Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, by Ignatius L. Donnelly.

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Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel,

by Ignatius L. Donnelly.

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One picks up these works of Ignatius donelly when one sees a reference, due to a vague possibility that it might actually have information about these islands that might have existed. That part, having finished his work on Atlantis, one now knows was over in less than one chapter, where he quotes Plato, his sources and legends thereof, all that's known.

It's not that the next part, surmised due to Challenger ship having conducted research, is contradictory, but that the Rest, where Donelly tries to leap over all gaps in evidence to assert that all civilisations on earth stemmed from Atlantis, and that Atlantis was the biblical Eden, thereafter using lies routinely about India (and possibly also others), tgat one is put off majorly.

Looking at contents of this book, after having read first few chapters, one begins to get the drift. Here he's discussing the Drift, one wonders why, until one sees biblical mention in contents.

So it's more of the same.

Donelly is assuming that if certain parts of the earth now warmer were once shrouded in ice sheet, so must have been all that is now colder. And the rest. This is assuming the pattern now is what it always was, and no shifting of poles or precession of axis ever occurred, which is incorrect.

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On the whole, this work is only a sequel to his thesis on Atlantis, where he argued Atlantis not only existed but was the source of all civilisation of every race except the Sub-Saharan Africans. He considers them not civilized enough to co-opt them, although he does everything of lies and frauds to claim civilisation of India as stemming from Atlantis and only incidentally existing in India due to migration. He doesn't bother considering why this civilisation didn't survive elsewhere after abrahmic onslaught, because he thinks physically forced victory proves superiority.

Here he continues with the same assault on India with lies and frauds, while attempting to prove that Atlantis survived a comet strike during which most other civilisations if any perished.

In this series of assaults against India he lies, or uses lies by missionaries from a publication titled "Bible in India", which he'd used also in the prior work, as a source.

But he crosses all possible limits of fraud here.

He claims several legends from ancient Sanskrit literature, one after a other, as really referring to comet strike suffered by earth, not what they are clearly written about, and understood by India for millennia.

He begins by coopting Varāha Avatāra as being about a comet, and lies several times in the process additionally - Brahma was only an earthly king, Mareechee and sons were genii, Varāha is a comet and not a boar, ...

Next he assaults the Samudra Manthana and claims Meru is battlefield in Atlantis where Asuras (which he says were fiends in air) were symbolical depiction of the comet battled by Gods.

His final lie is about Indra being the Sun battling Vritra who's comet, and he says Indra the Hindoo God is the supreme Buddhist God.

But the worst fraud is his third assault, which he repeats throughout the book, claiming Ramayana as depiction of sun battling comet, and the bridge the Atlantic ridge connecting lands across Atlantic to Atlantis and to one another.

He asserts that Hindus worship Rama as Sun, Ravana is comet who's stolen Sita whose name means earth so she represents earth assaulted by comet, the battle in Lanka is really over Atlantis, and it ends with Sun regaining earth and the couple loving happily ever after.

That has half a dozen whoppers. But it gets worse.

In the process of repeating this lie, he claims at one point that Krishna in Bhagawadgeeta told Arjuna the story of Adam and Heva, who he claims was Indian name of Eve, and the land connection was lost after they walked across to India, and he pretends that this wasn't a bridge built by Rāma.

He also reiterates various facts of these legends and claims they were lies made up after Aryans migrated from Atlantis to India. Rāma Setu is one such fact he categorically calls made up.

Racist arrogance is exhibited fully flagrant by Donelly, apart from antisemitism of claiming strenuously that Job wasn't a Jew because he was long before Moses.

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In PART III CHAPTER I, Donelly astounds one with this -

"But as time rolled on it was seen that the greater part of history was simply recorded legends, while all the rest represented the passions of factions, the hates of sects, or the servility and venality of historians. Men perceived that the common belief of antiquity, as expressed in universal tradition, was much more likely to be true than the written opinions of a few prejudiced individuals."

Amazing, because when one reads his earlier work on Atlantis, such understanding wasn't apparent except by its absence - he's all gung-ho therein to impose not only the fraudulent theory of Aryan migration into India, but also join missionaries in imposing bible on India, and ignore all of the wealth of treasures of Indian literature, especially those relating history of the land, as it does in legdnds, in what Europe brands myth, but has proved correct in several separate points.

"Civilization brings with it a contempt for everything which it can not understand; skepticism becomes the synonym for intelligence; men no longer repeat; they doubt; they dissect; they sneer; they reject; they invent. If the myth survives this treatment, the poets take it up and make it their stock in trade: they decorate it in a masquerade of frippery and finery, feathers and furbelows, like a clown dressed for a fancy ball; and the poor barbarian legend survives at last, if it survives at all, like the Conflagration in Ovid or King Arthur in Tennyson—a hippopotamus smothered in flowers, jewels, and laces."

"But he adds:

""Never was there a time in the history of philosophy when the character, customs, and beliefs of aboriginal man, and everything appertaining to him, were held in such high esteem by scholars as at present."

""It is now a recognized principle of philosophy that no religious belief, however crude, nor any historical tradition, however absurd, can be held by the majority of a people for any considerable time as true, without having had in the beginning some foundation in fact."[1]

"An universal myth points to two conclusions:

"First, that it is based on some fact.

"Secondly, that it dates back, in all probability, to the time when the ancestors of the races possessing it had not yet separated."

"In the next place, we must remember how impossible it is for the mind to invent an entirely new fact. "

One wonders, but is soon confronted with the familiar Donelly, in the very next chapter when he proceeds to pick at a legend from India, and lie and tear it to shreds, because it's convenient to attack a non abrahmic faith, insult Hindus, be generally as racist as he pleases.

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As we go to PART III CHAPTER III, however, we see that Donelly remains the same colonial racist, in twisting and lying in interpretations of what he borrows from India. Here he borrows third chapter of Dashāvatāra, only to change everything to suit his purpose.

He changes Brahmā, the Creator God, to a mere king, and Varāha, the third Avatāra of Vishnu, into the comet to suit his purpose, instead of what it is, the third chapter of evolution, land animals appearing on Earth.

""By the power of God there issued from the essence of Brahma a being shaped like a boar, white and exceeding small; this being, in the space of an hour, grew to the size of an elephant of the largest size, and remained in the air."

"That is to say, it was an atmospheric, not a terrestrial creature.

""Brahma was astonished on beholding this figure, and discovered, by the force of internal penetration, that it could be nothing but the power of the Omnipotent which had assumed a body and become visible. He now felt that God is all in all, and all is from him, and all in him; {p. 133} and said to Mareechee and his sons (the attendant genii): 'A wonderful animal has emanated from my essence; at first of the smallest size, it has in one hour increased to this enormous bulk, and, without doubt, it is a portion of the almighty power.'" "

Mareechee wasn't a genii, there's no such thing in India, and donelly is fraudulently imposing an Arabian concept on India. Mareechee was a sage.

"Brahma, an earthly king, was at first frightened by the terrible spectacle in the air, and then claimed that he had produced it himself!"

There's another lie, "Brahma, an earthly king", from Donnelly who is gung-ho to impose conversion by missionaries on India, so he does not refrain from borrowing Hindu legends, but lies, and refuses to admit that Brahma was the Creator God, and instead calls him "an earthly king".

But then, he lied in Atlantis about Indian and Hindus having an Adam and Heva, a blatant lie, and about their walking over from Lanka before loss of the land bridge which is denying that Rāma had built it. That whole lie was quoted from "Bible in India", which is a missionary nanufacture of lies like that,obviously.

""They were engaged in this conversation when that vara, or 'boar-form,' suddenly uttered a sound like the loudest thunder, and the echo reverberated and shook all the quarters of the universe.""

Obviously a boar.

Donelly lies in saying "vara, or 'boar-form,'", when it's Varāha, nor vara. "Vara" means a blessing, or a bridegroom, in Sanskrit, where multiple meanings of a word are norm just as several names or epithets for a person or an object is norm too.

"The legend continues:

""But still, under this dreadful awe of heaven, a certain wonderful divine confidence secretly animated the hearts of Brahma, Mareechee, and the other genii, who immediately began praises and thanksgiving. That vara (boar-form) figure, hearing the power of the Vedas and Mantras from their mouths, again made a loud noise, and became a dreadful spectacle. Shaking the full flowing mane which hung down his neck on both sides, and erecting the humid hairs of his body, he proudly displayed his two most exceedingly white tusks; then, rolling about his wine-colored (red) eyes, and erecting his tail, he descended from the region of the air, and plunged headforemost into the water. The whole body of water was convulsed by the motion, and began to rise in waves, while the guardian spirit of the sea, being terrified, began to tremble for his domain and cry for mercy.[1]"

Again he lies in saying "Brahma, Mareechee, and the other genii,", since there's no word that translates in Sanskrit to genii, while he merely is bring derogatory towards a non abrahmic faith in demoting a Creator God to king and a sage to genii.

Donelly next proceeds to Persia, and its unclear if he has a little more respect for another non abrahmic faith due to racist regard, or other. But he does begin with a "man-bull" and promptly interpret it as a line of kings, so perhaps he thinks he does.

He proceeds thence to British legends and others.

Donelly goes extensively into the Greek legend, which does speak of destruction on earth. Donelly fails to notice that the legend he quotes from India has, if it's about the comet, the comet vanish into ocean. Clearly it speaks of a time when India had not yet joined Asia, and suffered no destruction of land whatsoever.

The least he could learn here from is that Aryan invasion theory by any name is a whopper of a lie, thst Aryans belonged to India and if the culture spread elsewhere it's from India via migrations from outlying lands of influence such as Afghanistan, Persia and Central Asia, to West Asia, Greece and thence rest of the West. India retains memories of cataclysmic events that are unique to the land in the Sanskrit literature of Aryans.

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In next chapter, Ragnarok, Donelly goes extensively into the Scandinavian legend, interpreting it along the way. He comes to

""Then quivers the ash Ygdrasil, and all things in heaven and earth tremble.""

And here, for no reason except his racist need to trample on Hindus, he casually throws a lie.

"The ash Ygdrasil is the tree-of-life; the tree of the ancient tree-worship; the tree which stands on the top of the pyramid in the island-birth place of the Aztec race; the tree referred to in the Hindoo legends."

One, such a name doesn't connect to anything in Sanskrit, so if he thinks it does, he might mention the original Sanskrit name, at the very least. Two, there are famous trees in Sanskrit literature, apart from various trees and plants worshipped in India, whether as a species or as individual trees with an identity, but no concept of a tree of life as such. So he's making up a lie.

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Donelly continues with a blood-curdling account from the Eddas, the Norse legends, and it's easy enough for an outsider to see it as an interpretation of the comet strike on earth. But he hasn't seen this in perspective, when he appropriated the third chapter, Varāha Avatāra, of Dashāvatāra, for interpretation as comet strike.

The Norse Eddas account is quite graphic, and in comparison, the Hindu legend differs hugely. For one, if thus is about the comet, then obviously the Sanskrit account was by people who saw it at a distance and survived quite safe, with - even as Donelly tells- the comet plunging into the ocean after the Creatot God, Brahmā, along with Mariechi, and others, recited Veda-mantra-s, unlike the norse account of horrors.

This is true even in general. In the legends from India, that is, the Sanskrit legends, Gods always win eventually if not immediately, unlike the Norse and Gothic legends, where there are battles and Gods not only lose but die attempting to save earth from demons, wolves, serpents, et al. Also, serpents aren't demonized in India, another twist.

So - at the very least, this should tell Donelly and anyone else serious on the topic that Aryans belonged to India where humanity was safe unlike in Europe and Atlantic regions, and continent across Atlantic. That these accounts prove that Aryans and Sanskrit belonged to India, and the Aryan migration theory is a whopper of a lie by racists and invaders who sought to appropriate all that was good in India if they couldn't loot or destroy it.

For some reason, probably a negligence born of a racist disdain, it never occurred to Donelly to correlate the two legends of India that he quoted from ancient Sanskrit, and consider the order of the cataclysm her discussing in the two books, Atlantis and Ragnarok.

One he quoted in Atlantis is chronologically an earlier one, being first Avatāra of Vishnu, while one he quotes in Ragnarok is the third Avatāra of the same Vishnu.

At the very least, if one isn't so racist that one writes off all Sanskrit literature as imaginary, unrelated to logic or chronology - in which case, don't quote it! - it should occur to someone who quotes them extensively, that he's putting the biblical deluge before the comet strike.

That makes very little sense. There might have been several local and global deluges, but if there was a comet strike later, the prior deluge ought to get far less importance. Yet the bible and other legends he quotes in Atlantis don't refer to the cataclysm he describes here, and it only makes sense to assume the two were together, one leading to other.

In which case either the first Avatāra of Vishnu relates to another, very different event - very likely, since most ancient legends of Sanskrit are distinctly different from the western, Nordic ones Donelly refers to - or he's wrong assuming that the third one he quotes here is misinterpretation by him into coopting it into his comet related stories.

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March 19, 2022 - March 25, 2022.

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CONTENTS.

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PART I. THE DRIFT.

I. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DRIFT 1

II. THE ORIGIN OF THE DRIFT NOT KNOWN 8

III. THE ACTION OF WAVES 10

IV. WAS IT CAUSED BY ICEBERGS? 13

V. WAS IT CAUSED By GLACIERS? 17

VI. WAS IT CAUSED BY A CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEET? 23

VII. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE 43

VIII. GREAT HEAT A PREREQUISITE 58

PART II. THE COMET.

I. A COMET CAUSED THE DRIFT 63

II. WHAT IS A COMET? 65

III. COULD A COMET STRIKE THE EARTH? 82

IV. THE CONSEQUENCES TO THE EARTH 91 {p. iii}

PART III. THE LEGENDS.

I. THE NATURE OF MYTHS 113

II. DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT? 121

III. LEGENDS OF THE COMING OF THE COMET 132

IV. RAGNAROK 141

V. THE CONFLAGRATION OF PHAËTON 154

VI. OTHER LEGENDS OF THE CONFLAGRATION 166

VII. LEGENDS OF THE CAVE-LIFE 195

VIII. LEGENDS OF THE AGE OF DARKNESS 208

IX. THE TRIUMPH OF THE SUN 233

X. THE FALL OF THE CLAY AND GRAVEL 251

XI. THE ARABIAN MYTHS 268

XII. THE BOOK OF JOB 276

XIII. GENESIS READ BY THE LIGHT OF THE COMET 316

PART IV. CONCLUSIONS.

I. WAS PRE-GLACIAL MAN CIVILIZED? 341

II. THE SCENE OF MAN'S SURVIVAL 366

III. THE BRIDGE 376

IV. OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED 389

V. BIELA'S COMET 408

VI. THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF OF MANKIND 424

VII. THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES 431

VIII. THE AFTER-WORD 437 {p. iv}

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

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GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE DRIFT Frontispiece.

TILL OVERLAID WITH BOWLDER-CLAY 5

SCRATCHED STONE, FROM THE TILL 6

RIVER ISSUING FROM A SWISS GLACIER 19

TERMINAL MORAINE 20

GLACIER-FURROWS AND SCRATCHES AT STONY POINT, 26

LAKE ERIE DRIFT-DEPOSITS IN THE TROPICS 38

STRATIFIED BEDS IN TILL, LEITHEN WATER, 54

PEEBLESSHIRE, SCOTLAND SECTION AT JOINVILLE 54

ORBITS OF THE PERIODIC COMETS 83

ORBIT OF EARTH AND COMET 88

THE EARTH'S ORBIT 89

THE COMET SWEEPING PAST THE EARTH 92

THE SIDE OF THE EARTH STRUCK BY THE COMET 93

THE SIDE NOT STRUCK BY THE COMET 93

THE GREAT COMET OF 1811 95

CRAG AND TAIL 98

SOLAR SPECTRUM 105

SECTION AT ST. ACHEUL 122

THE ENGIS SKULL 124

THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL 125

PLUMMET FROM SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA 180 {p. v}

COMET OF 1862 137

COURSE OF DONATI'S COMET 157

THE PRIMEVAL STORM 220

THE AFRITE IN THE PILLAR 270

DAHISH OVERTAKEN BY DIMIRIAT 272

EARTHEN VASE, FOUND IN THE CAVE OF FURFOOZ, 347

BELGIUM PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE MAMMOTH 349

PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF REINDEER 350

PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE HORSE 351

SPECIMEN OF PRE-GLACIAL CARVING 352

STONE IMAGE FOUND IN OHIO 353

COPPER COIN, FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN FEET 356

UNDER GROUND, IN ILLINOIS {front}

COPPER COIN, FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN FEET 356

UNDER GROUND, IN ILLINOIS {back}

BIELA'S COMET, SPLIT IN TWO 409

SECTION ON THE SCHUYLKILL 432

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REVIEWS

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PART I. THE DRIFT.

