Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel

What do we dwell on? The earth. What part of the earth? The latest formations, of course. We live upon the top of a mighty series of stratified rocks, laid down in the water of...

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 e...

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 Dilu...

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...

WHAT is a glacier? It is a river of ice, crowded by the weight of mountain-ice down into some valley, along which it descends by a slow, almost imperceptible motion, due to a po...

It being apparent that glaciers were not adequate to produce the results which we find, the glacialists have fallen back upon an extraordinary hypothesis--to wit, that the whole...

IN the first place, the Drift fell upon a fair and lovely world, a world far better adapted to give happiness to its inhabitants than this storm-tossed planet on which we now li...

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 g...

Now, good reader, we have reasoned together up to this point. To be sure, I have done most of the talking, while you have indulged in what the Rev. Sydney Smith called, speaking...

It has been supposed by some that they are made of the most attenuated gases, so imponderable that if the earth were to pass through one of them we would be unconscious of the c...

READER, the evidence I am about to present will satisfy you, not only that a comet might have struck the earth in the remote past, but, that the marvel is that the earth escapes...

I shall ask the reader to follow the argument closely first, that he may see whether any part of the theory is inconsistent with the well-established principles of natural philo...

IN a primitive people the mind of one generation precisely repeats the minds of all former generations; the construction of the intellectual nature varies no more, from age to a...

If he did, he must have survived it; and he could hardly have passed through it without some remembrance of such a terrible event surviving in the traditions of the race.

I shall try to divide them, so as to represent, in their order, the several stages of the great event. This, of course, will be difficult to do, for the same legend may detail s...

THERE is in the legends of the Scandinavians a marvelous record of the coming of the Comet. It has been repeated generation after generation, translated into all languages, comm...

Here we have the burning of the world involved in the myth of Phaëton, son of Phœbus--Apollo--the Sun--who drives the chariot of his father; he can not control the horses...

THE first of these, and the most remarkable of all, is the legend of one of the Central American nations, preserved not by tradition alone, but committed to writing at some time...

I HAVE shown that man could only have escaped the fire, the poisonous gases, and the falling stones and clay-dust, by taking refuge in the water or in the deep caves of the earth.

"_From the beginning the gloomy night enveloped and obscured all things_ that were under the ether" (the clouds). "The earth was invisible on account of the darkness, but the li...

A GREAT solar-myth underlies all the ancient mythologies. It commemorates the death and resurrection of the sun. It signifies the destruction of the light by the clouds, the dar...

I TRUST that the reader, who has followed me thus far in this argument, is satisfied that the legends of mankind point unmistakably to the fact that the earth, in some remote ag...

AND when we turn to the Arabian tales, we not only see, by their identity with the Hindoo and Slavonic legends, that they are of great antiquity, dating back to the time when th...

"While he [Job] was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, _The fire of God is fallen from heaven_ and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and _consumed them_,...

"The sun is no sooner risen with a burning heat but it withereth the grass, and the flower thereof faileth, and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth, so also shall the rich...

"9. His sneezing is like the _shining of fire_, and his eyes like the eyelids of the morning." (Syriac, "His look is brilliant." Arabic, "The apples of his eyes are fiery, and h...

AND now, gathering into our hands all the light afforded by the foregoing facts and legends, let us address ourselves to this question: How far can the opening chapters of the b...

It is, of course, difficult to attain to certainties in the consideration of an age so remote as this. We are, as it were, crawling upon our hands and knees into the dark cavern...

But I think I can see that many of these legends point to an island, east of America and west of Europe, that is to say in the Atlantic Ocean, as the scene where man, or at leas...

THE deep-sea soundings, made of late years in the Atlantic, reveal the fact that the Azores are the mountaintops of a colossal mass of sunken land; and that from this center one...

"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."

There is reason to believe that the present generation has passed through the gaseous prolongation of a comet's tail, and that hundreds of human beings lost their lives, somewha...

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.

IF the reader is satisfied, from my reasoning and the facts I have adduced, that the so-called Glacial Age really represents a collision of the earth with one of these wandering...

"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,...