by our hands and the hands of others, on whom thou shalt bestow the same spirit, wilt please to convey a largess of new alms to thy family of mankind."

And again he says:

"This also we beg, that human things may not prejudice such as are divine; neither that from the unlocking of the gates of sense, and the kindling of a greater natural light, anything of incredulity, or intellectual night, may arise in our minds toward divine mysteries."

In the same spirit, but humbly halting afar after this illustrious man, I should be sorry to permit this book to go out to the world without a word to remove the impression which some who read it, and may believe it, may form, that such a vast catastrophe as I have depicted militates against the idea that God rules and cares for his world and his creatures. It will be asked, If "there is a special providence even in the fall of a sparrow," how could He have permitted such a calamity as this to overtake a beautiful, populous, and perhaps civilized world?

Here we fall again upon the great debate of Job, and we may answer in the words which the author of that book puts into the mouth of God himself, when from out the whirlwind he answered him:

"Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him "He that reproveth God, let him answer."

In other words, Who and what is man to penetrate the counsels and purposes of the Creator; and who are you, Job?--

"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare it, if thou hast understanding.

"Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who has stretched the line upon it?

"Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner-stone thereof?

"When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."

Consider, Job, the littleness of man, the greatness of the universe; and what right have you to ask Him, who made all this, the reasons for his actions?

And this is a sufficient answer: A creature seventy inches long prying into the purposes of an Awful Something, whose power ranges so far that blazing suns are seen only as mist-specks!

But I may make another answer:

Although it seems that many times have comets smitten the earth, covering it with dris, or causing its rocks to boil, and its waters to ascend into the heavens, yet, considering all life, as revealed in the fossils, from the first cells unto this day, nothing has perished that was worth preserving.

So far as we can judge, after every cataclysm the world has risen to higher levels of creative development.

If I am right, despite these incalculable tons of matter piled on the earth, despite heat and cyclones and darkness and ice and floods, not even a tender tropical plant fit to adorn or sustain man's life was blotted out; not an animal valuable for domestication was exterminated; and not even the great inventions which man had attained to, during the Tertiary Age, were lost. Nothing died but that which stood in the pathway of man's development,--the monstrous animals, the Neanderthal races, the half-human creatures intermediate between man and the brute. The great centers of human activity to-day in Europe and America are upon the Drift-deposits; the richest soils are compounded of the so-called glacial clays. Doubtless, too, the human brain was forced during the Drift Age to higher reaches of development under the terrible ordeals of the hour.

Surely, then, we can afford to leave God's planets in God's hands. Not a particle of dust is whirled in the funnel of the cyclone but God identifies it, and has marked its path.

If we fall again upon

"Axe-ages, sword-ages,
Wind-ages, murder-ages--

if "sensual sins grow huge"; if "brother spoils brother" if Sodom and Gomorrah come again--who can say that God may not bring out of the depths of space a rejuvenating comet?

Be assured of one thing--this world tends now to a deification of matter.

Dives says: "The earth is firm under my feet; I own my possessions down to the center of the earth and up to the heavens. If fire sweeps away my houses, the insurance company reimburses me; if mobs destroy them, the government pays me; if civil war comes, I can convert them into bonds and move away until the storm is over; if sickness comes, I have the highest skill at my call to fight it back; if death comes, I am again insured, and my estate makes money by the transaction; and if there is another world than this, still am I insured: I have taken out a policy in the ----- church, and pay my premiums semiannually to the minister."

And Dives has an unexpressed belief that heaven is only a larger Wall Street, where the millionaires occupy the front benches, while those who never had a bank account on earth sing in the chorus.

Speak to Dives of lifting up the plane of all the underfed, under-paid, benighted millions of the earth--his fellow-men--to higher levels of comfort, and joy, and intelligence--not tearing down any but building up all--and Dives can not understand you.

Ah, Dives! consider, if there is no other life than this, the fate of these uncounted millions of your race! What does existence give to them? What do they get out of all this abundant and beautiful world?

To look down the vista of such a life as theirs is like gazing into one of the corridors of the Catacombs: an alley filled with reeking bones of dead men; while from the cross-arches, waiting for the poor man's coming on, ghastly shapes look out:--sickness and want and sin and grim despair and red-eyed suicide.

Put yourself in his place, Dives, locked up in such a cavern as that, and the key thrown away!

Do not count too much, Dives, on your lands and houses and parchments; your guns and cannon and laws; your insurance companies and your governments. There may be even now one coming from beyond Arcturus, or Aldebaran, or Coma Berenices, with glowing countenance and horrid hair, and millions of tons of dris, to overwhelm you and your possessions, and your corporations, and all the ant-like devices of man in one common ruin.