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I. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DRIFT 1

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"And to begin: let us understand what the Drift is, before we proceed to discuss its origin.

"In the first place, it is mainly unstratified; its lower formation is altogether so. There may be clearly defined strata here and there in it, but they are such as a tempest might make, working in a dust-heap: picking up a patch here and laying it upon another there. But there are no continuous layers reaching over any large extent of country.

"Sometimes the material has been subsequently worked over by rivers, and been distributed over limited areas in strata, as in and around the beds of streams.

"But in the lower, older, and first-laid-down portion of the Drift, called in Scotland "the till," and in other countries "the hard-pan," there is a total absence of stratification.

"In the second place, although the Drift is found on the earth, it is unfossiliferous. That is to say, it contains no traces of pre-existent or contemporaneous life.

"This, when we consider it, is an extraordinary fact:

"Where on the face of this life-marked earth could such a mass of material be gathered up, and not contain any evidences of life? It is as if one were to say that he had collected the detritus of a great city, and that it showed no marks of man's life or works.

""I would reiterate," says Geikie,[3] "that nearly all the Scotch shell-bearing beds belong to the very close of the glacial period; only in one or two places have shells ever been obtained, with certainty, from a bed in the true till of Scotland. They occur here and there in bowlder-clay, and underneath bowlder-clay, in maritime districts; but this clay, as I have shown, is more recent than the till—fact, rests upon its eroded surface."

""The lower bed of the drift is entirely destitute of organic remains."[4]

"Sir Charles Lyell tells us that even the stratified drift is usually devoid of fossils:

""Whatever may be the cause, the fact is certain that over large areas in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, I might add throughout the northern hemisphere, on both sides of the Atlantic, the stratified drift of the glacial period is very commonly devoid of fossils."[5]"

"In the next place, this "till" differs from the rest of the Drift in its exceeding hardness:

""This till is so tough that engineers would much rather excavate the most obdurate rocks than attempt to remove it from their path. Hard rocks are more or less easily assailable with gunpowder, and the numerous joints and fissures by which they are traversed enable the workmen to wedge them out often in considerable lumps. But till has neither crack nor joint; it will not blast, and to pick it to pieces is a very slow and laborious process. Should streaks of sand penetrate it, water will readily soak through, and large masses will then run or collapse, as soon as an opening is made into it.""

In this "till" or "hard-pan" are found some strange and characteristic stones. They are bowlders, not water-worn, not rounded, as by the action of waves, and yet not angular—for every point and projection has been ground off. They are not very large, and they differ in this and other respects from the bowlders found in the other portions of the Drift. These stones in the "till" are always striated—that is, cut by deep lines or grooves, usually running lengthwise, or parallel to their longest diameter. ... "

"Above this clay is a deposit resembling it, and yet differing from it, called the "bowlder-clay." This is not so tough or hard. The bowlders in it are larger and more angular-sometimes they are of immense size; one at"

"Bradford, Massachusetts, is estimated to weigh 4,500,000 pounds. Many on Cape Cod are twenty feet in diameter. One at Whitingham, Vermont, is forty-three feet long by thirty feet high, or 40,000 cubic feet in bulk. In some cases no rocks of the same material are found within two hundred miles.[1]"

"These two formations—the "till" and the "bowlder-clay"—sometimes pass into each other by insensible degrees. At other times the distinction is marked. Some of the stones in the bowlder-clay are furrowed or striated, but a large part of them are not; while in the "till" the stone not striated is the rare exception.

"Above this bowlder-clay we find sometimes beds of loose gravel, sand, and stones, mixed with the remains of man and other animals. These have all the appearance of being later in their deposition, and of having been worked over by the action of water and ice.

"This, then, is, briefly stated, the condition of the Drift.

"It is plain that it was the result of violent action of some kind.

"And this action must have taken place upon an unparalleled and continental scale. One writer describes it as,

""A remarkable and stupendous period—a period so startling that it might justly be accepted with hesitation, were not the conception unavoidable before a series of facts as extraordinary as itself."[2]"

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March 08, 2022 - March 08, 2022.

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II. THE ORIGIN OF THE DRIFT NOT KNOWN 8

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"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]"

"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."

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March 08, 2022 - March 08, 2022.

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III. THE ACTION OF WAVES 10

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"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"

""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]"

"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."

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March 08, 2022 - March 09, 2022.

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IV. WAS IT CAUSED BY ICEBERGS? 13

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"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,

{p. 14}

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: 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 débris of any kind upon them.

"Again: how could the icebergs have made the continuous scratchings or striæ, 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 striæ.

"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 striæ; when the water was too shallow, the berg would not float at all, and there would be no striæ. The berg would mark the rocks only where it neither floated clear nor stranded. Hence we would find striæ only 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. They pass over mountains and down into the deepest valleys; they are [1. "Climate and Time," p. 282.]

{p. 16}

universal within very large areas; they cover the face of continents and disappear under the waves of the sea."

"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?"

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March 10, 2022 - March 19, 2022.

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V. WAS IT CAUSED By GLACIERS? 17

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"The glaciers are local in character, and comparatively few in number; they are confined to valleys having some general slope downward. The whole Alpine mass does not move down upon the plain. The movement downward is limited to these glacier-rivers.

"The glacier complies with some of the conditions of the problem. We can suppose it capable of taking in its giant paw a mass of rock, and using it as a graver to carve deep grooves in the rock below it; and we can see in it a great agency for breaking up rocks and carrying the detritus down upon the plains. But here the resemblance ends.

"That high authority upon this subject, James Geikie, says:

""But we can not fail to remark that, although scratched and polished stones occur not infrequently in the frontal moraines of Alpine glaciers, yet at the same time these moraines do not at all resemble till. The moraine consists for the most part of a confused heap of rough angular stones and blocks, and loose sand and débris; scratched

{p. 18}

stones are decidedly in the minority, and indeed a close search will often fail to show them. Clearly, then, the till is not of the nature of a terminal moraine. Each stone in the 'till' gives evidence of having been subjected to a grinding process. . . .

""We look in vain, however, among the glaciers of the Alps for such a deposit. The scratched stones we may occasionally find, but where is the clay? . . . It is clear that the conditions for the gathering of a stony clay like the I till' do not obtain (as far as we know) among the Alpine glaciers. There is too much water circulating below the ice there to allow any considerable thickness of such a deposit to accumulate."[1]"

"But it is questionable whether the glaciers do press with a steady force upon the rocks beneath so as to score them. As a rule, the base of the glacier is full of water; rivers flow from under them. ... "

" ... Mr. Dawkins state the case:

""The hypothesis upon which the southern extension is founded—that the bowlder-clays have been formed by ice melting on the land—is open to this objection, that no similar clays have been proved to have been so formed, either in the Arctic regions, where the ice-sheet has retreated, or in the districts forsaken by the glaciers in the Alps or Pyrenees, or in any other mountain-chain. . . .

"The English bowlder-clays, as a whole, differ from [1. "The Great Ice Age," pp. 70-72.]

{p. 19}

the moraine profonde in their softness, and the large area which they cover. Strata of bowlder-clay at all comparable to the great clay mantle covering the lower grounds of Britain, north of the Thames, are conspicuous by their absence from the glaciated regions of Central Europe and the Pyrenees, which were not depressed beneath the sea."

"Moreover, the Drift, especially the "till," lies in great continental sheets of clay and gravel, of comparatively uniform thickness. The glaciers could not form such sheets; they deposit their material in long ridges called "terminal moraines.""

" ... It might naturally be supposed that the smoothed, scratched, and smashed appearance of the underlying rocks was due to the rubbing and rolling of the stones under the ice of the glaciers; but, strange to say, we find that—

""The scratched and polished rock-surfaces are by no means confined to till-covered districts. They are met with everywhere and at all levels throughout the country, from the sea-coast up to near the tops of some of our higher mountains. The lower hill-ranges, such as the Sidlaws, the Ochils, the Pentlands, the Kilbarchan and Paisley Hills, and others, exhibit polished and smoothed rock-surfaces on their very crest. Similar markings streak and score the rocks up to a great height in the deep valleys of the Highlands."[1]"

""If glaciers descended, as they did, on both sides of the great Alpine ranges, then we would expect to find the same results on the plains of Northern Italy that present themselves on the low grounds of Switzerland. But this is not the case. On the plains of Italy there are no traces of the stony clay found in Switzerland and all over Europe. Neither are any of the stones of the drift of Italy scratched or striated."[2]"

This sounds like the effect related to that of continental plates moving, in this case, African plate pushing Europe and raising Alps.

"Here, then, are the objections to this theory of the glacier-origin of the Drift: I. The glaciers do not produce striated stones. II. The glaciers do not produce drift-clay. III. The glaciers could not have formed continental sheets of "till." IV. The glaciers could not have existed upon, and consequently could not have striated, the mountain-tops. V. The glaciers could not have reached to the great plains of the continents far remote from valleys, where we still find the Drift and drift-markings. VI. The glaciers are limited in number and confined in their operations, and were utterly inadequate to have produced the thousands of square miles of drift-débris which we find enfolding the world."

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VI. WAS IT CAUSED BY A CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEET? 23

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"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 north and south regions of the globe, extending from the poles to 35° or 40° of north and south latitude, were, in the Drift age, covered with enormous, continuous sheets of ice, from one mile thick at its southern margin, to three or five miles thick at the poles. As they find drift-scratches upon the tops of mountains in Europe three to four thousand feet high, and in New England upon elevations six thousand feet high, it follows, according to this hypothesis, that the ice-sheet must have been considerably higher than these mountains, for the ice must have been thick enough to cover their tops, and high enough and heavy enough above their tops to press down upon and groove and scratch the rocks. And as the striæ in Northern Europe were found to disregard the conformation of the continent and the islands of the sea, it became necessary to suppose that this polar ice-sheet filled up the bays and seas, so that one could have passed dry-shod, in that period, from France to the north pole, over a steadily ascending plane of ice."

"We have seen that the surface-rocks underneath the Drift are scored and grooved by some external force. Now we find that these markings do not all run in the same direction; on the contrary, they cross each other in an extraordinary manner. ... "

"Again: the ice-sheet theory requires an elevation in the north and a descent southwardly; and it is this descent southwardly which is supposed to have given the momentum and movement by which the weight of the superincumbent mass of ice tore up, plowed up, ground up, and smashed up the face of the surface-rocks, and thus formed the Drift and made the striæ.

"But, unfortunately, when we come to apply this theory to the facts, we find that it is the north sides of the hills and mountains that are striated, while the south sides have gone scot-free! Surely, if weight and motion made the Drift, then the groovings, caused by weight and motion, must have been more distinct upon a declivity than upon an ascent. The school-boy toils patiently and slowly up the hill with his sled, but when he descends he comes down with railroad-speed, scattering the snow before him in all directions. But here we have a school-boy that tears and scatters things going up-hill, and sneaks down-hill snail-fashion."

"If the vast deposits of sand, gravel, clay, and bowlders, which are found in Europe and America, were placed there by a great continental ice-sheet, reaching down from the north pole to latitude 35° or 40°; if it was the ice that tore and scraped up the face of the rocks and rolled the stones and striated them, and left them in great sheets and heaps all over the land—then it follows, as a matter of course, that in all the regions equally near the pole, and equally cold in climate, the ice must have formed a similar sheet, and in like manner have torn up the rocks and ground them into gravel and clay. This conclusion is irresistible. If the cold of the north caused the ice, and the ice caused the Drift, then in all the cold north-lands there must have been ice, and consequently there ought to have been Drift. If we can find, therefore, any extensive cold region of the earth where the Drift is not, then we can not escape the conclusion that the cold and the ice did not make the Drift."

" ... One of the coldest regions of the earth is Siberia. It is a vast tract reaching to the Arctic Circle; it is the north part of the Continent of Asia; it is intersected by great mountain-ranges. Here, if anywhere, we should find the Drift; here, if anywhere, was the ice-field, "the sea of ice." It is more elevated and more mountainous than the interior of North America where the drift-deposits are extensive; it is nearer the pole than New York and Illinois, covered as these are with hundreds of feet of débris, and yet there is no Drift in Siberia!

"I quote from a high authority, and a firm believer in the theory that glaciers or ice-sheets caused the drift; James Geikie says:

""It is remarkable that nowhere in the great plains of Siberia do any traces of glacial action appear to have {p. 29} been observed. If cones and mounds of gravel and great erratics like those that sprinkle so wide an area in Northern America and Northern Europe had occurred, they would hardly have failed to arrest the attention of explorers. Middendorff does, indeed, mention the occurrence of trains of large erratics which he observed along the banks of some of the rivers, but these, he has no doubt, were carried down by river-ice. The general character of the 'tundras' is that of wide, flat plains, covered for the most part with a grassy and mossy vegetation, but here and there bare and sandy. Frequently nothing intervenes to break the monotony of the landscape. . . . It would appear, then, that ill Northern Asia representatives of the glacial deposits which are met with in similar latitudes in Europe and America do not occur. The northern drift of Russia and Germany; the åsar of Sweden; the kames, eskers, and erratics of Britain; and the iceberg-drift of Northern America have, apparently, no equivalent in Siberia. Consequently we find the great river-deposits, with their mammalian remains, which tell of a milder climate than now obtains in those high latitudes, still lying undisturbed at the surface."[1]"

Why aren't they considering shifting of pole, and of axis of rotation, which might have explained Europe being polar and Siberia green then?

"There is no Drift in Siberia; no "till," no "bowlder-clay," no stratified masses of gravel, sand, and stones. There was, then, no Drift age in all Northern Asia, up to the Arctic Circle!"

"Mr. Geikie seeks to account for this extraordinary state of things by supposing that the climate of Siberia was, during the Glacial age, too dry to furnish snow to make the ice-sheet. But when it is remembered that there was moisture enough, we are told, in Northern Europe and America at that time to form a layer of ice from one to three miles in thickness, it would certainly seem that enough ought to have blown across the eastern line of European Russia to give Siberia a fair share of ice and Drift. The explanation is more extraordinary than the thing it explains. One third of the water of all the oceans must have been carried up, and was circulating around in the air, to descend upon the earth in rain and snow, and yet none of it fell on Northern Asia! And as the line of the continents separating Europe and Asia had not yet been established, it can not be supposed that the Drift ref used to enter Asia out of respect to the geographical lines.

"But not alone is the Drift absent from Siberia, and, probably, all Asia; it does not extend even over all Europe. Louis Figuier says that the traces of glacial action "are observed in all the north of Europe, in Russia, Iceland, Norway, Prussia, the British Islands, part of Germany in the north, and even in some parts of the south of Spain."[2] M. Edouard Collomb finds only a "a shred" of the glacial evidences in France, and thinks they were absent from part of Russia!"

"And, even in North America, the Drift is not found everywhere. There is a remarkable region, embracing a large area in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, which Professor J. D. Whitney[1] calls "the driftless region," in which no drift, no clays, no gravel, no rock strive or furrows are found. The rock-surfaces have not been ground down and polished. "This is the more remarkable," says Geikie, "seeing that the regions to the north, west, east, and south are all more or less deeply covered with drift-deposits."[2] And, in this region, as in Siberia, the remains of the large, extinct mammalia are found imbedded in the surface-wash, or in cracks or crevices of the limestone."

""In his valuable studies upon the diluvial flora, Count Gaston de Saporta concludes that the climate in this period was marked rather by extreme moisture than extreme cold."

