RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART I

The Drift

CHAPTER VIII

GREAT HEAT A PREREQUISITE

Now, it will be observed that the principal theories assigned for the Drift go upon the hypothesis that it was produced by extraordinary masses of ice--ice as icebergs, ice as glaciers, or ice in continental sheets. The scientists admit that immediately preceding this Glacial age the climate was mild and equable, and these great formations of ice did not exist. But none of them pretend to say how the ice came or what caused it. Even Agassiz, the great apostle of the ice-origin of Drift, is forced to confess:

"We have, as yet, no clew to the source of this great and sudden change of climate. Various suggestions have been made--among others, that formerly the inclination of the earth's axis was greater, or that a submersion of the continents under water might have produced a decided increase of cold; but none of these explanations are satisfactory, and science has yet to find any cause which accounts for all the phenomena connected with it." [1]

Some have imagined that a change in the position of the earth's axis of rotation, due to the elevation of extensive mountain-tracts between the poles and the equator, might have caused a degree of cold sufficient to produce the phenomena of the Drift; but Geikie says--

"It has been demonstrated that the protuberance of the earth at the equator so vastly exceeds that of any

[1. "Geological Sketches," p. 210.]

possible elevation of mountain-masses between the equator and the poles, that any slight changes which may have resulted from such geological causes could have had only an infinitesimal effect upon the. general climate of the globe."[1]

Let us reason together:--

The ice, say the glacialists, caused the Drift. What caused the ice? Great rains and snows, they say, falling on the face of the land. Granted. What is rain in the first instance? Vapor, clouds. Whence are the clouds derived? From the waters of the earth, principally from the oceans. How is the water in the clouds transferred to the clouds from the seas? By evaporation. What is necessary to evaporation? Heat.

Here, then, is the sequence:

If there is no heat, there is no evaporation; no evaporation, no clouds; no clouds, no rain; no rain, no ice; no ice, no Drift.

But, as the Glacial age meant ice on a stupendous scale, then it must have been preceded by heat on a stupendous scale.

Professor Tyndall asserts that the ancient glaciers indicate the action of heat as much as cold. He says:

"Cold will not produce glaciers. You may have the bitterest northeast winds here in London throughout the winter without a single flake of snow. Cold must have the fitting object to operate upon, and this object--the aqueous vapor of the air--is the direct product of heat. Let us put this glacier question in another form: the latent heat of aqueous vapor, at the temperature of its production in the tropics, is about 1,000 Fahr., for the latent heat augments as the temperature of evaporation descends.

A pound of water thus vaporized at the equator has absorbed one thousand times the quantity of heat which

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 98.]

would raise a pound of the liquid one degree in temperature. . . . It is perfectly manifest that by weakening the sun's action, either through a defect of emission or by the steeping of the entire solar system in space of a low temperature, we should be cutting off the glaciers at their source." [1]

Mr. Croll says:

"Heat, to produce evaporation, is just as essential to the accumulation of snow and ice as cold to produce condensation."[2]

Sir John Lubbock says:

"Paradoxical as it may appear, the primary cause of the Glacial epoch may be, after all, an elevation of the temperature in the tropics, causing a greater amount of evaporation in the equatorial regions, and consequently a greater supply of the raw material of snow in the temperate regions during the winter months." [3]

So necessary did it appear that heat must have come from some source to vaporize all this vast quantity of water, that one gentleman, Professor Frankland, [4]suggested that the ocean must have been rendered hot by the internal fires of the earth, and thus the water was sent up in clouds to fall in ice and snow; but Sir John Lubbock disposes of this theory by showing that the fauna of the seas during the Glacial period possessed an Arctic character. We can not conceive of Greenland shells and fish and animals thriving in an ocean nearly at the boiling-point.

A writer in "The Popular Science Monthly" [5]says:

"These evidences of vast accumulations of ice and snow on the borders of the Atlantic have led some theorists

[1. "Heat considered as a Mode of Motion," p. 192.

2. "Climate and Time," p. 74.

3. "Prehistoric Times," p. 401.

4. "Philosophical Magazine," 1864, p. 328.

5. July, 1876, p. 288.]

to suppose that the Ice period was attended, if not in part caused, by a far more abundant evaporation from the surface of the Atlantic than takes place at present; and it has even been conjectured that submarine volcanoes in the tropics might have loaded the atmosphere with an unusual amount of moisture. This speculation seems to me, however, both improbable and superfluous; improbable, because no traces of any such cataclysm have been discovered, and it is more than doubtful whether the generation of steam in the tropics, however large the quantity, would produce glaciation of the polar regions. The ascent of steam and heated air loaded with vapor to the altitude of refrigeration would, as it seems to me, result in the rapid radiation of the heat into space, and the local precipitation of unusual quantities of rain; and the effect of such a catastrophe would be slowly propagated and feebly felt in the Arctic and Antarctic regions.