Build a little broader, Dives. Establish spiritual relations. Matter is not everything. You do not deal in certainties. You are but a vitalized speck, filled with a fraction of God's delegated intelligence, crawling over an egg-shell filled with fire, whirling madly through infinite space, a target for the bombs of a universe.

Take your mind off your bricks and mortar, and put out your tentacles toward the great spiritual world around you. Open communications with God. You can not help God. For Him who made the Milky Way you can do nothing. But here are his creatures. Not a nerve, muscle, or brain-convolution of the humblest of these but duplicates your own; you excel them simply in the coordination of certain inherited faculties which have given you success. Widen your heart. Put your intellect to work to so readjust the values of labor, and increase the productive capacity of Nature, that plenty and happiness, light and hope, may dwell in every heart, and the Catacombs be closed for ever.

And from such a world God will fend off the comets with his great right arm, and the angels will exult over it in heaven.

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART IV

Conclusions

CHAPTER VI

THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF OF MANKIND

THERE are some thoughts and opinions which we seem to take by inheritance; we imbibe them with our mothers' milk; they are in our blood; they are received insensibly in childhood.

We have seen the folk-lore of the nations, passing through the endless and continuous generation of children, unchanged from the remotest ages.

In the same way there is an untaught but universal feeling which makes all mankind regard comets with fear and trembling, and which unites all races of men in a universal belief that some day the world will be destroyed by fire.

There are many things which indicate that a far-distant, prehistoric race existed in the background of Egyptian and Babylonian development, and that from this people, highly civilized and educated, we have derived the arrangement of the heavens into constellations, and our divisions of time into days, weeks, years, and centuries. This people stood much nearer the Drift Age than we do. They understood it better. Their legends and religious beliefs were full of it. The gods carved on Hindoo temples or painted on the walls of Assyrian, Peruvian, or American structures, the flying dragons, the winged gods, the winged animals, Gucumatz, Rama, Siva, Vishnu, Tezcatlipoca, were painted in the very colors of the clays which came from the disintegration of the granite, "red, white, and blue," the very colors which distinguished the comet; and they are all reminiscences of that great monster. The idols of the pagan world are, in fact, congealed history, and will some day be intelligently studied as such.

Doubtless this ancient astronomical, zodiac-building, and constellation-constructing race taught the people the true doctrine of comets; taught that the winding serpent, the flying dragon, the destructive winged dog, or wolf, or lion, whose sphinx-like images now frown upon us from ancient walls and door-ways, were really comets; taught how one of them had actually struck the earth; and taught that in the lapse of ages another of these multitudinous wanderers of space would again encounter our globe, and end all things in one universal conflagration.

And down through the race this belief has come, and down through the race it will go, to the consummation of time.

We find this "day of wrath" prefigured in the words of Malachi, (chap. iv, v. 1):

"1. For behold the day cometh that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.

"2. But unto you that fear my name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.

"3. And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the Lord of hosts."

We find the same great catastrophe foretold in the book of Revelation, (chap. xii, v. 3):

"And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.

"4. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth."

And again, (chap. vi):

"12. And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;

"13. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

"14. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

"15. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman and every freeman, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;

"16. And said to the mountains and the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb

17. For the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?"

Here we seem to have the story of Job over again, in this prefiguration of the future.

The Ethiopian copy of the apocryphal book of Enoch contains a poem, which is prefixed to the body of that work, and which the learned author of "Nimrod" supposes to be authentic. It certainly dates from a vast antiquity. It is as follows:

"Enoch, a righteous man, who was with God, answered and spoke while his eyes were open, and while he saw a holy vision in the heavens. . . .

"Upon this account I spoke, and conversed with him who will go forth from his habitation, the holy and mighty One, the God of the world.

"Who will hereafter tread upon the mountain Sinai, and appear with his hosts, and he manifested in the strength of his power from heaven.

"All shall be afraid, and the watchers be terrified. Great fear and trembling shall seize even to the ends of the earth.

"The lofty mountains shall be troubled, and the exalted hills depressed, melting like honeycomb in the flame.

"The earth shall be immerged, and all things which are in it perish. . . .

"He shall preserve the elect, and toward them exercise clemency. . . . The whole earth is full of water."

This is either history or prophecy.

In the Second Epistle General of Peter, (chap. iii,) we have some allusions to the past, and some prophecies based upon the past, which are very curious:

Verse 5. "For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water."

That is to say, the earth was, as in Ovid and Ragnarok, and the legends generally, an island, "standing out of the water and in the water."

Verse 6. "Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished."

This seems to refer to the island Atlantis, "overflowed with water," and destroyed, as told by Plato; thereby forming a very distinct connection between the Island of Poseidon and the Deluge of Noah.

We read on:

Verse 7. "But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men."

Verse 10. "But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up."

The Gothic mythology tells us that Surt, with his flaming sword, "shall come at the end of the world; he shall vanquish all the gods; he shall give up the universe a prey to the flames."