"Again: where did the clay, which is deposited in such gigantic masses, hundreds of feet thick, over the continents, come from? We have seen (p. 18, ante) that, according to Mr. Dawkins, "no such clay has been proved to have been formed, either in the Arctic regions, whence the ice-sheet has retreated, or in the districts forsaken by the glaciers."

"If the Arctic ice-sheet does not create such a clay now, why did it create it centuries ago on the plains of England or Illinois?

"The other day I traveled from Minnesota to Cape May, on the shore of the Atlantic, a distance of about fifteen hundred miles. At scarcely any point was I out of sight of the red clay and gravel of the Drift: it loomed up amid the beach-sands of New Jersey; it was laid bare by railroad-cuts in the plains of New York and Pennsylvania; it covered the highest tops of the Alleghanies at Altoona; the farmers of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin were raising crops upon it; it was everywhere. If one had laid down a handful of the Wisconsin Drift alongside of a handful of the New Jersey deposit, he could scarcely have perceived any difference between them. {p. 34}

"Here, then, is a geological formation, almost identical in character, fifteen hundred miles long from east to west, and reaching through the whole length of North and South America, from the Arctic Circle to Patagonia.

"Did ice grind this out of the granite?"

Donelly gives arguments against the drift being from granite ground by ice sheet.

"Again: if these drift-deposits, these vast accumulations of sand, clay, gravel, and bowlders, were caused by a great continental ice-sheet scraping and tearing the rocks on which it rested, and constantly moving toward the sun, then not only would we find, as I have suggested in the case of glaciers, the accumulated masses of rubbish piled up in great windrows or ridges along the lines where the face of the ice-sheet melted, but we would naturally expect that the farther north we went the less we would find of these materials; in other words, that the ice, advancing southwardly, would sweep the north clear of débris to pile it up in the more southern regions. But this is far from being the case. On the contrary, the great masses of the Drift extend as far north as the land itself. In the remote, barren grounds of North America, we are told by various travelers who have visited those regions, "sand-hills and erratics appear to be as common as in the countries farther south." ... "

That would be consistent with polar shift and regression of axis.

"If the presence of the Drift proves that the country in which it is found was once covered with a body of ice thick and heavy enough by its pressure and weight to grind up the surface-rocks into clay, sand, gravel, and bowlders, then the tropical regions of the world must have been covered with such a great ice-sheet, upon the very equator; for Agassiz found in Brazil a vast sheet of "ferruginous clay with pebbles," which covers the whole country, "a sheet of drift," says Agassiz, "consisting of the same homogeneous, unstratified paste, and containing loose materials of all sorts and sizes," deep red in color, and distributed, as in the north, in uneven hills, while sometimes it is reduced to a thin deposit. It is recent in time, although overlying rocks ancient geologically. Agassiz had no doubt whatever that it was of glacial origin.

CProfessor Hartt, who accompanied Professor Agassiz in his South American travels, and published a valuable work called "The Geology of Brazil," describes drift-deposits as covering the province of Pará, Brazil, upon the equator itself. The whole valley of the Amazon is covered with stratified and unstratified and unfossiliferous {p. 38} Drift,[1] and also with a peculiar drift-clay (argile plastique bigarrée), plastic and streaked."

"And we are not without evidences that the drift-deposits are found in Africa. We know that they extend in Europe to the Mediterranean. The "Journal of the Geographical Society" (British) has a paper by George Man, F. G. S., on the geology of Morocco, in which he says:

""Glacial moraines may be seen on this range nearly eight thousand feet above the sea, forming gigantic ridges and mounds of porphyritic blocks, in some places damming up the ravines, and at the foot of Atlas are enormous mounds of bowlders."

"These mounds oftentimes rise two thousand feet above the level of the plain, and, according to Mr. Man, were produced by glaciers.

"We shall see, hereafter, that the sands bordering Egypt belong to the Drift age. The diamond-bearing gravels of South Africa extend to within twenty-two degrees of the equator.

"It is even a question whether that great desolate land, the Desert of Sahara, covering a third of the Continent of Africa, is not the direct result of this signal catastrophe. Henry W. Haynes tells us that drift-deposits are found in the Desert of Sahara, and that—

""In the bottoms of the dry ravines, or wadys, which pierce the hills that bound the valley of the Nile, I have found numerous specimens of flint axes of the type of St. Acheul, which have been adjudged to be true palæolithic implements by some of the most eminent cultivators of prehistoric science."[1]

"The sand and gravel of Sahara are underlaid by a deposit of clay."

"But we know that all life,—vegetable, animal, and human,—is derived from pre-glacial sources; therefore animal, vegetable, and human life did not perish in the Drift age; therefore an ice-sheet did not wrap the world in its death-pall; therefore the drift-deposits of the tropics were not due to an ice-sheet; therefore the drift-deposits of the rest of the world were not due to ice-sheets: therefore we must look elsewhere for their origin."

"Here, then, in conclusion, are the evidences that the deposits of the Drift are not due to continental ice-sheets:

"I. The present ice-sheets of the remote north create no such deposits and make no such markings.

"II. A vast continental elevation of land-surfaces at the north was necessary for the ice to slide down, and this did not exist.

"III. The ice-sheet, if it made the Drift markings, must have scored the rocks going up-hill, while it did not score them going down-hill.

"IV. If the cold formed the ice and the ice formed the Drift, why is there no Drift in the coldest regions of the earth, where there must have been ice?

"V. Continental ice-belts, reaching to 40° of latitude, would have exterminated all tropical vegetation. It was not exterminated, therefore such ice-sheets could not have existed.

"VI. The Drift is found in the equatorial regions of the world. If it was produced by an ice-sheet in those regions, all pre-glacial forms of life must have perished; but they did not perish; therefore the ice-sheet could not

[1. "Popular Science Monthly," April, 1874, p. 646.] {p. 42}

have covered these regions, and could not have produced the drift-deposits there found.

"In brief, the Drift is not found where ice must have been, and is found where ice could not have been; the conclusion, therefore, is irresistible that the Drift is not due to ice."

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March 20, 2022 - March 21, 2022.

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VII. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE 43

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"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 live, with its endless battle between heat and cold, between sun and ice.

"The pre-glacial world was a garden, a paradise; not excessively warm at the equator, and yet with so mild and equable a climate that the plants we now call tropical flourished within the present Arctic Circle. If some future daring navigator reaches the north pole and finds solid land there, he will probably discover in the rocks at his feet the fossil remains of the oranges and bananas of the pre-glacial age.

"That the reader may not think this an extravagant statement, let me cite a few authorities.

"This was, indeed, for America, the golden age of animals and plants, and in all respects but one—the absence of man—the country was more interesting and picturesque than now. We must imagine, therefore, that the hills and valleys about the present site of New York were covered with noble trees, and a dense undergrowth of species, for the most part different from those now living there; and that these were the homes and feeding-grounds of many kinds of quadrupeds and birds, which have long since become extinct. The broad plain which sloped gently seaward from the highlands must have been {p. 44} covered with a sub-tropical forest of-giant trees and tangled vines teeming with animal life. This state of things doubtless continued through many thousands of years, but ultimately a change came over the fair face of Nature more complete and terrible than we have language to describe."[1]

"Another says:

""At the close of the Tertiary age, which ends the long series of geological epochs previous to the Quaternary, the landscape of Europe had, in the main, assumed its modern appearance. The middle era of this age—the Miocene—was characterized by tropical plants, a varied and imposing fauna, and a genial climate, so extended as to nourish forests of beeches, maples, walnuts, poplars, and magnolias in Greenland and Spitzbergen, while an exotic vegetation hid the exuberant valleys of England."[2]

"Dr. Dawson says:

""This delightful climate was not confined to the present temperate or tropical regions. It extended to the very shores of the Arctic Sea. In North Greenland, at Atane-Kerdluk, in latitude 70° north, at an elevation of more than a thousand feet above the sea, were found the remains of beeches, oaks, pines, poplars, maples, walnuts, magnolias, limes, and vines. The remains of similar plants were found in Spitzbergen, in latitude 78° 56'."[3]"

Donelly is clearly getting ready to pounce on the reader with the biblical deluge theory, having gone here one to quote a page of various sources asking the reader to imagine the world having been an idyllic garden without humans.

"We shall see hereafter that man, possibly civilized man, dwelt in this fair and glorious world—this world that knew no frost, no cold, no ice, no snow; that he had dwelt in it for thousands of years; that he witnessed the appalling and sudden calamity which fell upon it; and that he has preserved the memory of this catastrophe to the present day, in a multitude of myths and legends scattered all over the face of the habitable earth.

"But was it sudden? Was it a catastrophe?"

"One writer says:

""The glacial action, in the opinion of the land-glacialists, was limited to a definite period, and operated simultaneously over a vast area."[1]

"And again:

""The drift was accumulated where it is by some violent action."[2]

"Louis Figuier says:

""The two cataclysms of which we have spoken surprised Europe at the moment of the development of an important creation. The whole scope of animated nature, the evolution of animals, was suddenly arrested in that part of our hemisphere over which these gigantic convulsions spread, followed by the brief but sudden submersion of entire continents. Organic life had scarcely recovered from the violent shock, when a second, and perhaps severer blow assailed it. The northern and central parts of Europe, the vast countries which extend from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and the Danube, were visited by a period of sudden and severe cold; the temperature of the polar regions seized them. The plains of Europe, but now ornamented by the luxurious vegetation developed by the heat of a burning climate, the boundless pastures on which herds of great elephants, the active horse, the robust hippopotamus, and great carnivorous animals grazed and roamed, became covered with a mantle of ice and snow."[3]

"M. Ch. Martins says:

"The most violent convulsions of the solid and liquid elements appear to have been themselves only the effects due to a cause much more powerful than the mere expansion of the pyrosphere; and it is necessary to recur, in order to explain them, to some new and bolder hypothesis than has Yet been hazarded. Some philosophers have belief

[1. American Cyclopædia," vol. vi, p. 114. 2. Ibid., vol. vi, p. 111. 3. "The World before the Deluge," p. 435.] {p. 47}

in an astronomical revolution which may have overtaken our globe in the first age of its formation, and have modified its position in relation to the sun. They admit that the poles have not always been as they are now, and that some terrible shock displaced them, changing at the same time the inclination of the axis of the rotation of the earth."[1]"

"Cuvier says, speaking of the bodies of the quadrupeds which the ice had seized, and which have been preserved, with their hair, flesh, and skin, down to our own times:

""If they had not been frozen as soon as killed, putrefaction would have decomposed them; and, on the other hand, this eternal frost could not have previously prevailed in the place where they died, for they could not have lived in such a temperature. It was, therefore, at the same instant when these animals perished that the country they inhabited was rendered glacial. These events must have been sudden, instantaneous, and without any gradation."[3]

"There is abundant evidence that the Drift fell upon a land covered with forests, and that the trunks of the trees were swept into the mass of clay and gravel, where they are preserved to this day."

"At Bloomington, Illinois, pieces of wood were found one hundred and twenty-three feet below the surface, in sinking a shaft.[2]

"And it is a very remarkable fact that none of these Illinois clays contain any fossils.[3]

"The inference, therefore, is irresistible that the clay, thus unfossiliferous, fell upon and inclosed the trees while they were yet growing.

"These facts alone would dispose of the theory that the Drift was deposited upon lands already covered with water. It is evident, on the contrary, that it was dry land, inhabited land, land embowered in forests.

"On top of the Norwich crag, in England, are found the remains of an ancient forest, "showing stumps of trees standing erect with their roots penetrating an ancient soil."[4] In this soil occur the remains of many extinct species of animals, together with those of others still living; among these may be mentioned the hippopotamus, three species of elephant, the mammoths, rhinoceros, bear, horse, Irish elk, etc.

"In Ireland remains of trees have been found in sand-beds below the till.[5]

"Dr. Dawson found a hardened peaty bed under the bowlder-clay, in Canada, which "contained many small roots and branches, apparently of coniferous trees allied to the spruces.""

""The remains of the mastodon, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and elephant are found in the pre-glacial beds of Italy."[2]

"These animals were slaughtered outright, and so suddenly that few escaped:

"Admiral Wrangel tells us that the remains of elephants, rhinoceroses, etc., are heaped up in such quantities in certain parts of Siberia that "he and his men climbed over ridges and mounds composed entirely of their bones."[3]

"We have seen that the Drift itself has all the appearance of having been the product of some sudden catastrophe:

""Stones and bowlders alike are scattered higgledy-piggledy, pell-mell, through the clay, so as to give it a highly confused and tumultuous appearance."

"Another writer says:

""In the mass of the 'till' itself fossils sometimes, but very rarely, occur. Tusks of the mammoth, reindeer-antlers, and fragments of wood have from time to time been discovered. They almost invariably afford marks of having been subjected to the same action as the stones and bowlders by which they are surrounded."[4]

"Another says:

""Logs and fragments of wood are often got at great depths in the buried gorges."[5]"

"Professor Winchell says

""Buried tree-trunks are often exhumed from the glacial drift at a depth of from twenty to sixty feet from the surface. Dr. Locke has published an account of a mass of buried drift-wood at Salem, Ohio, forty-three feet below the surface, imbedded in ancient mud. The museum of the University of Michigan contains several fragments of well-preserved tree-trunks exhumed from wells in the vicinity of Ann Arbor. Such occurrences are by no means uncommon. The encroachments of the waves upon the shores of the Great Lakes reveal whole forests of the buried trunks of the white cedar."[3]"

"Was it an extraordinary event, a world-shaking cataclysm?

"The answer to this question is plain: The Drift marks probably the most awful convulsion and catastrophe that has ever fallen upon the globe. The deposit of these continental masses of clay, sand, and gravel was but one of the features of the apalling event. In addition to this the earth at the same time was cleft with great cracks or fissures, which reached down through many miles of the planet's crust to the central fires and released the boiling rocks imprisoned in its bosom, and these poured to the surface, as igneous, intrusive, or trap-rocks. Where the great breaks were not deep enough to reach the central fires, they left mighty fissures in the surface, which, in the Scandinavian regions, are known as fiords, and which constitute a striking feature of the scenery of these northern lands; they are great canals—hewn, as it were, in the rock—with high walls penetrating from the sea far into the interior of the land. They are found in Great Britain, Maine, Nova Scotia, Labrador, Greenland, and on the Western coast of North America.

"David Dale Owen tells us that the outburst of trap-rock at the Dalles of the St. Croix came up through open fissures, breaking the continuity of strata, without tilting them into inclined planes."[1] It would appear as if the earth, in the first place, cracked into deep clefts, and the igneous matter within took advantage of these breaks to rise to the surface. It caught masses of the sandstone in its midst and hardened around them."

"In America, in Britain, and in Europe, the glacial deposits made clean work of nearly all animal life. The great mammalia, too large to find shelter in caverns, were some of them utterly swept away, while others never afterward returned to those regions. In like manner palæolithic man, man of the rude and unpolished flint implements, the contemporary of the great mammalia, the mammoth, the hippopotamus, and the rhinoceros, was also stamped out, and the cave-deposits of Europe show that there was a long interval before be reappeared in those regions. The same forces, whatever they were, which "smashed" and "pounded" and "contorted" the surface of the earth, crushed man and his gigantic associates out of existence.[2]

"But in Siberia, where, as we have seen, some of the large mammalia were caught and entombed in ice, and preserved even to our own day, there was no "smashing" and "crushing" of the earth, and many escaped the snow-sheets, and their posterity survived in that region for long ages after the Glacial period, and are supposed only to have disappeared in quite recent times. In fact, within the last two or three years a Russian exile declared that he had seen a group of living mammoths in a wild valley in a remote portion of that wilderness.

"These, then, good reader, to recapitulate, are points that seem to be established:

"I. The Drift marked a world-convulsing catastrophe. It was a gigantic and terrible event. It was something quite out of the ordinary course of Nature's operations.

"II. It was sudden and overwhelming.

"[1. "Prehistoric Times," p. 372. 2. "The Great Ice Age," p. 466.] {p. 57}

"III. It fell upon land areas, much like our own in geographical conformation; a forest-covered, inhabited land; a glorious land, basking in perpetual summer, in the midst of a golden age."