When we consider the magnitude of the ice-sheets which, it is claimed by the glacialists, covered the continents during the Drift age, it becomes evident that a vast proportion of the waters of the ocean must have been evaporated and carried into the air, and thence cast down as snow and rain. Mr. Thomas Belt, in a recent number of the "Quarterly Journal of Science," argues that the formation of ice-sheets at the poles must have lowered the level of the oceans of the world two thousand-feet!

The mathematician can figure it out for himself: Take the area of the continents down to, say, latitude 40, on both sides of the equator; suppose this area to be covered by an ice-sheet averaging, say, two miles in thickness; reduce this mass of ice to cubic feet of water, and estimate what proportion of the ocean would be required to be vaporized to create it. Calculated upon any basis, and it follows that the level of the ocean must have been greatly lowered.

What a vast, inconceivable accession of heat to our atmosphere was necessary to lift this gigantic layer of ocean-water out of its bed and into the clouds!

The ice, then, was not the cause of the cataclysm; it was simply one of the secondary consequences.

We must look, then, behind the ice-age for some cause that would prodigiously increase the heat of our atmosphere, and, when we have found that, we shall have discovered the cause of the drift-deposits as well as of the ice.

The solution of the whole stupendous problem is, therefore, heat, not cold.

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART I

The Drift

CHAPTER IV

WAS IT CAUSED BY ICEBERGS ?

WE come now to a much more reasonable hypothesis, and one not without numerous advocates even to this day, to wit: that the drift-deposits were caused by icebergs floating down in deep water over the sunken land, loaded with dris from the Arctic shores, which they shed as they melted in the warmer seas of the south.

This hypothesis explains the carriage of enormous blocks weighing hundreds of tons from their original site to where they are now found; but it is open to many unanswerable objections.

In the first place, if the Drift had been deposited under water deep enough to float icebergs, it would present throughout unquestionable evidences of stratification, for the reason that the larger masses of stone would fall more rapidly than the smaller, and would be found at the bottom of the deposit. If, for instance, you were to go to the top of a shot-tower, filled with water, and let loose at the same moment a quantity of cannon-balls, musket-balls, pistol-balls, duck-shot, reed-bird shot, and fine sand, all mixed together, the cannon-balls would reach the bottom first, and the other missiles in the order of their size; and the deposit at the bottom would be found to be regularly stratified, with the sand and the finest shot on top. But nothing of this kind is found in the Drift, especially in the "till"; clay, sand, gravel, stones, and bowlders are all found mixed together in the utmost confusion, "higgledy-piggledy, pell-mell."

Says Geikie:

"Neither can till owe its origin to icebergs. If it had been distributed over the sea-bottom, it would assuredly have shown some kind of arrangement. When an iceberg drops its rubbish, it stands to reason that the heavier blocks will reach the bottom first, then the smaller stones, and lastly the finer ingredients. There is no such assortment visible, however, in the normal 'till,' but large and small stones are scattered pretty equally through the clay, which, moreover, is quite unstratified." [1]

This fact alone disposes of the iceberg theory as an explanation of the Drift.

Again: whenever deposits are dropped in the sea, they fall uniformly and cover the surface below with a regular sheet, conforming to the inequalities of the ground, no thicker in one place than another. But in the Drift this is not the case. The deposit is thicker in the valleys and thinner on the hills, sometimes absent altogether on the higher elevations.

"The true bowlder-clay is spread out over the region under consideration as a somewhat widely extended and uniform sheet, yet it may be said to fill up all small valleys and depressions, and to be thin or absent on ridges or rising grounds." [2]

That is to say, it fell as a snow-storm falls, driven by high winds; or as a semi-fluid mass might be supposed to fall, draining down from the elevations and filling up the hollows.

Again: the same difficulty presents itself which we found in the case of "the waves of transplantation." Where did the material of the Drift come from? On what sea-shore, in what river-beds, was this incalculable mass of clay, gravel, and stones found?

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 72.

2. "American Cyclopia," vol. vi, p. 112.]

Again: if we suppose the supply to have existed on the Arctic coasts, the question comes,

Would the icebergs have carried it over the face of the continents?

Mr. Croll has shown very clearly [1]that the icebergs nowadays usually sail down into the oceans without a scrap of dris of any kind upon them.