This belief in the ultimate destruction of the world and all its inhabitants by fire was found among the American races as well as those of the Old World:

"The same terror inspired the Peruvians at every eclipse; for some day--taught the Amantas--the shadow will veil the sun for ever, and land, moon, and stars will be wrapped in a devouring conflagration, to know no regeneration." [1]

The Algonquin races believed that some day Michabo "will stamp his foot on the ground, flames will burst forth to consume the habitable land; only a pair, or only, at most, those who have maintained inviolate the institutions he ordained, will he protect and preserve to inhabit the new world he will then fabricate."[2]

Nearly all the American tribes had similar presentiments. The Chickasaws, the Mandans of the Missouri, the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, the Muyscas of Bogota, the Botocudos of Brazil, the Araucanians of Chili, the Winnebagoes, all have possessed such a belief from time immemorial. The Mayas of Yucatan had a prediction which Father Lizana, curof Itzamal, preserved in the Spanish language:

"At the close of the ages, it hath been decreed,
Shall perish and vanish each weak god of men,
And the world shall be purged with ravening fire."

We know that among our own people, the European races, this looking forward to a conflagration which is to end all things is found everywhere; and that everywhere a comet is regarded with terror. It is a messenger of woe and disaster; it is a dreadful threat shining in the heavens; it is "God's rod," even as it was in Job's day.

[1. Brinton's "Myths," p. 235.

2. Ibid.]

I could fill pages with the proofs of the truth of this statement.

An ancient writer, describing the great meteoric shower of the year 1202, says:

"The stars flew against one another like a scattering swarm of locusts, to the right and left; this phenomenon lasted until daybreak; people were thrown into consternation and cried to God, the Most High, with confused clamor." [1]

The great meteoric display of 1366 produced similar effects. An historian of the time says:

"Those who saw it were filled with such great fear and dismay that they were astounded, imagining that they were all dead men, and that the end of the world had come." [2]

How could such a universal terror have fixed itself in the blood of the race, if it had not originated from some great primeval fact? And all this terror is associated with a dragon.

And Chambers says:

"The dragon appears in the mythical history and legendary poetry of almost every nation, as the emblem of the destructive and anarchical principle; . . . as misdirected physical force and untamable animal passions. . . . The dragon proceeds openly to work, running on its feet with expanded wings, and head and tail erect, violently and ruthlessly outraging decency and propriety, spouting fire and fury from both mouth and tail, and wasting and devastating the whole land." [3]

This fiery monster is the comet.

[1. Popular Science Monthly," June, 1882, p. 193.

2. Ibid., p. 193.

3. "Chambers's Encyclopaedia," vol. iii, p. 655.]

And Milton speaks from the same universal inspiration when he tells us:

"A comet burned,
That fires the length of Ophiucus huge
In th' arctic sky, and from its horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war."

And in the Shakespeare plays [1] we read:

"Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky;
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars."

Man, by an inherited instinct, regards the comet as a great terror and a great foe; and the heart of humanity sits uneasily when one blazes in the sky. Even to the scholar and the scientist they are a puzzle and a fear; they are erratic, unusual, anarchical, monstrous--something let loose, like a tiger of the heavens, athwart an orderly, peaceful, and harmonious world. They may be impalpable and harmless attenuations of gas, or they way be loaded with death and ruin; but in any event man can not contemplate them without terror.

[1. 1 Henry VI, 1, 1.]

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART IV

Conclusions

CHAPTER IV

OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED

LET ME consider, briefly, those objections to my theory which have probably presented themsevles {sic} to some of my readers.

First, it may be said:

"We don't understand you. You argue that there could not have been such an ice-age as the glacialists affirm, and yet you speak of a period of cold and ice and snow."

True: 'but there is a great difference between such a climate as that of Scotland, damp and cold, snowy and blowy, and a continental ice-sheet, a mile or two thick, reaching from John o' Groat's House to the Mediterranean. We can see that the oranges of Spain can grow to-day within a comparatively short distance of Edinburgh; but we can not realize that any tropical or semitropical plant could have survived in Africa when a precipice of ice, five thousand feet high, frowned on the coast of Italy; or that any form of life could have survived on earth when the equator in South America was covered with a continental ice-sheet a mile in thickness, or even ten feet in thickness. We can conceive of a glacial age of snow-storms, rains, hail, and wind--a terribly trying and disagreeable climate for man and beast--but we can not believe that the whole world was once in the condition that the dead waste of ice-covered Greenland is in now.

Secondly, it may be said--

"The whole world is now agreed that ice produced the Drift; what right, then, has any one man to set up a different theory against the opinions of mankind? "

One man, Mohammed said, with God on his side, is a majority; and one man, with the truth on his side, must become a majority.