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VIII. GREAT HEAT A PREREQUISITE 58

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Donelly quotes sources arguing that extraordinary amount of heat seems necessary to have produced the ice sheets fallen as snow, but there's no logic or evidence thereof.

"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 {p. 62} 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."

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PART II. THE COMET.

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I. A COMET CAUSED THE DRIFT 63

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"First, we are to find something that instantaneously increased to a vast extent the heat of our planet, vaporized the seas, and furnished material for deluges of rain, and great storms of snow, and accumulations of ice north and south of the equator and in the high mountains.

"Secondly, we are to find something that, coming from above, smashed, pounded, and crushed "as with a maul," and rooted up as with a plow, the gigantic rocks of the surface, and scattered them for hundreds of miles from their original location. {p. 64}

"Thirdly, we are to find something which brought to the planet vast, incalculable masses of clay and gravel, which did not contain any of the earth's fossils ... which are marked after a fashion which can not be found anywhere else on earth; produced in a laboratory which has not yet been discovered on the planet.

"Fourthly, we are to find something that would produce cyclonic convulsions upon a scale for which the ordinary operations of nature furnish us no parallel.

"Fifthly, we are to find some external force so mighty that it would crack the crust of the globe like an eggshell, lining its surface with great rents and seams, through which the molten interior boiled up to the light.

"Would a comet meet all these prerequisites?"

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II. WHAT IS A COMET? 65

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"Padre Secchi, of Rome, observed, in Donati's comet, of 1858, from the 15th to the 22d of October, that the nucleus threw out intermittingly from itself appendages having the form of brilliant, coma-shaped masses of incandescent substance twisted violently backward. He accounts for these very remarkable changes of configuration by the influence first of the sun's heat upon the comet's substance as it approached toward perihelion, and afterward by the production in the luminous emanations thus generated of enormous tides and perturbation derangements. Some of the most conspicuous of these luminous developments occurred on October 11th, when the comet was at its nearest approach to the earth, and on {p. 66} October 17th, when it was nearest to the planet Venus. He has no doubt that the close neighborhood of the earth and Venus at those times was the effective cause of the sudden changes of aspect, and that those changes of aspect may be accepted as proof that the comet's substance consists of "really ponderable material."

"Mr. Lockyer used the spectroscope to analyze the light of Coggia's comet, and he established beyond question that—

""Some of the rays of the comet were sent either from solid particles, or from vapor in a state of very high condensation, and also that beyond doubt other portions of the comet's light issue from the vapor shining by its own inherent light. The light coming from the more dense constituents, and therefore giving a continuous colored spectrum, was, however, deficient in blue rays, and was most probably emitted by material substance at the low red and yellow stages of incandescence."

"Padre Secchi, at Rome, believed he saw in the comet "carbon, or an oxide of carbon, as the source of the bright luminous bands," and the Abbé Moigno asks whether this comet may not be, after all, "un gigantesque diamant volatilisé.""

"Newton, from the first, maintained that the comet is made partly of solid substance, and partly of an investment of thin, elastic vapors. If this is the case, it is manifest that the central nodule of dense substance should be capable of intercepting light when it passes in front of a more distant luminary, such as a fixed star. Comets, on this account, have been watched very narrowly whenever they have been making such a passage. On August 18, 1774, the astronomer Messier believed that he saw a second bright star burst into sight from behind the nucleus of a comet which had concealed it the instant before. Another observer, Wartmann, in the year 1828, noticed that the light of an eighth-magnitude star was temporarily quenched as the nucleus of Encke's comet passed over it."[2]

"Others, again, have held that stars have been seen through the comet's nucleus."

"When Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Urania, he thought it was a comet."

""Schiaparelli considers meteors to be dispersed portions of the comet's original substance; that is, of the substance with which the comet entered the solar domain. Thus comets would come to be regarded as consisting of a multitude of relatively minute masses."[1]"

"Says Amédée Guillemin:

""Comets form a part of our solar system. Like the. planets, they revolve about the sun, traversing with very variable velocities extremely elongated orbits."[2]

"We shall see reason to believe that they contain the same kinds of substances of which the planets are composed.

"Their orbits seem to be reminiscences of former planetary conditions:

""All the comets, having a period not exceeding seven years, travel in the same direction around the sun as the planets. Among comets with periods less than eighty years long, five sixths travel in the same direction as the planets."[3]"

"It is agreed that this globe of ours was at first a gaseous mass; as it cooled it condensed like cooling steam into a liquid mass; it became in time a molten globe of red-hot matter. As it cooled still further, a crust or shell formed around it, like the shell formed on an egg, and on this crust we dwell.

"While the crust is still plastic it shrinks as the mass within grows smaller by further cooling, and the wrinkles so formed in the crust are the depths of the ocean and the elevations of the mountain-chains.

"But as ages go on and the process of cooling progresses, the crust reaches a density when it supports itself, like a couple of great arches; it no longer wrinkles; it no longer follows downward the receding molten mass within; mountains cease to be formed; and at length we have a red-hot ball revolving in a shell or crust, with a space between the two, like the space between the dried and shrunken kernel of the nut and the nut itself.

"Volcanoes are always found on sea-shores or on islands. Why? Through breaks in the earth the sea-water finds its way occasionally down upon the breast of the molten mass; it is at once converted into gas, steam; and as it expands it blows itself out through the escape-pipe of the volcano; precisely as the gas formed by the gunpowder coming in contact with the fire of the percussion-cap, drives the ball out before it through the same passage by which it had entered. Hence, some one has said, "No water, no volcano."

"While the amount of water which so enters is small because of the smallness of the cavity between the shell of the earth and the molten globe within, this process is carried on upon a comparatively small scale, and is a safe one for the earth. But suppose the process of cooling to go on uninterruptedly until a vast space exists between the

{p. 72}

crust and the core of the earth, and that some day a convulsion of the surface creates a great chasm in the crust, and the ocean rushes in and fills up part of the cavity; a tremendous quantity of steam is formed, too great to escape by the aperture through which it entered, an explosion takes place, and the crust of the earth is blown into a million fragments.

"The great molten ball within remains intact, though sorely torn; in its center is still the force we call gravity; the fragments of the crust can not fly off into space; they are constrained to follow the master-power lodged in the ball, which now becomes the nucleus of a comet, still blazing and burning, and vomiting flames, and wearing itself away. The catastrophe has disarranged its course, but it still revolves in a prolonged orbit around the sun, carrying its broken débris in a long trail behind it.

"This débris arranges itself in a regular order: the largest fragments are on or nearest the head; the smaller are farther away, diminishing in regular gradation, until the farthest extremity, the tail, consists of sand, dust, and gases. There is a continual movement of the particles of the tail, operated upon by the attraction and repulsion of the sun. The fragments collide and crash against each other; by a natural law each stone places itself so that its longest diameter coincides with the direction of the motion of the comet; hence, as they scrape against each other they mark each other with lines or striæ, lengthwise of their longest diameter. The fine dust ground out by these perpetual collisions does not go off into space, or pack around the stones, but, still governed by the attraction of the head, it falls to the rear and takes its place, like the small men of a regiment, in the farther part of the tail.

"Now, all this agrees with what science tells us of the constitution of clay."

"Dana says:

""Meteoric stones exemplify the same chemical and crystallographic laws as the rocks of the earth, and have afforded no new element or principle of any kind."[2]

"It may be presumed, therefore, that the granite crust of the exploded globe from which some comet was created was the source of the finely triturated material which we know as clay."

"The great comet of 1858, Donati's comet, which many now living will well remember, and which was of such size that when its head was near our horizon the extremity of the tail reached nearly to the zenith, illustrated this continual movement of the material of the tail; that appendage shrank and enlarged millions of miles in length."

"Now, in this perpetual motion, this conflict, these great thrills of movement, we are to find the source of the clays which cover a large part of our globe to a depth of hundreds of feet. Where are those exposures of granite on the face of the earth from which ice or water could have ground them? Granite, I repeat, comes to the surface only in limited areas. And it must be remembered that clay is the product exclusively of granite ground to powder. The clays are composed exclusively of the products of disintegrated granite. They contain but a trace of lime or magnesia or organic matters, and these can be supposed to have been infiltrated into them after their arrival on the face of the earth.[1] Other kinds of rock, ground up, form sand. Moreover, we have seen that neither glaciers nor ice-sheets now produce such clays.

"We shall see, as we proceed, that the legends of mankind, in describing the comet that struck the earth, represent it as party-colored; it is "speckled" in one legend; spotted like a tiger in another; sometimes it is a white boar in the heavens; sometimes a blue snake; sometimes it is red with the blood of the millions that are to perish. Doubtless these separate formations, ground out of the granite, from the mica, hornblende, or feldspar, respectively, may, as I have said, under great laws, acted upon by magnetism or electricity, have arranged themselves in separate lines or sheets, in the tail of the comet, and hence we find that the clays of one region are of one color, while those of another are of a different hue. Again, we shall see that the legends represent the monster as "winding," undulating, writhing, twisting, fold over fold, precisely as the telescopes show us the comets do to-day."

"The writer from whom I have already quoted, speaking of the extraordinary comet of 1843, says:

""As the comet moves past the great luminary, it sweeps round its tail as a sword may be conceived to be held out at arm's-length, and then waved round the head, from one side to the opposite. But a sword with a blade one hundred and fifty millions of miles long must be a somewhat awkward weapon to brandish round after this fashion. Its point would have to sweep through a curve stretching out more than six hundred millions of miles; and, even with an allowance of two hours for the accomplishment of the movement, the flash of the weapon would be of such terrific velocity that it is not an easy task to conceive how any blade of connected material substance could bear the strain of the stroke. Even with a blade that possessed the coherence and tenacity of iron or steel, the case would be one that it would be difficult for molecular cohesion to deal with. But that difficulty is almost infinitely increased when it is a substance of much lower cohesive tenacity than either iron or steel that has to be subjected to the strain.

""There would be, at least, some mitigation of this difficulty if it were lawful to assume that the substance which is subjected to this strain was not amenable to the laws of ponderable existence; if there were room for the notion that comets and their tails, which have to be brandished in such a stupendous fashion, were sky-spectres, immaterial phantoms, unreal visions of that negative shadow-kind which has been alluded to. This, however, unfortunately, is not a permissible alternative in the circumstances of the case. The great underlying and indispensable fact that the comet comes rushing up toward the sun out of space, and then shoots round that great center of attraction by the force of its own acquired and ever-increasing impetuosity; the fact that it is obedient

{p. 78}

through this course to the law of elliptical, or, to speak more exactly, of conic-section, movement, permits of no doubt as to the condition of materiality. The comet is obviously drawn by the influence of the sun's mass, and is subservient to that all-pervading law of sympathetic gravitation that is the sustaining bond of the material universe. It is ponderable substance beyond all question, and held by that chain of physical connection which it was the glory of Newton to discover. If the comet were not a material and ponderable substance it would not gravitate round the sun, and it would not move with increasing velocity as it neared the mighty mass until it had gathered the energy for its own escape in the enhanced and quickened momentum. In the first instance, the ready obedience to the attraction, and then the overshooting of the spot from which it is exerted, combine to establish the comet's right to stand ranked at least among the ponderable bodies of space."[1]

"And it is to the comet we must look for the source of a great part of those vast deposits of gravel which go to constitute the Drift."

"The sea does not separate the sand from the gravel; it places all together at elevations where the waves can not reach them:

""Waves or shallow soundings have some transporting power; and, as they always move toward the land, their action is landward. They thus beat back, little by little, any detritus in the waters, preventing that loss to continents or islands which would take place if it were carried out to sea."[1]

"The pebbles and gravel are soon driven by the waves up the shore, and beyond the reach of further wear;[2] and "the rivers carry only silt to the ocean."[3]

"The brooks and rivers produce much more gravel than the sea-shore:

""The detritus brought down by rivers is vastly greater in quantity than the stones, sand, or clay produced by the wear of the coasts."[4]"

"But it would be absurd to suppose that the beds of rivers could have furnished the immeasurable volumes of gravel found over a great part of the world in the drift-deposits.

"And the drift-gravel is different from the gravel of the sea or rivers.

"Geikie says, speaking of the "till":

""There is something very peculiar about the shape of the stones. They are neither round and oval, like the pebbles in river-gravel, or the shingle of the sea-shore, nor are they sharply angular like newly-fallen débris at the base of a cliff, although they more closely resemble the latter than the former. They are, indeed, angular in shape, but the sharp corners and edges have invariably been smoothed away. . . . Their shape, as will be seen, is by no means their most striking peculiarity. Each is smoothed, polished, and covered with striæ or scratches, some of which are delicate as the lines traced by an etching-needle, others deep and harsh as the scores made by the plow upon a rock. And, what is worthy of note, most of the scratches, coarse and fine together, seem to run parallel to the longer diameter of the stones, which, however, are scratched in many other directions as well."[1]"

"Let me again summarize:

"I. Comets consist of a blazing nucleus and a mass of ponderable, separated matter, such as stones, gravel, clay-dust, and gas.

"II. The nucleus gives out great heat and masses of burning gas.

"III. Luminous gases surround the nucleus.

"IV. The drift-clays are the result of the grinding up of granitic rocks.

"V. No such deposits, of anything like equal magnitude, could have been formed on the earth. [1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 13.] {p. 81}

"VI. No such clays are now being formed under glaciers or Arctic ice-sheets.

"VII. These clays were ground out of the substance of the comet by the endless changes of position of the material of which it is composed as it flew through space, during its incalculable journeys in the long reaches of time.

"VIII. The earth-supplies of gravel are inadequate to account for the gravel of the drift-deposits.

"IX. Neither sea-beach nor rivers produce stones like those found in the Drift."

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III. COULD A COMET STRIKE THE EARTH? 82

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"Kepler affirmed that "COMETS ARE SCATTERED THROUGH THE HEAVENS WITH AS MUCH PROFUSION AS FISHES IN THE OCEAN.""

""Three or four telescopic comets are now entered upon astronomical records every year. Lalande had a list of seven hundred comets that had been observed in his time."

"Arago estimated that the comets belonging to the solar system, within the orbit of Neptune, numbered seventeen million five hundred thousand!

"Lambert regards five hundred millions as a very moderate estimate![1]"

"And this does not include the monstrous fiery wanderers who may come to visit us, bringing their relations along, from outside the solar system—a sort of celestial immigrants whom no anti-Chinese legislation can keep away.

"Says Guillemin:

""Leaving mere re-appearances out of the question, new comets are constantly found to arrive from the depths of space, describing around the sun orbits which testify to the attractive power of that radiant body; and, for the

{p. 84}

most part, going away for centuries, to return again from afar after their immense revolutions."[1]

"It is a celestial game of ten-pins, with the solar system for a bowling-alley, and the earth waiting for a ten-strike.

""In the year 1779 Lexell's comet approached so near to the earth that it would have increased the length of the sidereal year by three hours if its mass had been equal to the earth's."[2]

"And this same comet did strike our fellow-planet, Jupiter."

"In the years 1767 and 1779 Lexell's comet passed though the midst of Jupiter's satellites, and became entangled temporarily among them.

"But not one of the satellites altered its movements to the extent of a hair's breadth, or of a tenth of an instant."[1]

"But it must be remembered that we had no glasses then, and have none now, that could tell us what were the effects of this visitation upon the surface of Jupiter or its moons. The comet might have covered Jupiter one hundred feet—yes, one hundred miles—thick with gravel and clay, and formed clouds of its seas five miles in thickness, without our knowing anything about it. Even our best telescopes can only perceive on the moon's surface—which is, comparatively speaking, but a few miles distant from us—objects of very great size, while Jupiter is sixteen hundred times farther away from us than the moon.

"But it is known that Lexell's comet was very much demoralized by Jupiter. It first came within the influence of that planet in 1767; it lost its original orbit, and went bobbing around Jupiter until 1779, when it became entangled with Jupiter's moons, and then it lost its orbit again, and was whisked off into infinite space, never more, perhaps, to be seen by human eyes. Is it not reasonable to suppose that an event which thus demoralized the comet may have caused it to cast down a considerable part of its material on the face of Jupiter?