Again: how could the icebergs have made the continuous scratchings or stri found under the Drift nearly all over the continents of Europe and America? Why, say the advocates of this theory, the icebergs press upon the bottom of the sea, and with the stones adhering to their base they make those stri

But two things are necessary to this: First, that there should be a force great enough to drive the berg over the bottom of the sea when it has once grounded. We know of no such force. On the contrary, we do know that wherever a berg grounds it stays until it rocks itself to pieces or melts away. But, suppose there was such a propelling force, then it is evident that whenever the iceberg floated clear of the bottom it would cease to make the strive, and would resume them only when it nearly stranded again. That is to say, when the water was deep enough for the berg to float clear of the bottom of the sea, there could be no stri when the water was too shallow, the berg would not float at all, and there would be no stri The berg would mark the rocks only where it neither floated clear nor stranded. Hence we would find strionly at a certain elevation, while the rocks below or above that level would be free from them. But this is not the case with the drift-markings.

[1. "Climate and Time," p. 282.]

They pass over mountains and down into the deepest valleys; they are universal within very large areas; they cover the face of continents and disappear under the waves of the sea.

It is simply impossible that the Drift was caused by icebergs. I repeat, when they floated clear of the rocks, of course they would not mark them; when the water was too shallow to permit them to float at all, and so move onward, of course they could not mark them. The striations would occur only when the water was; just deep enough to float the berg, and not deep enough to raise the berg clear of the rocks; and but a small part of the bottom of the sea could fulfill these conditions.

Moreover, when the waters were six thousand feet deep in New England, and four thousand feet deep in Scotland, and over the tops of the Rocky Mountains, where was the rest of the world, and the life it contained?

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART I

The Drift

CHAPTER III

THE ACTION OF WAVES

WHEN men began, for the first time, to study the drift deposits, they believed that they found in them the results of the Noachic Deluge; and hence the Drift was called the Diluvium, and the period of time in which it was laid down was entitled the Diluvial age.

It was supposed that--

"Somehow and somewhere in the far north a series of gigantic waves was mysteriously propagated. These waves were supposed to have precipitated themselves upon the land, and then swept madly over mountain and valley alike, carrying along with them a mighty burden of rocks and stones and rubbish. Such deluges were called 'waves of translation.'" [1]

There were many difficulties about this theory:

In the first place, there was no cause assigned for these waves, which must have been great enough to have swept over the tops of high mountains, for the evidences of the Drift age are found three thousand feet above the Baltic, four thousand feet high in the Grampians of Scotland, and six thousand feet high in New England.

In the next place, if this deposit had been swept up from or by the sea, it would contain marks of its origin. The shells of the sea, the bones of fish, the remains of seals and whales, would have been taken up by these great deluges, and carried over the land, and have remained mingled in the dris which they deposited.

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 26.]

This is not the case. The unstratified Drift is unfossiliferous, and where the stratified Drift contains fossils they are the remains of land animals, except in a few low-lying districts near the sea.

I quote:

"Over the interior of the continent it contains no marine fossils or relics." [1]

Geikie says:

"Not a single trace of any marine organism has yet been detected in true till." [2]

Moreover, if the sea-waves made these great deposits, they must have picked up the material composing them either from the shores of the sea or the beds of streams. And when we consider the vastness of the drift-deposits, extending, as they do, over continents, with a depth of hundreds of feet, it would puzzle us to say where were the sea-beaches or rivers on the globe that could produce such inconceivable quantities of gravel, sand, and clay. The production of gravel is limited to a small marge of the ocean, not usually more than a mile wide, where the waves and the rocks meet. If we suppose the whole shore of the oceans around the northern half of America to be piled up with gravel five hundred feet thick, it would go but a little way to form the immense deposits which stretch from the Arctic Sea to Patagonia.

The stones of the "till" are strangely marked, striated, and scratched, with lines parallel to the longest diameter. No such stones are found in river-beds or on sea-shores.

Geikie says:

"We look in vain for striated stones in the gravel which the surf drives backward and forward on a beach,

[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 220.

2. "The Great Ice Age," p. 15.]

and we may search the detritus that beaches and rivers push along their beds, but we shall not find any stones at all resembling those of the till."[1]

But we need not discuss any further this theory. It is now almost universally abandoned.

We know of no way in which such waves could be formed; if they were formed, they could not find the material to carry over the land; if they did find it, it would not have the markings which are found in the Drift, and it would possess marine fossils not found in the Drift; and the waves would not and could not scratch and groove the rock-surfaces underneath the Drift, as we know they are scratched and grooved.

Let us then dismiss this hypothesis, and proceed to the consideration of the next.

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 69.]

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.]