All recognized truths once rested, solitary and alone, in some one brain.

Truth is born an acorn, not an oak.

The Rev. Sydney Smith once said that there was a kind of men into whom you could not introduce a new idea without a surgical operation. He might have added that, when you had once forced an idea into the head of such a man, you could not deliver him of it without instruments.

The conservatism of unthinkingness is one of the potential forces of the world. It lies athwart the progress of mankind like a colossal mountain-chain, chilling the atmosphere on both sides of it for a thousand miles. The Hannibal who would reach the eternal city of Truth on the other side of these Alps must fight his way over ice and hew his way through rocks.

The world was once agreed that the Drift was due to the Deluge. It abandoned this theory, and then became equally certain that it came from icebergs. This theory was, in turn, given up, and mankind were then positive that glaciers caused the Drift. But the glaciers were found to be inadequate for the emergency; and so the continents were lifted up fifteen hundred feet, and the ice-sheets were introduced. And now we wait to hear that the immense ice-masses of the Himalayas have forsaken their elevations and are moving bodily over the plains of India, grinding up the rocks into clay and gravel as they go, before we accept a theory which declares that they once marched over the land in this fashion from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn, from Spitzbergen to Spain.

The universality of an error proves nothing, except that the error is universal. The voice of the people is only the voice of God in the last analysis. We can safely appeal from Caiaphas and Pilate to Time.

But, says another:

"We find deep grooves or striations under the glaciers of to-day; therefore the glaciers caused the grooves."

But we find striations on level plains far remote from mountains, where the glaciers could not have been; therefore the glaciers did not cause the striations. "A short horse is soon curried." Superposition is not paternity. A porcelain nest-egg found under a hen is no proof that the hen laid it.

But, says another

"The idea of a comet encountering the earth, and covering it with dris, is so stupendous, so out of the usual course of nature, I refuse to accept it."

Ah, my friend, you forget that those Drift deposits, hundreds of feet in thickness, are there. They are out of the usual course of nature. It is admitted that they came suddenly from some source. If you reject my theory, you do not get clear of the phenomena. The facts are a good deal more stupendous than the theory. Go out and look at the first Drift deposit; dig into it a hundred feet or more; follow it for a few hundred miles or more; then come back, and scratch your head, and tell me where it came from! Calculate how many cart-loads there are of it, then multiply this by the area of your own continent, and multiply that again by the area of two or three more continents, and then again tell me where it came from!

Set aside my theory as absurd, and how much nearer are you to solving the problem? If neither waves, nor icebergs, nor glaciers, nor ice-sheets, nor comets, produced this world-cloak of dris, where did it come from?

Remember the essential, the incontrovertible elements of the problem:

1. Great heat.

2. A sudden catastrophe.

3. Great evaporation of the seas and waters.

4. Great clouds.

5. An age of floods and snows and ice and torrents.

6. The human legends.

Find a theory that explains and embraces all these elements, and then, and not until then, throw mine aside.

Another will say:

"But in one place you give us legends about an age of dreadful and long-continued heat, as in the Arabian tale, where no rain is said to have fallen for seven years; and in another place you tell us of a period of constant rains and snows and cold. Are not these statements incompatible?"

Not at all. This is a big globe we live on: the tropics are warmer than the poles. Suppose a tremendous heat to be added to our natural temperature; it would necessarily make it hotter on the equator than at the poles, although it would be warm everywhere. There can be no clouds without condensation, no condensation without some degree of cooling. Where would the air cool first? Naturally at the points most remote from the equator, the poles. Hence, while the sun was still blazing in the uncovered heavens of the greater part of the earth, small caps of cloud would form at the north and south poles, and shed their moisture in gentle rain. As the heat brought to the earth by the comet was accidental and adventitious, there would be a natural tendency to return to the pre-comet condition. The extraordinary evaporation would of itself have produced refrigeration. Hence the cloud-caps would grow and advance steadily toward the equator, casting down continually increasing volumes of rain. Snow would begin to form near the poles, and it too would advance. We would finally have, down to say the thirty-fifth degree of north and south latitude, vast belts of rain and snow, while the equator would still be blazing with the tropical heat which would hold the condensation back. Here, then, we would have precisely the condition of things described in the "Younger Edda" of the Northmen:

"Then said Jafnhar: 'All that part of Ginungagap' (the Atlantic) 'that turns toward the north was filled with thick, heavy ice and rime,' (snow,) 'and everywhere within were drizzling gusts and rain. But the south part of Ginungagap was lighted up by the glowing sparks that flew out of Muspelheim' (Africa?). Added Thride: 'As cold and all things grim proceeded from Niflheim, so that which bordered on Muspelheim was hot and bright, and Ginungagap' (the Atlantic near Africa?) 'was as warm and mild as windless air.'"