"Encke's comet revolves around the sun in the short period of twelve hundred and five days, and, strange to say— "The period of its revolution is constantly diminishing; so that, if this progressive diminution always follows the same rate, the time when the comet, continually

[1. "Edinburgh Review," October, 1874, p. 205.] {p. 86}

describing a spiral, will be plunged into the incandescent mass of the sun can be calculated."[1]

"The comet of 1874, first seen by Coggia, at Marseilles, and called by his name, came between the earth and the sun, and approached within sixty thousand miles of the flaming surface of the sun. It traveled through this fierce blaze at the rate of three hundred and sixty-six miles per second! Three hundred and sixty-six miles per second! When a railroad-train moves at the rate of a mile per minute, we regard it as extraordinary speed; but three hundred and sixty-six miles per second! The mind fails to grasp it.

"When this comet was seen by Sir John Herschel, after it had made its grand sweep around the sun, it was not more than six times the breadth of the sun's face away from the sun. And it had come careering through infinite space with awful velocity to this close approximation to our great luminary."

" ... the great comet of 1843 possessed a tail one hundred and fifty million miles long; that is, it would reach from the sun to the earth, and have over fifty million miles of tail to spare; and it swept this gigantic appendage around in two hours, describing the are of a circle six hundred million miles long!"

"And it must be remembered that this enormous creature actually grazed the surface of the sun.

"And it is supposed that this monster of 1843, which was first seen in 1668, returned, and was seen in the southern hemisphere in 1880—that is to say, it came back in thirty-seven years instead of one hundred and seventy-five years. ... "

"On October 10, 1880, Lewis Swift, of Rochester, New York, discovered a comet which has proved to be of peculiar interest. From its first discovery it has presented no brilliancy of appearance, for, during its period of visibility, a telescope of considerable power was necessary to observe it. Since this comet, when in close proximity to the earth, was very faint indeed, its dimensions must be quite moderate.

"On the 22d of June, 1881, a comet of great brilliancy flashed suddenly into view. It was unexpected, and advanced with tremendous rapidity. The illustration on page 89 will show how its flight intersected the orbit of the earth. At its nearest point, June 19th, it was distant {p. 88} from the earth only 0.28 of the distance of the sun from the earth.

" ... The period of the comet of July, 1844, has been estimated at not less than one hundred thousand years!"

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IV. THE CONSEQUENCES TO THE EARTH 91 {p. iii}

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"In the first place, it is, of course, impossible at this time to say precisely how the contact took place; whether the head of the comet fell into or approached close to the sun, like the comet of 1843, and then swung its mighty tail, hundreds of millions of miles in length, moving at a rate almost equal to the velocity of light, around through a great are, and swept past the earth;—the earth, as it were, going through the midst of the tail, which would extend for a vast distance beyond and around it. In this movement, the side of the earth, facing the advance of the tail, would receive and intercept the mass of material—stones, gravel, and the finely-ground-up-dust which, compacted by water, is now clay—which came in contact with it, while the comet would sail off into space, {p. 92} demoralized, perhaps, in its orbit, like Lexell's comet when it became entangled with Jupiter's moons, but shorn of a comparatively small portion of its substance."

""The breadth of the tail of the great comet of 1811, at its widest part, was nearly fourteen million miles, the length one hundred and sixteen million miles, and that of the second comet of the same year, one hundred and forty million miles."[1]"

"The earth, seven thousand nine hundred and twenty-five miles wide, would simply make a bullet-hole through that tail, fourteen million miles broad, where it passed through it!—a mere eyelet-hole—a pin-hole—closed up at once by the constant movements which take place in the tail of the comet. And yet in that moment of contact the side of the earth facing the comet might be covered with hundreds of feet of débris.

"Or, on the other hand, the comet may, as described in some of the legends, have struck the earth, head on, amid-ships, and the shock may have changed the angle of inclination of the earth's axis, and thus have modified [1. Schellen, "Spectrum Analysis," p. 392.] {p. 95} permanently the climate of our globe; and to this cause we might look also for the great cracks and breaks in the earth's surface, which constitute the fiords of the sea-coast and the trap-extrusions of the continents; and here, too, ### THE GREAT COMET OF 1811. might be the cause of those mighty excavations, hundreds of feet deep, in which are now the Great Lakes of America, and from which, as we have seen, great cracks radiate out in all directions, like the fractures in a pane of glass where a stone has struck it.

"The cavities in which rest the Great Lakes have been attributed to the ice-sheet, but it is difficult to comprehend how an ice-sheet could dig out and root out a hole, as in the case of Lake Superior, nine hundred feet deep! {p. 96}

"And, if it did this, why were not similar holes excavated wherever there were ice-sheets—to wit, all over the northern and southern portions of the globe? Why should a general cause produce only local results?

"Sir Charles Lyell shows[1] that glaciers do not cut out holes like the depressions in which the Great Lakes lie; he also shows that these lakes are not due to a sinking down of the crust of the earth, because the strata are continuous and unbroken beneath them. He also calls attention to the fact that there is a continuous belt of such lakes, reaching from the northwestern part of the United States, through the Hudson Bay Territory, Canada, and Maine, to Finland, and that this belt does not reach below 50° north latitude in Europe and 40° in America. Do these lie in the track of the great collision? The comet, as the striæ indicate, came from the north.

"The mass of Donati's comet was estimated by MM. Faye and Roche at about the seven-hundredth part of the bulk of the earth. M. Faye says:

""That is the weight of a sea of forty thousand square miles one hundred and nine yards deep; and it must be owned that a like mass, animated with considerable velocity, might well produce, by its shock with the earth, very perceptible results."[2]

"We have but to suppose, (a not unreasonable supposition,) that the comet which struck the earth was much larger than Donati's comet, and we have the means of accounting for results as prodigious as those referred to."

" ... Drift is deposited on the earth, as it might have been if it had suddenly fallen from the heavens; that is, it is on one side of the globe—to wit, the side that faced the comet as it came on. ... Drift probably fell at once. If it had been twenty-four hours in falling, the diurnal revolution would, in turn, have presented all sides of the earth to it, and the Drift would be found everywhere. And this is in accordance with what we know of the rapid movements of comets. They travel, as I have shown, at the rate of three hundred and sixty-six miles per second; this is equal to twenty-one thousand six hundred miles per minute, and one million two hundred and ninety-six thousand miles per hour!

"And this accords with what we know of the deposition of the Drift. It came with terrific force. It smashed the rocks; it tore them up; it rolled them over on one another; it drove its material into the underlying rocks; "it indented it into them," says one authority, already quoted.

"It was accompanied by inconceivable winds—the hurricanes and cyclones spoken of in many of the legends. Hence we find the loose material of the original surface gathered up and carried into the drift-material proper; hence the Drift is whirled about in the wildest confusion. Hence it fell on the earth like a great snow-storm driven by the wind. It drifted into all hollows; it was not so thick on, or it was entirely absent from, the tops of hills; it formed tails, precisely as snow does, on the leeward side of all obstructions. Glacier-ice is slow and plastic, {p. 98} and folds around such impediments, and wears them away; the wind does not. ... "

"In short, it appears as if it were gusts and great whirls of the same material as the "till," lifted up by the cyclones and mingled with blocks, rocks, bones, sands, fossils, earth, peat, and other matters, picked up with terrible [1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 18. 2. "American Cyclopædia," vol. vi, p. 112.] {p. 99} force from the face of the earth and poured down pell-mell on top of the first deposit of true "till."

"In England ninety-four per cent of these stones found in this bowlder-clay are "stranger" stones; that is to say, they do not belong to the drainage area in which they are found, but must have been carried there from great distances.

"But how about the markings, the striæ, on the face of the surface-rocks below the Drift? The answer is plain. Débris, moving at the rate of a million miles an hour, would produce just such markings.

"Dana says:

""The sands carried by the winds when passing over rocks sometimes wear them smooth, or cover them with scratches and furrows, as observed by W. P. Blake on granite rocks at the Pass of San Bernardino, in California. Even quartz was polished and garnets were left projecting upon pedicels of feldspar. Limestone was so much worn as to look as if the surface had been removed by solution. Similar effects have been observed by Winchell in the Grand Traverse region, Michigan. Glass in the windows of houses on Cape Cod sometimes has holes worn through it by the same means. The hint from nature has led to the use of sand, driven by a blast, with or without steam, for cutting and engraving glass, and even for cutting and carving granite and other hard rocks."[1]

"Gratacap describes the rock underneath the "till" as polished and oftentimes lustrous."[2]"

"We have seen that, to produce the phenomena of the Glacial age, it was absolutely necessary that it must have been preceded by a period of heat, great enough to vaporize all the streams and lakes and a large part of the ocean. And we have seen that no mere ice-hypothesis gives us any clew to the cause of this.

"Would the comet furnish us with such heat? ... "

"Here we have a good deal more heat than is necessary to account for that vaporization of the seas of the globe which seems to have taken place during the Drift Age.

"But similar effects might be produced, in another way, even though the heat of the comet itself was inconsiderable."

"Mr. Proctor notes that in 1866 a star, in the constellation Northern Cross, suddenly shone with eight hundred times its former luster, afterward rapidly diminishing in luster. In 1876 a new star in the constellation Cygnus became visible, subsequently fading again so as to be only perceptible by means of a telescope; the luster of this star must have increased from five hundred to many thousand times.

"Mr. Proctor claims that should our sun similarly increase in luster even one hundred-fold, the glowing heat would destroy all vegetable and animal life on earth.

"There is no difficulty in seeing our way to heat enough, if we concede that a comet really struck the earth or fell into the sun. The trouble is in the other direction—we would have too much heat.

"We shall see, hereafter, that there is evidence in our rocks that in two different ages of the world, millions of years before the Drift period, the whole surface of the [1. "The Heavens," p. 260.] {p. 102} earth was actually fused and melted, probably by cometic contact."

"It needs but an infinitesimal increase in the quantity of oxygen in the air to produce a combustion which would melt all things. In pure oxygen, steel burns like a candle-wick. Nay, it is not necessary to increase the amount of oxygen in the air to produce terrible results. It has been shown[1] that, of our forty-five miles of atmosphere, one fifth, or a stratum of nine miles in thickness, is oxygen. A shock, or an electrical or other convulsion, which would even partially disarrange or decompose this combination, and send an increased quantity of oxygen, the heavier gas, to the earth, would wrap everything in flames. Or the same effects might follow from any great change in the constitution of the water of the world. Water is composed of eight parts of oxygen and one part of hydrogen. "The intensest heat by far ever yet produced by the blow-pipe is by the combustion of these two gases." And Dr. Robert Hare, of Philadelphia, found that the combination which produced the intensest heat was that in which the two gases were in the precise proportions found in water.[2]

"We may suppose that this vast heat, whether it came from the comet, or the increased action of the sun, preceded the fall of the débris of the comet by a few minutes or a few hours. We have seen the surface-rocks

[1. "Science and Genesis," p. 125. 2. Ibid., p. 127.] {p. 103}

described as lustrous. The heat may not have been great enough to melt them—it may merely have softened them; but when the mixture of clay, gravel, striated rocks, and earth-sweepings fell and rested on them, they were at once hardened and almost baked; and thus we can account for the fact that the "till," which lies next to the rocks, is so hard and tough, compared with the rest of the Drift, that it is impossible to blast it, and exceedingly difficult even to pick it to pieces; it is more feared by workmen and contractors than any of the true rocks."

"We shall see, hereafter, that many of the legends tell us that, as the comet approached the earth, that is, as it entered our atmosphere and combined with it, it gave forth world-appalling noises, thunders beyond all earthly thunders, roarings, howlings, and hissings, that shook the globe. If a comet did come, surrounded by volumes of carbureted hydrogen, or carbon combined with hydrogen, the moment it reached far enough into our atmosphere to supply it with the requisite amount of oxygen or atmospheric air, precisely such dreadful explosions would occur, accompanied by noises similar to those described in the legends."

"The ice-fields and wild climate of the poles, and the cold which descends annually over Europe and North America, represent the residuum of the refrigeration caused by the evaporation due to the comet's heat, and the long absence of the sun during the age of darkness. Every visitation of a comet would, therefore, necessarily eventuate in a glacial age, which in time would entirely pass away. And our storms are bred of the conflict between the heat and cold of the different latitudes. Hence, it may be, that the Tertiary climate represented the true climate of the earth, undisturbed by comet catastrophes; a climate equable, mild, warm, stormless. Think what a world this would be without tempests, cyclones, ice, snow, or cold!"

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PART III. THE LEGENDS.

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I. THE NATURE OF MYTHS 113

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Donelly astounds one with this -

"The story has come down without its geography, and a new geography is given it.

"Again, an ancient word or name may have a signification in the language in which the story is told different from that which it possessed in the original dialect, and, in the effort to make the old fact and the new language harmonize, the story-teller is forced, gradually, to modify the narrative; and, as this lingual difficulty occurs at every fireside, at every telling, an ingenious explanation comes at last to be generally accepted, and the ancient myth remains dressed in a new suit of linguistic clothes.

"But, as a rule, simple races repeat; they do not invent.

"One hundred years ago the highest faith was placed in written history, while the utmost contempt was felt for all legends. Whatever had been written down was regarded as certainly true; whatever had not been written down was necessarily false.

"We are reminded of that intellectual old brute, Dr. Samuel Johnson, trampling poor Macpherson under foot, like an enraged elephant, for daring to say that he had collected from the mountaineers of wild Scotland the poems of Ossian, and that they had been transmitted, from mouth to mouth, through ages. But the great epic of the son of Fingal will survive, part of the widening {p. 116} heritage of humanity, while Johnson is remembered only as a coarse-souled, ill-mannered incident in the development of the great English people.

"H. H. Bancroft describes myths as—

""A mass of fragmentary truth and fiction, not open to rationalistic criticism; a partition wall of allegories, built of dead facts cemented with wild fancies; it looms ever between the immeasurable and the measurable past."

"But he adds:

"An universal myth points to two conclusions:

"First, that it is based on some fact.

"Secondly, that it dates back, in all probability, to the time when the ancestors of the races possessing it had not yet separated."

"In the next place, we must remember how impossible it is for the mind to invent an entirely new fact.

"What dramatist or novelist has ever yet made a plot which did not consist of events that had already transpired somewhere on earth? He might intensify events, concentrate and combine them, or amplify them; but that is all. Men in all ages have suffered from jealousy,—like Othello; have committed murders,—like Macbeth; have yielded to the sway of morbid minds,—like Hamlet; have stolen, lied, and debauched,—like Falstaff;—there are Oliver Twists, Bill Sykeses, and Nancies; Micawbers, Pickwicks, and Pecksniffs in every great city."

Indeed - there the most loved figures are those familiar, unless one speaks of the great epics of India - Rāmāyana and Mahābhārata - with their great, unique figures of Gods, Goddesses, and aspiring humans, contrasting all too familiar negative figures set down as what one mustn't be.

"There is nothing in the mind of man that has not preexisted in nature. Can we imagine a person, who never saw or heard of an elephant, drawing a picture of such a two-tailed creature? It was thought at one time that man had made the flying-dragon out of his own imagination; but we now know that the image of the pterodactyl had simply descended from generation to generation. Sindbad's great bird, the roc, was considered a flight of the Oriental fancy, until science revealed the bones of the dinornis. All the winged beasts breathing fire are simply a recollection of the comet.

"It is utterly impossible that the races of the whole world, of all the continents and islands, could have preserved traditions from the most remote ages, of a comet having struck the earth, of the great heat, the conflagration, the cave-life, the age of darkness, and the return of the sun, and yet these things have had no basis of fact. It was not possible for the primitive mind to have imagined these things if they had never occurred."

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II. DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT? 121

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Donelly discusses the questiona out existence of humans prior to Drift - except he keeps saying Man, instead of human.