Another may say:

"But how does all this agree with your theory that the progenitors of the stock from which the white, the yellow, and the brown races were differentiated, were saved in one or two caverns in one place? How did they get to Africa, Asia, and America?"

In the first place, it is no essential part of my case that man survived in one place or a dozen places; it can not, in either event, affect the question of the origin of the Drift. It is simply an opinion of my own, open to modification upon fuller information. If, for instance, men dwelt in Asia at that time, and no Drift deposits fell upon Asia, races may have survived there; the negro may have dwelt in India at that time; some of the strange Hill-tribes of China and India may have had no connection with Lif and Lifthraser.

But if we will suppose that the scene of man's survival was in that Atlantic island, Atlantis, then this would follow:

The remnant of mankind, whether they were a single couple, like Lif and Lifthraser; or a group of men and women, like Job and his companions; or a numerous party, like that referred to in the Navajo and Aztec legends, in any event, they would not and could not stay long in the cave. The distribution of the Drift shows that it fell within twelve hours; but there were probably several days thereafter during which the face of the earth was swept by horrible cyclones, born of the dreadful heat. As soon, however, as they could safely do so, the remnant of the people must have left the cave; the limited nature of their food-supplies would probably drive them out. Once outside, their condition was pitiable indeed. First, they encountered the great heat; the cooling of the atmosphere had not yet begun; water was a pressing want. Hence we read in the legends of Mimer's well, where Odin pawned his eye for a drink. And we are told, in an American legend, of a party who traveled far to find the life-giving well, and found the possessor sitting over it to hide it. It was during this period that the legends originated which refer to the capture of the cows and their recovery by demi-gods, Hercules or Rama.

Then the race began to wander. The world was a place of stones. Hunger drove them on. Then came the clouds, the rains, the floods, the snows, the darkness; and still the people wandered. The receded ocean laid bare the great ridges, if they had sunk in the catastrophe, and the race gradually spread to Europe, Africa, and America.

"But," says one, "how long did all this take?

Who shall say? It may have been days, weeks, months, years, centuries. The Toltec legends say that their ancestors wandered for more than a hundred years in the darkness.

The torrent-torn face of the earth; the vast rearrangement of the Drift materials by rivers, compared with which our own rivers are rills; the vast continental regions which were evidently flooded, all testify to an extraordinary amount of moisture first raised up from the seas and then cast down on the lands. Given heat enough to raise this mass, given the cold caused by its evaporation, given the time necessary for the great battle between this heat and this condensation, given the time to restore this body of water to the ocean, not once but many times,--for, along the southern border of the floods, where Muspelheim. and Niflheim met, the heat must have sucked up the water as fast almost as it fell, to fall again, and again to be lifted up, until the heat-area was driven back and water fell, at last, everywhere on the earth's face, and the extraordinary evaporation ceased,--this was a gigantic, long-continued battle.

But it may be asked:

"Suppose further study should disclose the fact that the Drift is found in Siberia and the rest of Asia, and over all the world, what then? "

It will not disprove my theory. It will simply indicate that the dris did not, as I have supposed, strike the earth instantaneously, but that it continued to fall during twenty-four hours. If the comet was split into fragments, if there was the "Midgard-Serpent" as well as the "Fenris Wolf" and "the dog Garm," they need not necessarily have reached the earth at the same time.

Another says:

"You supposed in your book, 'Atlantis,' that the Glacial Age might have been caused by the ridges radiating from Atlantis shutting off the Gulf Stream and preventing the heated waters of the tropics from reaching the northern shores of the world."

True; and I have no doubt that these ridges did play an important part in producing climatic changes, subsequent to the Drift Age, by their presence or absence, their elevation or depression; but on fuller investigation I find that they are inadequate to account for the colossal phenomena of the Drift itself--the presence of the clay and gravel, the great heat and the tremendous downfall of water.

It may be asked,

"How does your theory account for the removal of great blocks, weighing many tons, for hundreds of miles from their original site?

The answer is plain. We know the power of the ordinary hurricanes of the earth. "The largest trees are uprooted, or have their trunks snapped in two; and few if any of the most massive buildings stand uninjured." [1]If we will remember the excessive heat and the electrical derangements that must have accompanied the Drift Age, we can realize the tremendous winds spoken of in many of the legends. We have but to multiply the hurricane of the West Indies, or the cyclone of the Mississippi Valley, a hundred or a thousand fold, and we shall have power enough to move all the blocks found scattered over the face of the Drift deposits or mixed with its material.

[1. Appletons' "American Cyclopia," vol. ix, p. 80.]

Another asks:

"How do you account for the fact that this Drift material does not resemble the usual aolites, which are commonly composed of iron, and unlike the stones of the earth?"