"The "Engis skull," with its full frontal brain-pan, its fine lines, and its splendidly arched dome, tells us of ages of cultivation and development in some favored center of the race; while the horrible and beast-like proportions of "the Neanderthal skull" speak, with no less certainty, of undeveloped, brutal, savage man, only a little above the gorilla in capacity;—a prowler, a robber, a murderer, a cave-dweller, a cannibal, a Cain."

"The conclusion is, therefore, logically irresistible, that these skulls belonged to men who lived during or before the Drift Age.

"Many authorities support this proposition that man—palæolithic man, man of the mammoth and the mastodon—existed in the caves of Europe before the Drift. "

"After having occupied the English caves for untold ages, palæolithic man disappeared for ever, and with him vanished many animals now either locally or wholly extinct."[1]

"Above the remains of man in these caves comes a deposit of stalagmite, twelve feet in thickness, indicating a vast period of time during which it was being formed, and during this time man was absent.[2]"

""There is no passage, but, on the contrary, a sharp and abrupt break between these later deposits and the underlying palæolithic accumulations."[1]

:Here we have the proof that man inhabited these caves for ages before the Drift; that he perished with the great mammals and disappeared; and that the twelve feet of stalagmite were formed while no men and few animals dwelt in Europe. But some fragment of the human race had escaped elsewhere, in some other region; there it multiplied and replenished the earth, and gradually extended and spread again over Europe, and reappeared in the cave-deposits above the stalagmite. And, in like manner, the animals gradually came in from the regions on which the Drift had not fallen.

"But the revelations of the last few years prove, not only that man lived during the Drift age, and that he dwelt on the earth when the Drift fell, but that he can be traced backward for ages before the Drift; and that he was contemporary with species of great animals that had run their course, and ceased to exist centuries, perhaps thousands of years, before the Drift."

""The discoveries that are constantly being made in this country are proving that man existed on this continent as far back in geological time as on the European Continent; and it even seems that America, really the Old World, geologically, will soon prove to be the birthplace of the earliest race of man. One of the late and important discoveries is that by Mr. E. L. Berthoud, which is given in full, with a map, in the 'Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences for 1872,' p. 46. Mr. Berthoud there reports the discovery of ancient fire-places, rude stone monuments, and implements of stone in great number and variety, in several places along Crow Creek, in Colorado, and also on several other rivers in the vicinity. These fire-places indicate several ancient sites of an unknown race differing entirely from the mound-builders and the present Indians, while the shells and other fossils found with the remains make it quite certain that the deposit in which the ancient sites are found is as old as the Pliocene, and perhaps as the Miocene. As the fossil shells found with the relies of man are of estuary forms, and as the sites of the ancient towns are on extended

[1. "Popular Science Monthly," April, 1875, p. 682.] {p. 129}

points of land, and at the base of the ridges or bluffs, Mr. Berthoud thinks the evidence is strongly in favor of the locations having been near some ancient fresh-water lake, whose vestiges the present topography of the region favors.""

" ... The remains of this man are found separated—part are eighteen feet below the surface, part twenty-four feet—that is, they are six feet apart. How can we account for this condition of things, except by supposing that the poor savage had rushed for safety to his shallow rock-shelter, and had there been caught by the world-tempest, and torn to pieces and deposited in fragments with the débris that filled his rude home?

"In California we encounter a still more surprising state of things."

"In Louisiana, layers of pottery, six inches thick, with remnants of matting and baskets, were found twelve feet below the surface, and underneath what Dr. Foster believes to be strata of the Drift.[1]"

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III. LEGENDS OF THE COMING OF THE COMET 132

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Donelly remains the same colonial racist, however, in twisting and lying in interpretations of what he borrows from India. Here he borrows third chapter of Dashāvatāra, only to change everything to suit his purpose.

"That is to say, it was an atmospheric, not a terrestrial creature.

Mareechee wasn't a genii, there's no such thing in India, and donelly is fraudulently imposing an Arabian concept on India. Mareechee was a sage.

"Brahma, an earthly king, was at first frightened by the terrible spectacle in the air, and then claimed that he had produced it himself!"

""They were engaged in this conversation when that vara, or 'boar-form,' suddenly uttered a sound like the loudest thunder, and the echo reverberated and shook all the quarters of the universe.""

Obviously a boar.

"The legend continues:

He proceeds thence to British legends and others.

"The traditions of the ancient Britons[1] tell us of an ancient time, when

""The profligacy of mankind had provoked the great Supreme to send a pestilential wind upon the earth. A pure poison descended, every blast was death. At this time the patriarch, distinguished for his integrity, was shut up, together with his select company, in the inclosure with the strong door. (The cave?) Here the just ones were safe from injury. Presently a tempest of fire arose. It split the earth asunder to the great deep. The lake Llion burst its bounds, and the waves of the sea lifted themselves on high around the borders of Britain, the rain poured down from heaven, and the waters covered the earth."

"Here we have the whole story told briefly, but with the regular sequence of events:

"1. The poisonous gases.

"2. The people seek shelter in the caves.

"3. The earth takes fire.

"4. The earth is cleft open; the fiords are made, and the trap-rocks burst forth.

"5. The rain pours down.

"6. There is a season of floods."

"We shall see here, and in many other legends, reference to the fact that there was more than one monster in the sky. This is in accordance with what we now know to be true of comets. They often appear in pairs or even triplets. Within the past few years we have seen Biela's comet divide and form two separate comets, pursuing

[1. "Mythology of the British Druids," p. 226.] {p. 136}

their course side by side. When the great comet of 1811 appeared, another of almost equal magnitude followed it. Seneca informs us that Ephoras, a Greek writer of the fourth century before Christ, had recorded the singular fact of a comet's separation into two parts.

""This statement was deemed incredible by the Roman philosopher. More recent observations of similar phenomena leave no room to question the historian's veracity."[1]

"The Chinese annals record the appearance of three comets—one large and two smaller ones—at the same time, in the year 896 of our era.

""They traveled together for three days. The little ones disappeared first and then the large one."

"And again:

""On June 27th, A. D. 416, two comets appeared in the constellation Hercules, and pursued nearly the same path."[2]

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IV. RAGNAROK 141

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"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, commented on, criticised, but never understood. It has been regarded as a wild, unmeaning rhapsody of words, or as a premonition of some future earth catastrophe.

"But look at it!

"The very name is significant. According to Professor Anderson's etymology of the word, it means "the darkness of the gods"; from regin, gods, and rökr, darkness; but it may, more properly, be derived from the Icelandic, Danish, and Swedish regn, a rain, and rök, smoke, or dust; and it may mean the rain of dust, for the clay came first as dust; it is described in some Indian legends as ashes."

Reminds one of the German concept of Goetterdaemerung. Wonder if it's the same?

Finally one has come to the title, but it's not what one expected, the island that sank between Britain and Scandinavia, leaving a shallow part in the North sea North of Netherlands and Denmark, marked as Dogger's Bank in Google maps.

................................................................................................

Donelly goes extensively into the Scandinavian legend, interpreting it along the way.

"The whole story is told with the utmost detail, and we shall see that it agrees, in almost every particular, with what reason assures us must have happened.

"There are three winters," or years, "during which great wars rage over the world." Mankind has reached a climax of wickedness. Doubtless it is, as now, highly civilized in some regions, while still barbarian in others.

""Then happens that which will seem a great miracle: that the wolf devours the sun, and this will seem a great loss."

"That is, the Comet strikes the sun, or approaches so close to it that it seems to do so.

""The other wolf devours the moon, and this, too, will cause great mischief."

"We have seen that the comets often come in couples or triplets.

""The stars shall be hurled from heaven."

"This refers to the blazing débris of the Comet falling to the earth.

""Then it shall come to pass that the earth will shake so violently that trees will be torn up by the roots, the

[1. Anderson, "Norse Mythology," p. 416.] {p. 143}

mountains will topple down, and all bonds and fetters will be broken and snapped."

"Chaos has come again. How closely does all this agree with Hesiod's description of the shaking earth and the universal conflict of nature?

""The Fenris-wolf gets loose."

"This, we shall see, is the name of one of the comets.

""The sea rushes over the earth, for the Midgard-serpent writhes in giant rage, and seeks to gain the land."

"The Midgard-serpent is the name of another comet; it strives to reach the earth; its proximity disturbs the oceans. And then follows an inexplicable piece of mythology:

""The ship that is called Naglfar also becomes loose. It is made of the nails of dead men; wherefore it is worth warning that, when a man dies with unpared nails, he supplies a large amount of materials for the building of this ship, which both gods and men wish may be finished as late as possible. But in this flood Naglfar gets afloat. The giant Hrym is its steersman.

""The Fenris-wolf advances with wide-open mouth; the upper jaw reaches to heaven and the lower jaw is on the earth."

"That is to say, the comet extends from the earth to the sun.

""He would open it still wider had he room."

"That is to say, the space between the sun and earth is not great enough; the tail of the comet reaches even beyond the earth.

""Fire flashes from his eyes and nostrils."

"A recent writer says: "When bright comets happen to come very near to the sun, and are subjected to close observation under the {p. 144} advantages which the fine telescopes of the present day afford, a series of remarkable changes is found to take place in their luminous configuration. First, jets of bright light start out from the nucleus, and move through the fainter haze of the coma toward the sun; and then these jets are turned backward round the edge of the coma, and stream from it, behind the comet, until they are fashioned into a tail."[1]

""The Midgard-serpent vomits forth venom, defiling all the air and the sea; he is very terrible, and places himself side by side with the wolf."

"The two comets move together, like Biela's two fragments; and they give out poison—the carbureted-hydrogen gas revealed by the spectroscope.

""In the midst of this clash and din the heavens are rent in twain, and the sons of Muspelheim come riding through the opening." Muspelheim, according to Professor Anderson,[2] means the day of judgment." Muspel signifies an abode of fire, peopled by fiends. So that this passage means, that the heavens are split open, or appear to be, by the great shining comet, or comets, striking the earth; ... "

In midst of this Donelly must impose biblical stuff!

" ... it is a world of fire; it is the Day of Judgment."

He proceeds, back to the Scandinavian legend.

""Surt rides first, and before him and after him flames burning fire."

"Surt is a demon associated with the comet;[3] he is the same as the destructive god of the Egyptian mythology, Set, who destroys the sun. It may mean the blazing nucleus of the comet.

""He has a very good sword that shines brighter than the sun. As they ride over Bifrost it breaks to pieces, as has before been stated."

[1. "Edinburgh Review," October, 1874, p. 207. 2. "Norse Mythology," p. 454. 3. Ibid., p. 458.] {p. 145}

"Bifrost, we shall have reason to see hereafter, was a prolongation of land westward from Europe, which connected the British Islands with the island-home of the gods, or the godlike race of men.

"There are geological proofs that such a land once existed. A writer, Thomas Butler Gunn, in a recent number of an English publication,[1] says:

""Tennyson's 'Voyage of Maeldune' is a magnificent allegorical expansion of this idea; and the laureate has also finely commemorated the old belief in the country of Lyonnesse, extending beyond the bounds of Cornwall:

"'A land of old upheaven from the abyss

"By fire, to sink into the abyss again;

"Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,

"And the long mountains ended in a coast

"Of ever-shifting sands, and far away

"The phantom circle of a moaning sea.'"

""Cornishmen of the last generation used to tell stories of strange household relics picked up at the very low tides, nay, even of the quaint habitations seen fathoms deep in the water."

"There are those who believe that these Scandinavian Eddas came, in the first instance, from Druidical Briton sources.

"The Edda may be interpreted to mean that the Comet strikes the planet west of Europe, and crushes down some land in that quarter, called "the bridge of Bifrost."

"Then follows a mighty battle between the gods and the Comet. It can have, of course, but one termination; but it will recur again and again in the legends of different nations. It was necessary that the gods, the protectors of mankind, should struggle to defend them against these strange and terrible enemies. But their very helplessness

[1. "All the Year Round."] {p. 146}

and their deaths show how immense was the calamity which had befallen the world.

"The Edda continues:

""The sons of Muspel direct their course to the plain which is called Vigrid. Thither repair also the Fenris-wolf and the Midgard-serpent."

"Both the comets have fallen on the earth.

""To this place have also come Loke" (the evil genius of the Norse mythology) "and Hrym, and with him all the Frost giants. In Loke's company are all the friends of Hel" (the goddess of death). "The sons of Muspel have then their efficient bands alone by themselves. The plain Vigrid is one hundred miles (rasts) on each side."

"That is to say, all these evil forces, the comets, the fire, the devil, and death, have taken possession of the great plain, the heart of the civilized land. The scene is located in this spot, because probably it was from this spot the legends were afterward dispersed to all the world.

"It is necessary for the defenders of mankind to rouse themselves.

"There is no time to be lost, and, accordingly, we learn—

""While these things are happening, Heimdal" (he was the guardian of the Bifrost-bridge) "stands up, blows with all his might in the Gjallar-horn and awakens all the gods, who thereupon hold counsel. Odin rides to Mimer's well to ask advice of Mimer for himself and his folk.

""Then quivers the ash Ygdrasil, and all things in heaven and earth tremble.""

And here, for no reason except his racist need to trample on Hindus, he casually throws a lie.

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Donelly continues -

"The asas" (the godlike men) "and the einherjes" (the heroes) "arm themselves and speed forth to the battlefield. Odin rides first; with his golden helmet, resplendent {p. 147} byrnie, and his spear Gungner, he advances against the Fenris-wolf" (the first comet). "Thor stands by his side, but can give him no assistance, for he has his hands full in his struggle with the Midgard-serpent" (the second comet). "Frey encounters Surt, and heavy blows are exchanged ere Frey falls. The cause of his death is that he has not that good sword which he gave to Skirner. Even the dog Garm," (another comet), "that was bound before the Gnipa-cave, gets loose. He is the greatest plague. He contends with Tyr, and they kill each other. Thor gets great renown by slaying the Midgard-serpent, but retreats only nine paces when he falls to the earth dead, poisoned by the venom that the serpent blows upon him."

"He has breathed the carbureted-hydrogen gas!

""The wolf swallows Odin, and thus causes his death; but Vidar immediately turns and rushes at the wolf, placing one foot on his nether jaw.

"["On this foot he has the shoe, for which materials have been gathering through all ages, namely, the strips of leather which men cut off from the toes and heels of shoes; wherefore he who wishes to render assistance to the asas must cast these strips away."]

"This last paragraph, like that concerning the ship Naglfar, is probably the interpolation of some later age. The narrative continues:

""With one hand Vidar seizes the upper jaw of the wolf, and thus rends asunder his mouth. Thus the wolf perishes. Loke fights with Heimdal, and they kill each other. Thereupon Surt flings fire over the earth, and burns up all the world."

"This narrative is from the Younger Edda. The Elder Edda is to the same purpose, but there are more allusions to the effect of the catastrophe on the earth

"The eagle screams,

"And with pale beak tears corpses. . . .

"Mountains dash together, {p. 148}

"Heroes go the way to Hel,

"And heaven is rent in twain. . . .

"All men abandon their homesteads

"When the warder of Midgard

"In wrath slays the serpent.

"The sun grows dark,

"The earth sinks into the sea,

"The bright stars

"From heaven vanish;

"Fire rages,

"Heat blazes,

"And high flames play

"'Gainst heaven itself"

"And what follow then? Ice and cold and winter. For although these things come first in the narrative of the Edda, yet we are told that "before these" things, to wit, the cold winters, there occurred the wickedness of the world, and the wolves and the serpent made their appearance. So that the events transpired in the order in which I have given them.

""First there is a winter called the Fimbul winter,"

""The mighty, the great, the iron winter,"[1]

""'When snow drives from. all quarters, the frosts are so severe, the winds so keen, there is no joy in the sun. There are three such winters in succession, without any intervening summer."

"Here we have the Glacial period which followed the Drift. Three years of incessant wind, and snow, and intense cold.

"The Elder Edda says, speaking of the Fenris-wolf:

""It feeds on the bodies

"Of men, when they die

"The seats of the gods

"It stains with red blood."

[1. "Norse Mythology," p. 444.] {p. 149}

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Donelly is very free with expressing his racism at levels one finds rare, e cept in pakistan.