I nave shown that aolites have fallen that did not contain any iron, and that could not be distinguished from the material native to the earth. And it must be remembered that, while the shining meteoroids that blaze in periodical showers from radiant points in the sky are associated with comets, and are probably lost fragments of comet-tails, these meteoroids do not reach the earth, but are always burned out, far up in our atmosphere, by the friction produced by their motion. The iron aolite is of different origin. It may be a product of space itself, a condensation of metallic gases. The fact that it reaches the earth without being consumed would seem to indicate that it belongs at a lower level than the meteoric showers, and has, consequently, a less distance to fall and waste.

And these views are confirmed by a recent writer, [1]who, after showing that the meteoroids, or shooting-stars, are very different from meteorites or aolites, and seldom or never reach the earth, proceeds to account for the former. He says:

"Many theories have been advanced in the past to account for these strange bodies, but the evidence now accumulated proves beyond reasonable doubt that they are near relatives, and probably the dris of comets.

"Tempel's comet is now known to be traveling in the same orbit as the November meteors, and is near the head of the train, and it appears, in like manner, that the second comet of 1862 (Swift's comet) is traveling in the orbit of the August meteors. And the first comet of 1881 seems to be similarly connected with the April meteors. . . .

[1. Ward's "Science Bulletin," E. E. II., 1882, p. 4.]

"Although few scientific men now question a relationship between comets and the ordinary meteors, there are those, and among them some of our ablest men, who think that the large meteors, or bolides, and aolites, may be different astronomically, and perhaps physically, from the ordinary shooting-stars, and in the past some contended that they originated in our atmosphere others that they were ejected from terrestrial volcanoes. . . And at the present time the known facts, and all scientific thought, seem to point to the conclusion that the difference between them and ordinary shooting-stars is analogous to that between rain and mist, and, in addition to the reasons already given for connecting them with comets, may be mentioned the fact that meteorites bring with them carbonic acid, which is known to form so prominent a part of comets' tails; and if fragments of meteoric iron or stone be heated moderately in a vacuum, they yield up gases consisting of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and the spectrum of these gases corresponds to the spectrum of a cornet's coma and tail.

"By studying their microscopical structure, Mr. Sorby has been able to determine that the material was at one time certainly in a state of fusion; and that the most remote condition of which we have positive evidence was that of small, detached, melted globules, the formation of which can not be explained in a satisfactory manner, except by supposing that their constituents were originally in the state of vapor, as they now exist in the atmosphere of the sun; and, on the temperature becoming lower, condensed into these "ultimate cosmical particles." These afterward collected into larger masses, which have been variously changed by subsequent metamorphic action, and broken up by repeated mutual impact, and often again collected together and solidified. The meteoric irons are probably those portions of the metallic constituents which were separated from the rest by fusion when the metamorphism was carried to that extreme point.'"

But if it be true, as is conceded, that all the planets and comets of the solar system were out-throwings from the sun itself, then all must be as much of one quality of material as half a dozen suits of clothes made from the same bolt of cloth. And hence our-brother-the-comet must be made of just such matter as our earth is made of. And hence, if a comet did strike the earth and deposited its ground-up and triturated material upon the earth's surface, we should find nothing different in that material from earth-substance of the same kind.

But, says another:

"If the Drift fell from a comet, why would not this clay-dust and these pebbles have been consumed before reaching the earth by the friction of our atmosphere just as we have seen the meteoroids consumed; or, if not entirely used up, why would these pebbles not show a fused surface, like the iron aolites? "

Here is the difference: a meteorite, a small or large stone, is detached, isolated, lone-wandering, lost in space; it comes within the tremendous attractive power of our globe; it has no parental attraction to restrain it; and it rushes headlong with lightning-like rapidity toward the earth, burning itself away as it falls.

But suppose two heavenly bodies, each with its own center of attraction, each holding its own scattered materials in place by its own force, to meet each other; then there is no more probability of the stones and dust of the comet flying to the earth, than there is of the stones and dust of the earth flying to the comet. And the attractive power of the comet, great enough to bold its gigantic mass in place through the long reaches of the fields of space, and even close up to the burning eye of the awful sun itself, holds its dust and pebbles and bowlders together until the very moment of impact with the earth. In short, they, the dust and stones, do not continue to follow the comet, because the earth has got in their way and arrested them. It was this terrific force of the comet's attraction, represented in a fearful rate of motion, that tore and pounded and scratched and furrowed our poor earth's face, as shown in the crushed and striated rocks under the Drift. They would have gone clean through the earth to follow the comet, if it had been possible.

If we can suppose the actual bulk of the comet to have greatly exceeded the bulk of the earth, then the superior attraction of the comet may have shocked the earth out of position. It has already been suggested that the inclination of the axis of the earth may have been changed at the time of the Drift; and the Esquimaux have a legend that the earth was, at that time, actually shaken out of its position. But upon this question I express no opinion.