"This probably refers to the iron-stained red clay cast down by the Comet over a large part of the earth; the "seats of the gods" means the home of the god-like race, which was doubtless covered, like Europe and America, with red clay; the waters which ran from it must have been the color of blood."

What voted "god-like race, which was doubtless covered, like Europe and America" possibly mean???

That God (- or Gods, and of course Goddesses since he speaks of race -) too lives in so dark a world, the skin pales like a rare steak?

""The Sunshine blackens

"In the summers thereafter,

"And the weather grows bad.""

That should do it, of course, over millennia.

"In the Younger Edda (p. 57) we are given a still more precise description of the Ice age:

""Replied Har, explaining, that as soon as the streams, that are called Elivogs" (the rivers from under ice), "had came so far that the venomous yeast" (the clay?) "which flowed with them hardened, as does dross that runs from the fire, then it turned" (as) "into ice. And when this ice stopped and flowed no more, then gathered over it the drizzling rain that arose from the venom" (the clay), "and froze into rime" (ice), "and one layer of ice was laid upon another clear into the Ginungagap."

"Ginungagap, we are told,[1] was the name applied in the eleventh century by the Northmen to the ocean between Greenland and Vinland, or America. It doubtless meant originally the whole of the Atlantic Ocean. The clay, when it first fell, was probably full of chemical elements, which rendered it, and the waters which filtered through it, unfit for human use; clay waters are, to this day, the worst in the world.

""Then said Jafnhar: 'All that part of Ginungagap that turns to the north' (the north Atlantic) 'was filled with thick and heavy ice and rime, and everywhere within were drizzling rains and gusts. But the south part of Ginungagap was lighted up by the glowing sparks that flew out of Muspelheim.'"

[1. "Norse Mythology," p. 447.] {p. 150}

"The ice and rime to the north represent the age of ice and snow. Muspelheim was the torrid country of the south, over which the clouds could not yet form in consequence of the heat—Africa.

"But it can not last forever. The clouds disappear; the floods find their way back to the ocean; nature begins to decorate once more the scarred and crushed face of the world. But where is the human race? The "Younger Edda" tells us:

""During the conflagration caused by Surt's fire, a woman by the name of Lif and a man named Lifthraser lie concealed in Hodmimer's hold, or forest. The dew of the dawn serves them for food, and so great a race shall spring from them, that their descendants shall soon spread over the whole earth."[1]

"The "Elder Edda" says:

""Lif and Lifthraser Will lie hid In Hodmimer's-holt; The morning dew They have for food. From them are the races descended."

"Two others, of the godlike race, also escaped in some [1. "Norse Mythology" p. 429.] {p. 151} way not indicated; Vidar and Vale are their names. They, too, had probably taken refuge in some cavern.

" Holt is a grove, or forest, or hold; it was probably a cave. We shall see that nearly all the legends refer to the caves in which mankind escaped from destruction.

""Neither the sea nor Surt's fire had harmed them, and they dwell on the plains of Ida, where Asgard was before. Thither come also the sons of Thor, Mode, and Magne, and they have Mjolner. Then come Balder and Hoder from Hel."

"Mode and Magne are children of Thor; they belong to the godlike race. They, too, have escaped. Mjolner is Thor's hammer. Balder is the Sun; he has returned from the abode of death, to which the comet consigned him. Hoder is the Night.

"All this means that the fragments and remnants of humanity reassemble on the plain of Ida—the plain of Vigrid—where the battle was fought. They possess the works of the old civilization, represented by Thor's hammer; and the day and night once more return after the long midnight blackness.

"And the Vala looks again upon a renewed and rejuvenated world:

""She sees arise

"The second time.

"From the sea, the earth,

"Completely green.

"The cascades fall,

"The eagle soars,

"From lofty mounts

"Pursues its prey.""

" It is once more the glorious, the sun-lighted world the world of flashing seas, dancing streams, and green leaves; with the eagle, high above it all,

"Batting the sunny ceiling of the globe

"With his dark wings;"

while

""The wild cataracts leap in glory."

"What history, what poetry, what beauty, what inestimable pictures of an infinite past have lain hidden away in these Sagas—the despised heritage of all the blue-eyed, light-haired races of the world!"

Wait - who said the races across Atlantic weren't always what they are now, Mongoloid?

"Rome and Greece can not parallel this marvelous story:

"The gods convene

"On Ida's plains,

"And talk of the powerful

"Midgard-serpent;

"They call to mind

"The Fenris-wolf

"And the ancient runes

"Of the mighty Odin.""

" What else can mankind think of, or dream of, or talk of for the next thousand years but this awful, this unparalleled calamity through which the race has passed?

"A long-subsequent but most ancient and cultivated people, whose memory has, for us, almost faded from the earth, will thereafter embalm the great drama in legends, myths, prayers, poems, and sagas; fragments of which are found to-day dispersed through all literatures in all lands; some of them, as we shall see, having found their way even into the very Bible revered alike of Jew and Christian:"

But the bible for Jews is exactly what Edda is for Norse people, their history! It's Europe under yoke of Rome rejecting her own legends and forced to revere that of another, just because Rome subjected jews and their kings to atrocities and needed to lie to force everyone to think otherwise, that's disgusting, twisted fraud

"The Edda continues,

""Then again

"The wonderful

"Golden tablets

"Are found in the grass

"In time's morning,

The leader of the gods

"And Odin's race

"Possessed them.""

"And what a find was that! This poor remnant of humanity discovers "the golden tablets" of the former {p. 153} civilization. Doubtless, the inscribed tablets, by which the art of writing survived to the race; for what would tablets be without inscriptions? For they talk of "the ancient runes of mighty Odin," that is, of the runic letters, the alphabetical writing. And we shall see hereafter that this view is confirmed from other sources.

"There follows a happy age:

""The fields unsown Yield their growth; All ills cease. Balder comes. Hoder and Balder, Those heavenly gods, Dwell together in Odin's halls."

"The great catastrophe is past. Man is saved, The world is once more fair. The sun shines again in heaven. Night and day follow each other in endless revolution around the happy globe. Ragnarok is past.

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March 22, 2022 - March 22, 2022.

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V. THE CONFLAGRATION OF PHAËTON 154

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"Now let us turn to the mythology of the Latins, as preserved in the pages of Ovid, one of the greatest of the poets of ancient Rome.[1]

"Here we have the burning of the world involved in the myth of Phaëton, son of Ph&oelig;bus—Apollo—the Sun—who drives the chariot of his father; he can not control the horses of the Sun, they run away with him; they come so near the earth as to set it on fire, and Phaëton is at last killed by Jove, as he killed Typhon in the Greek legends, to save heaven and earth from complete and common ruin. "

"This is the story of the conflagration as treated by a civilized mind, explained by a myth, and decorated with the flowers and foliage of poetry."

The Sun did try to dissuade the son.

" ... Besides, the heavens are carried round with a constant rotation, and carrying with them the lofty stars, and whirl them with rapid revolution. Against this I have to contend; and that force which overcomes all other things does not overcome me, and I am carried in a contrary direction to the rapid world."

"Here we seem to have a glimpse of some higher and older learning, mixed with the astronomical errors of the day: Ovid supposes the rapid world to move, revolve, one way, while the sun appears to move another."

Donelly gives it, as Ovid wrote, and it's indeed poetic, about a son of a God desiring to drive his father's chariot, but the horses recognising the difference, his inability to control them, and more.

"Compare the course which Ovid tells us Phaëton pursued through the constellations, past the Great Serpent and Boötes, and close to the venomous Scorpion, with the orbit of Donati's comet in 1858, as given in Schellen's great work.[1]"

"The path described by Ovid shows that the comet came from the north part of the heavens; and this agrees with what we know of the Drift; the markings indicate that it came from the north."

Subsequent account is of the mayhem.

" ... Nor do rivers that {p. 159} have banks distant remain secure. Tanais smokes in the midst of its waters, and the aged Peneus and Teuthrantian Caïcus and rapid Ismenus. . . . The Babylonian Euphrates, too, was on fire, Orontes was in flames, and the swift Thermodon and Ganges and Phasis and Ister. ... "

Wait, they sitting in Rome wrote of Ganges- Gangaa - on fire, while no record of such a happening exists in Sanskrit literature, and one must take the latter as the truer account.

So Ovid in a latter era presumed that the event was global, while the event was prior to India being near Asia, and while there was an ocean between India and Asia, there were no Himaalayan ranges, no Sindhu and certainly no Ganga or any other river originating from Himaalayan ranges. Ovid mentioned a name he'd heard, but he was wrong.

""The ocean, too, is contracted," says Ovid, "and that which lately was sea is a surface of parched sand, and the mountains which the deep sea has covered, start up and increase the number of the scattered Cyclades" (a cluster of islands in the Ægean Sea, surrounding Delos as though with a circle, whence their name); "the fishes sink to the bottom, and the crooked dolphins do not care to raise themselves on the surface into the air as usual. The bodies of sea-calves float lifeless on their backs on {p. 160} the top of the water. The story, too, is that even Nereus himself and Doris and their daughters lay hid in the heated caverns."

"All this could scarcely have been imagined, and yet it agrees precisely with what we can not but believe to have been the facts. Here we have an explanation of how that vast body of vapor which afterward constituted great snow-banks and ice-sheets and river-torrents rose into the air. Science tells us that to make a world-wrapping ice-sheet two miles thick, all the waters of the ocean must have been evaporated;[1] to make one a mile thick would take one half the waters of the globe; and here we find this Roman poet, who is repeating the legends of his race, and who knew nothing about a Drift age or an Ice age, telling us that the water boiled in the streams; that the bottom of the Mediterranean lay exposed, a bed of dry sand; that the fish floated dead on the surface, or fled away to the great depths of the ocean; and that even the sea-gods "hid in the heated caverns.""

""However, the genial Earth, as she was surrounded by the sea, amid the waters of the main" (the ocean); "the springs dried up on every side which had hidden themselves in the bowels of their cavernous parent, burnt up, lifted up her all-productive face as far as her neck, and [1. "Science and Genesis," p. 125.] {p. 161} placed her hand to her forehead, and, shaking all things with a vast trembling, she sank down a little and retired below the spot where she is wont to be."

"Here we are reminded of the bridge Bifrost, spoken of in the last chapter, which, as I have shown, was probably a prolongation of land reaching from Atlantis to Europe, and which the Norse legends tell us sank down under the feet of the forces of Muspelheim, in the day of Ragnarok:"

" .

. The Hesperian Naiads commit his body, smoking from the three-forked flames, to the tomb, and inscribe these verses on the stone: 'Here is Phaëton buried, the driver of his father's chariot, which, if he did not manage, still he miscarried in a great attempt.'

""But his wretched father" (the Sun) "had hidden his {p. 163} face overcast with bitter sorrow, and, if only we can believe it, they say that one day passed without the sun. The flames" (of the fires on the earth) "afforded light, and there was some advantage in that disaster."

"As there was no daily return of the sun to mark the time, that one day of darkness was probably of long duration; it may have endured for years."

Perhaps this cataclysmic event, coupled with the uncertainty of duration of sunlight in Nordic latitudes, led to mechanization of clocks and dependence on them for rhythm of life.

"Then follows Ovid's description of the mourning of Clymene and the daughters of the Sun and the Naiads for the dead Phaëton. Cycnus, king of Liguria, grieves for Phaëton until he is transformed into a swan; reminding one of the Central American legend, (which I shall give hereafter,) which states that in that day all men were turned into goslings or geese, a reminiscence, perhaps, of those who saved themselves from the fire by taking refuge in the waters of the seas:"

""Meanwhile, the father of Phaëton" (the Sun), "in squalid garb and destitute of his comeliness, just as he is wont to be when he suffers an eclipse of his disk, abhors both the light, himself, and the day; and gives his mind up to grief, and adds resentment to his sorrow."

"In other words, the poet is now describing the age of darkness, which, as we have seen, must have followed the conflagration, when the condensing vapor wrapped the world in a vast cloak of cloud."

Donelly describes Jupiter directing the subsequent operations, including return of the Sun.

Was the planet named Jupiter later? That too makes just as little sense as the other way, since its not possible anyone thought that Jupiter the planet was greater than Sun that lights skies and warms Earth.

"The legend ends, like Ragnarok, in a beautiful picture of a regenerated world."

" ... When Solon, the Greek lawgiver, visited Egypt, six hundred years before the Christian era, he talked with the priests of Sais about the Deluge of Deucalion. ... Plato ("Dialogues," xi, 517, Timæus):"

""Thereupon, one of the priests, who was of very great age, said, 'O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are but children, and there is never an old man who is an Hellene.' Solon, hearing this, said, 'What do you mean?' 'I mean to say,' he replied, 'that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you the reason of this: there have been, and there will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes. There is a story which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Phaëthon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunder-bolt. Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time: when this happens, those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the sea-shore."'"

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March 22, 2022 - March 22, 2022.

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VI. OTHER LEGENDS OF THE CONFLAGRATION 166

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"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 in the remote past.

"In the "Codex Chimalpopoca," one of the sacred books of the Toltecs, the author, speaking of the destruction which took place by fire, says:

""The third sun" (or era) "is called Quia-Tonatiuh, sun of rain, because there fell a rain of fire; all which existed burned; and there fell a rain of gravel."

""They also narrate that while the sandstone, which we now see scattered about, and the tetzontli (amygdaloide poreuse—trap or basaltic rocks), 'boiled with great tumult, there also rose the rocks of vermilion color.'"

"Here we have the whole story told in little: "Fire fell from heaven," the comet; "the sun itself was on fire"; the comet reached to, or appeared to reach to, the sun; or its head had fallen into the sun; or the terrible object may have been mistaken for the sun on fire. "There was a rain of gravel"—the Drift fell from the comet. There is also some allusion to the sandstones scattered about; and we have another reference to the great breaks in the earth's crust, caused either by the shock of contact with the comet, or the electrical disturbances of the time; and we are told that the trap-rocks, and rocks of vermilion color, boiled up to the surface with great tumult. Mankind was destroyed, except such as fled into the seas and lakes, and there plunged into the water, and lived like "goslings.""

"In the Aztec creation-myths, as preserved by the Fray Andres de Olmos, and taken down by him from the lips of those who narrated the Aztec traditions to him, we have an account of the destruction of mankind by the sun ... "

"Here we have the same Titanic battle between the gods, the godlike men of old—"the old ones"—and the Comet, which appears in the Norse legends, when Odin, Thor, Prey, Tyr, and Heimdal boldly march out to encounter the Comet and fall dead, like Citli, before the weapons or the poisonous breath of the monster. In the same way we see in Hesiod the great Jove, rising high on Olympus and smiting Typhaon with his lightnings. And we shall see this idea of a conflict between the gods and the great demon occurring all through the legends. And it may be that the three arrows of this American story represent the three comets spoken of in Hesiod, and the Fenris-wolf, Midgard-serpent, and Surt or Garm of the Goths: the first arrow did not strike the sun; the second and the third "attained its body," and then the enraged sun launched the last arrow back at Citli, at the earth; and thereupon despair filled the people, and they prepared to die."

Donelly deals with perdian legends, presumably same way he does with those of India, carelessly twisting and tearing facts, racism bolstering his fraud.

"In the legends of the Hindoos we read of the fight between Rama, the sun-god (Ra was the Egyptian god of the sun), and Ravana, a giant who, accompanied by the [1. Poor, "Sanskrit Literature," p. 144. 2. Ibid., p. 158.] {p. 172} Rakshasas, or demons, made terrible times in the ancient land where the ancestors of the Hindoos dwelt at that period. ... "

Donelly LIES. When he writes "Rama, the sun-god", THATS A LIE. A WHOPPER.

Rāma was a descendent of a clan claiming descent from Sun, and calling him sun-god is pretty much like church worshipping David as his descendent or the other way, identifying the figure on cross as David.

Just because "(Ra was the Egyptian god of the sun) might be true, or not, does not amount to Rāma being sun or sun-god.

Similarity of name isn't necessarily indicative of identification even within a family, as Donelly should know - he belonged to a culture that routinely named sons after fathers and daughters after mothers, which did not amount to marriages of sons with mothers or siblings with one another.