But another may say:

"Your theory is impossible; these dense masses of clay and gravel could not have fallen from a comet, because the tails of comets are composed of material so attenuated that sometimes the stars are seen through them."

Granted: but remember that the clay did not come to the earth as clay, but as a finely comminuted powder or dust; it packed into clay after having been mixed with water. The particles of this dust must have been widely separated while in the comet's tail; if they had not been, instead of a deposit of a few hundred feet, we should have had one of hundreds of miles in thickness. We have seen, (page 94, ante,) that the tail of one comet was thirteen million miles broad; if the particles of dust composing that tail had been as minute as those of clay-dust, and if they had been separated from each other by many feet in distance, they would still have left a deposit on the face of any object passing through them much greater than the Drift. To illustrate my meaning: you ride on a summer day a hundred miles in a railroad-car, seated by an open window. There is no dust perceptible, at least not enough to obscure the landscape; yet at the end of the journey you find yourself covered with a very evident coating of dust. Now, suppose that, instead of traveling one hundred miles, your ride had been prolonged a million miles, or thirteen million miles; and, instead of the atmosphere being perfectly clear, you had moved through a cloud of dust, not dense enough to intercept the light of the stars, and yet dense enough to reflect the light of the sun, even as a smoke-wreath reflects it, and you can readily see that, long before you reached the end of your journey, you would be buried alive under hundreds of feet of dust. To creatures like ourselves, measuring our stature by feet and inches, a Drift-deposit three hundred feet thick is an immense affair, even as a deposit a foot thick would be to an ant; but, measured on an astronomical scale, with the foot-rule of the heavens, and the Drift is no more than a thin coating of dust, such as accumulates on a traveler's coat. Even estimating it upon the scale of our planet, it is a mere wrapping of tissue-paper thickness. In short, it must be remembered that we are an infinitely insignificant breed of little creatures, to whom a cosmical dust-shower is a cataclysm.

And that which is true of the clay-dust is true of the gravel. At a million miles' distance it, too, is dust; it runs in lines or streaks, widely separated; and the light shines between its particles as it does through the leaves of the trees

"And glimmering through the groaning trees
Kirk Alloway seems in a blaze;
Through every bore the beams are glancing."

But another says:

"Why do you think the finer parts of the material of the comet are carried farthest back from the head?"

Because the attractive power lodged in the nucleus acts with most force on the largest masses; even as the rock is not so likely to leave the earth in a wind-storm as the dust; and in the flight of the comet through space, at the rate of three hundred and sixty-six miles per second, its lighter substances would naturally trail farthest behind it; for--

"The thing that's heavy in itself
Upon enforcement flies with greatest speed."

And it would seem as if in time this trailing material of the comet falls so far behind that it loses its grip, and is lost; hence the showers of meteoroids.

Another says:

"I can not accept your theory as to the glacial clays they were certainly deposited in water, formed like silt, washed down from the adjacent continents."

I answer they were not, because:--

1. If laid down in water, they would be stratified; but they are not.

2. If laid down in water, they would be full of the fossils of the water, fresh-water shells, sea-shells, bones of fish, reptiles, whales, seals, etc.; but they are non-fossiliferous.

3. If laid down in water, they would not be made exclusively from granite. Where are the continents to be found which are composed of granite and nothing but granite?

4. Where were the continents, of any kind, from which these washings came? They must have reached from pole to pole, and filled the whole Atlantic Ocean. And how could the washings of rivers have made this uniform sheet, reaching over the whole length and half the breadth of this continent?

5. If these clays were made from land-washings, how comes it that in some places they are red, in others blue, in others yellow? In Western Minnesota you penetrate through twenty feet of yellow clay until you reach a thin layer of gravel, about an inch thick, and then pass at once, without any gradual transition, into a bed of blue clay fifty feet thick; and under this, again, you reach gravel. What separated these various deposits? The glacialists answer us that the yellow clay was deposited in fresh water, and the blue clay in salt water, and hence the difference in the color. But how did the water change instantly from salt to fresh? Why was there no interval of brackish water, during which the blue and yellow clays would have gradually shaded into each other? The transition from the yellow clay to the blue is as immediate and marked as if you were to lay a piece of yellow cloth across a piece of blue cloth. You can not take the salt out of a vast ocean, big enough to cover half a continent, in a day, a month, a year, or a century. And where were the bowl-like ridges of land that inclosed the continent, and kept out the salt water during the ages that elapsed while the yellow clay was being laid down in fresh water? And, above all, why are no such clays, blue, yellow, or red, now being formed anywhere on earth, under sheet-ice, glaciers, icebergs, or anything else? And how about the people who built cisterns, and used coins and iron implements before this silt was accumulated in the seas, a million years ago, for it must have taken that long to create these vast deposits if they were deposited as silt in the bottom of seas and lakes.

It may be asked:

"What relation, in order of time, do you suppose the Drift Age to hold to the Deluge of Noah and Deucalion? "

The latter was infinitely later. The geologists, as I have shown, suppose the Drift to have come upon the earth--basing their calculations upon the recession of the Falls of Niagara--about thirty thousand years ago. We have seen that this would nearly accord with the time given in Job, when he speaks of the position of certain constellations. The Deluge of Noah probably occurred somewhere from eight to eleven thousand years ago. Hence, about twenty thousand years probably intervened between the Drift and the Deluge. These were the "myriads of years" referred to by Plato, during which mankind dwelt on the great plain of Atlantis.

And this order of events agrees with all the legends.

In the Bible a long interval elapsed between the fall of man, or his expulsion from paradise, and the Deluge of Noah; and during this period mankind rose to civilization; became workers in the metals, musicians, and the builders of cities.

In the Egyptian history, as preserved by Plato, the Deluge of Deucalion, which many things prove to have been identical with the Deluge of Noah, was the last of a series of great catastrophes.

In the Celtic legends the great Deluge of Ogyges preceded the last deluge.

In the American legends, mankind have been many times destroyed, and as often renewed.

But it may be asked:

"Are you right in supposing that man first rose to civilization in a great Atlantic island?

We can conceive, as I have shown, mankind at some central point, like the Atlantic island, building up anew, after the Drift Age, the shattered fragments of pre-glacial civilization, and hence becoming to the post-glacial ancient world the center and apparent fountain of all cultivation. But in view of the curious discoveries made, as I have shown, in the glacial clays of the United States, further investigations may prove that it was on the North American Continent civilization was first born, and that it was thence moved eastward over the bridge-like ridges to Atlantis.

And it is, in this connection, remarkable that the Bible tells us (Genesis, chap. ii, v. 8):

"And the Lord God planted a garden eastward, in Eden; and there he put the man that he had formed."

He had first (v. 7) "formed man of the dust of the ground," and then he moves him eastward to Eden, to the garden.

And, as I have shown, when the fall of man came, when the Drift destroyed the lovely Tertiary conditions, man was again moved eastward; he was driven out of Eden, and the cherubims guarded the eastern extremity of the garden, to prevent man's return from (we will say) the shores of Atlantis. In other words, the present habitat of men is, as I have shown, according to the Bible, east of their former dwelling-place.

In the age of man's declension he moved eastward. In the age of his redemption he moves westward.

Hence, if the Bible is to be relied on, before man reached the garden of Eden, he had been created in some region west of the garden, to wit, in America; and here he may have first developed the civilization of which we find traces in Illinois, showing a metal-working race sufficiently advanced to have an alphabet and a currency.

But in all this we do not touch upon the question of where man was first formed by God.

The original birthplace of the human race who shall tell? It was possibly in some region now under the ocean, as Professor Winchell has suggested; there he was evolved during the mild, equable, gentle, plentiful, garden-age of the Tertiary; in the midst of the most favorable conditions for increasing the vigor of life and expanding it into new forms. It showed its influence by developing mammalian life in one direction into the monstrous forms of the mammoth and the mastodon, the climax of animal growth; and in the other direction into the more marvelous expansion of mentality found in man.

There are two things necessary to a comprehension of that which lies around us--development and design, evolution and purpose; God's way and God's intent. Neither alone will solve the problem. These are the two limbs of the right angle which meet at the first life-cell found on earth, and lead out until we find man at one extremity and God at the other.

Why should the religious world shrink from the theory of evolution? To know the path by which God has advanced is not to disparage God.

Could all this orderly nature have grown up out of chance, out of the accidental concatenation of atoms? As Bacon said:

"I would rather believe all the fables in the Talmud and the Koran than that this universal frame is without a mind!"

Wonderful thought! A flash of light through the darkness.

And what greater guarantee of the future can we have than evolution? If God has led life from the rudest beginnings, whose fossils are engraved, (blurred and obscured,) on the many pages of the vast geological volume, up to this intellectual, charitable, merciful, powerful world of to-day, who can doubt that the same hand will guide our posterity to even higher levels of development? If our thread of life has expanded from Cain to Christ, from the man who murders to him who submits to murder for the love of man, who can doubt that the Cain-like in the race will gradually pass away and the Christ-like dominate the planet?

Religion and science, nature and spirit, knowledge of God's works and reverence for God, are brethren, who should stand together with twined arms, singing perpetual praises to that vast atmosphere, ocean, universe of spirituality, out of which matter has been born, of which matter is but a condensation; that illimitable, incomprehensible, awe-full Something, before the conception of which men should go down upon the very knees of their hearts in adoration.