" ... He carries away the wife of Rama, Sita; her name signifies "a furrow," and seems to refer to agriculture, and an agricultural race inhabiting the furrowed earth. ... "

Donelly is disgusting in his negligence, arrogance, racism, twisting and fraud. Why didn't he take trouble to ask an Indian, instead of relying on lies by West and stupid guesses? No, she wasn't named after a culture, and as for agriculture, yes India had it. Doesn't amount to all women thus named. And the name does have more than that one connotation.

" ... He bears her struggling through the air. Rama and his allies pursue him. The monkey-god, Hanuman, helps Rama; a bridge of stone, sixty miles long, is built across the deep ocean to the Island of Lanka, where the great battle is fought: "The stones which crop out through Southern India are said to have been dropped by the monkey builders!" The army crosses on the bridge, as the forces of Muspelheim, in the Norse legends, marched over the bridge "Bifrost." ... "

The bridge exists,and not only can be seen by satellite, but by anyone at low tide. It has been pronounced ancient and of not natural formation but made by human engineering. What's more the stones aren't local.

Donelly is getting ready to chop and fit it into his comet story. Such lies are exactly why he lost his Atlantis thesis. What next, Troy was about comet strike?

"The body of Ravana is consumed by fire. Sita, the furrowed earth, goes through the ordeal of fire, and comes out of it purified and redeemed from all taint of the monster Ravana; and Rama, the sun, and Sita, the earth, are separated for fourteen years; Sita is hid in the dark jungle, and then they are married again, and live happily together ever after."

Much of that is a lie, especially about the couple being sun and earth. Sita is always seen as Daughter of Earth, of the Goddess Earth, but not identified with her. She isn't "the furrowed earth", any more than Rāma is "Rama, the sun".

Donelly lies there.

He lies also about the separation of the couple for fourteen years, which hasn't happened in the story before she was abducted. They were together in the forest until the kidnapping.

He lies about "then they are married again, and live happily together ever after."", too. There was no "married again", which would be ridiculous. Nor was the end he presumes correct.

Donelly is lying so he should fit Rāmayana, too, in his greed to gather legends to fit his thesis.

"Here we have the battle in the air between the sun and the demon: the earth is taken possession of by the demon; the demon is finally consumed by fire, and perishes; the earth goes through an ordeal of fire, a conflagration; and for fourteen years the earth and sun do not see each other; the earth is hid in a dark jungle; but {p. 173} eventually the sun returns, and the loving couple are again married, and live happily for ever after."

No, here we have nothing of the sort.

What can one expect but racism, arrogance and lies, from someone brought up in church?

He goes on to discuss Byron, Iroquois and more, but having been disgusted with his lying about Rāmāyana, one doesn't know if one can believe anything he says.

True to his usual ridiculous leaps, he connects words of a tribe across Atlantic related to comet with words throughout the world for father.

It might be inferred that heaven meant in the Tupi legend the heavenly land, not the skies; this is rendered the more probable because we find Irin asking where should he dwell if heaven is destroyed. This could scarcely allude to a spiritual heaven.

"And here I would note a singular coincidence: The fire that fell from heaven was the divine tata. In Egypt the Dame of deity was "ta-ta," or "pta-pta," which signified father. This became in the Hebrew "ya-ya," from which we derive the root of Jah, Jehovah. And this word is found in many languages in Europe and America, and even in our own, as, "da-da," "daddy," father. The Tupi "tata" was fire from the supreme father."

What did his father do to Donelly?

"We must concede that these legends of a world-embracing conflagration represent a race-remembrance of a great fact, or that they are a colossal falsehood—an invention of man."

No, we must check if Donelly lies about others too as he does about everything related to India.

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March 22, 2022 - March 22, 2022.

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VII. LEGENDS OF THE CAVE-LIFE 195

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"And hence everywhere in the ancient legends we find the races claiming that they came up out of the earth. Man was earth-born. The Toltecs and Aztecs traced back their origin to "the seven caves." We have seen the ancestors of the Peruvians emerging from the primeval cave, Pacarin-Tampu; and the Aztec Nanahuatzin taking refuge in a cave; and the ancestors of the Yurucares, the Takahlis, and the Mbocobi of America, all biding themselves from the conflagration in a cave; and we have seen the tyrannical and cruel race of the Tahoe legend buried in a cave. And, passing to a far-distant region, we find the Bungogees and Pankhoos, Hill tribes, of the most ancient races of Chittagong, in British India, relating that "their ancestors came out of a cave in the earth, under the guidance of a chief named Tlandrokpah."[1]"

Forests and caves have very different connotations in a tropical land where sleeping in open under stars is as normal and comfortable as sitting on floor. But "Tlandrokpah" sounds more of a racist writing down gibberish ignorinģ a real word of a language of India. Donelly mixed up his falsely labeled "Indian" tribes of U.S. with those of India?

As to the complete nonsense about "most ancient races", does he mean his own is newly evolved from another species?

Donelly goes on to discuss various legends of different tribes of natives of US, describing living in caves and emerging to a dark world where sun, moon and stars returned slowly.

"But it may be asked, How in such a period of terror and calamity—as we must conceive the comet to have caused-would men think of finding refuge in caves?

"The answer is plain: either they or their ancestors had lived in caves.

"Caves were the first shelters of uncivilized men. It was not necessary to fly to the caves through the rain of falling débris; many were doubtless already in them when the great world-storm broke, and others naturally sought their usual dwelling-places.

""The cavern," says Brinton, "dimly lingered in the memories of nations.""

Just when you think he acqsense, Donelly reassures you he's the same nasty racist.

"The cave-temples of India-the oldest temples, probably, on earth—are a reminiscence of this cave-life."

He'd never understand a thing even about Buddhist monks, never mind something complex as Hinduism or aryans, Sanskrit or times, Rāmāyaṇa or Mahābhārata.

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March 22, 2022 - March 23, 2022.

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VIII. LEGENDS OF THE AGE OF DARKNESS 208

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"ALL the cosmogonies begin with an Age of Darkness; a damp, cold, rainy, dismal time."

Again, not all - certainly not those in Sanskrit. That should tell anyone who is familiar with Sanskrit literature that it belongs completely to India, since long before India merged with Asia as land.

Donelly quotes anything of India that he can twist and tear to shreds to suit his purpose, but does not notice this. Or if he did, he ignores it.

True racist.

"It is from Sanchoniathon that we derive most of the little we know of that ancient and mysterious people, the Ph&oelig;nicians. He lived before the Trojan war; and of his writings but fragments survive—quotations in the writings of others."

"He tells us that—

""The beginning of all things was a condensed, windy air, or a breeze of thick air, and a chaos turbid and black as Erebus.

""Out of this chaos was generated Môt, which some call Ilus," (mud,) "but others the putrefaction of a watery mixture. And from this sprang all the seed of the creation, and the generation of the universe. . . . And, when the air began to send forth light, winds were produced and clouds, and very great defluxions and torrents of the heavenly waters."

"Was this "thick air" the air thick with comet-dust, which afterward became the mud? Is this the meaning of the "turbid chaos"?

"We turn to the Babylonian legends. Berosus wrote from records preserved in the temple of Belus at Babylon. He says:

"There was a time in which there existed nothing but darkness and an abyss of waters, wherein resided most hideous beings, which were produced of a twofold principle."

"Were these "hideous beings" the comets?"

Comets fid not reside in waters, as quoted above, so Donelly is stretching it - its only about sharks, jellyfish, octopi, crocodiles, alligators and so forth, most likely.

But here comes his raud to include India in his assertion.

"From the "Laws of Menu," of the Hindoos, we learn that the universe existed at first in darkness."

It's Manu, not menu, and he should know. He's quoted Manusmriti in his book on Atlantis, oo, however falsely, and there he alternated a mistaken spelling Mann with the correct Manu.

He must have made that mistake here deliberately, just to give some cheap thrills to his own likes, the racists of West.

"We copy the following text from the Vedas:

""The Supreme Being alone existed; afterward there was universal darkness; next the watery ocean was produced by the diffusion of virtue.""

That wasn't preceded by an account to fit the comet strike, so it's about beginning of Time, not the era post comet strike.

Donelly will use any lie and any fraud, however obvious and stupid.

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"We turn to the legends of the Chinese, and we find the same story:

"Their annals begin with "Pwan-ku, or the Reign of Chaos."[1]"

Sounds like Pawan Kumar, a visitor from India.

""After the chaos cleared away, heaven appeared first in order, then earth, then after they existed, and the atmosphere had changed its character, man came forth."[3]

"That is to say, P'an-ku lived through the Age of Darkness, during a chaotic period, and while the atmosphere was pestilential with the gases of the comet. ... "

P'an-ku is an incorrect rendering of what Donelly himself gives a paragraph earlier, "Pwan-ku". Is he so careless, or is it desperate attempt to confuse anyone who connects Pwan-ku with a name that obviously comes from India?

" ... Where did he live? The Chinese annals tell us:

""In the age after the chaos, when heaven and earth had just separated."

" ... At this fortunate juncture Pan-ku-sze came forth, and from that time heaven and earth began to be heaven and earth, men and things to be men and things, and so the chaotic state passed away."[1]"

Without giving name or source, Donelly links thus Chinese lore with one seemingly from across Pacific Ocean, with only a man's base, Machito, as a clue if at all;thence he gies on to British Columbia, Mexico and rest of the continent.

"In the Aztec creation-myths, according to the accounts furnished by Mendieta, and derived from Fray Andres de Olmos, one of the earliest of the Christian missionaries among the Mexicans, we have the following legend of the "Return of the Sun":

""Now, there had been no sun in existence for many years; so the gods being assembled in a place called Teotihuacan, six leagues from Mexico, and gathered at the time around a great fire, told their devotees that he of them who should first cast himself into that, fire should have the honor of being transformed into a sun. So, one of them, called Nanahuatzin . . . flung himself into the fire. Then the gods" (the chiefs?) "began to peer through the gloom in all directions for the expected light, and to make bets as to what part of heaven. he should

[1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, pp. 71-73. 2. "North Americans of Antiquity," p. 239.] {p. 216}

first appear in. Some said 'Here,' and some said 'There'; but when the sun rose they were all proved wrong, for not one of them had fixed upon the east."

"In the long-continued darkness they had lost all knowledge of the cardinal points. The ancient landmarks, too, were changed.

"The "Popul Vuh," the national book of the Quiches, tells us of four ages of the world. ... "

Donelly proceeds to give account of this, different from rest so far in that here there's mention, more than once, of the morning star, as the only source of light.

Donelly guesses it's a volcano! Why it doesn't occur to him that it could've been the comet, is a mystery. A volcano close enough as to be an only source of light wouldn't be a morning star, but a lamp always there, wouldn't it?

""It was thus they spake, living tranquilly, invoking the return of the light; waiting the rising of the sun; watching the star of the morning, precursor of the sun. But no sun came, and the four men and their descendants grew uneasy. 'We have no person to watch over us,' they said; 'nothing to guard our symbols!' Then they adopted gods of their own, and waited. They kindled fires, for the climate was colder; then there fell great rains and hail-storms, and put out their fires. Several times they made fires, and several times the rains and storms extinguished them. Many other trials also they underwent in Tulan, famines and such things, and a general dampness and cold—for the earth was moist, there being yet no sun.""

" ... Dense clouds covered the sky, shutting out the light of the sun; perpetual rains and storms fell; the world was cold and damp, muddy and miserable; the people were wanderers, despairing and hungry. They seem to have come from an eastern land. We are told:

""Tulan was a much colder climate than the happy eastern land they had left." Many generations seem to have grown up and perished under the sunless skies, "waiting for the return of the light"; for the "Popul Vuh" tells us that "here also the language of all the families was confused, so that no one of the first four men could any longer understand the speech of the others."

"That is to say, separation and isolation into rude tribes had made their tongues unintelligible to one another.

"This shows that many, many years—it may be centuries—must have elapsed before that vast volume of moisture, carried up by evaporation, was able to fall {p. 218} back, in snow and rain to the land and sea, and allow the sun to shine through "the blanket of the dark." Starvation encountered the scattered fragments of mankind."

Centuries? A chapter or two ago he'd guessed three years. Centuries might be correct, but did he not revise a manuscript?

" ... It was still dark; for they had no light but the light of the morning-star. They came to Tulan."

Says James Geikie:

""Nor can we form any proper conception of how long a time was needed to bring about that other change of climate, under the influence of which, slowly and imperceptibly, this immense sheet of frost melted away from the lowlands and retired to the mountain recesses. We must allow that long ages elapsed before the warmth became such as to induce plants and animals to clothe and people the land. How vast a time, also, must have passed away ere the warmth reached its climax!"

[2] [1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 100. 2. "The Great Ice Age," p. 184.] {p. 220}

"And all this time the rain fell. There could be no return of the sun until all the mass of moisture sucked up by the comet's heat had been condensed into water, and falling on the earth had found its way back to the ocean; and this process had to be repeated many times. It was the age of the great primeval rain."

"In the Andes, Humboldt tells us of a somewhat similar state of facts:

""A thick mist during a particular season obscures the firmament for many months. Not a planet, not the most brilliant stars of the southern hemisphere—Canopus, the {p. 221} Southern Cross, nor the feet of Centaur—are visible. It is frequently almost impossible to discover the position of the moon. If by chance the outlines of the sun's disk be visible during the day, it appears devoid of rays."

"Says Croll:

""We have seen that the accumulation of snow and ice on the ground, resulting from the long and cold winters, tended to cool the air and produce fogs, which cut off the sun's rays."[1]

"The same writer says:

""Snow and ice lower the temperature by chilling the air and condensing the rays into thick fogs. The great strength of the sun's rays during summer, due to his nearness at that season, would, in the first place, tend to produce an increased amount of evaporation. But the presence of snow-clad mountains and an icy sea would chill the atmosphere and condense the vapors into thick fogs. The thick fogs and cloudy sky would effectually prevent the sun's rays from reaching the earth, and the snow, in consequence, would remain unmelted during the entire summer. In fact, we have this very condition of things exemplified in some of the islands of the Southern Ocean at the present day. Sandwich Land, which is in the same parallel of latitude as the north of Scotland, is covered with ice and snow the entire summer; and in the Island of South Georgia, which is in the same parallel as the center of England, the perpetual snow descends to the very sea-beach. The following is Captain Cook's description of this dismal place: 'We thought it very extraordinary,' he says, 'that an island between the latitudes of 54° and 55° should, in the very height of summer, be almost wholly covered with frozen snow, in some places many fathoms deep. . . . The head of the bay was terminated by ice-cliffs of considerable height, pieces of which were continually breaking off, which made a noise like cannon. Nor were the interior parts of the country less horrible. The savage rocks raised their lofty summits

[1. "Climate and Time," p. 75.] {p. 222}

till lost in the clouds, and valleys were covered with seemingly perpetual snow. Not a tree nor a shrub of any size was to be seen.'""

"The ancient world was united in believing in great cycles of time terminating in terrible catastrophes:

["1. Captain Cook's "Second Voyage," vol. ii, pp. 232-235;

"2. "Climate and Time," Croll, pp. 60, 61.

"3. Powers's Pomo MS., Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 86.]

{p. 223}

"Hence arose the belief in Epochs of Nature, elaborated by ancient philosophers into the Cycles of the Stoics, the great Days of Brahm, long periods of time rounding off by sweeping destructions, the Cataclysms and Ekpyrauses of the universe. Some thought in these all things perished, others that a few survived. . . . For instance, Epietetus favors the opinion that at the solstices of the great year not only all human beings, but even the gods, are annihilated; and speculates whether at such times Jove feels lonely.[1] Macrobius, so far from agreeing with him, explains the great antiquity of Egyptian civilization by the hypothesis that that country is so happily situated between the pole and the equator, as to escape both the deluge and conflagration of the great cycle."[2]

"In the Babylonian Genesis tablets we have the same references to the man or people who, after the great disaster, divided the heavens into constellations, and regulated, that is, discovered and revealed, their movements. ... "

"the civilized race that followed the great cataclysm, with whom the history of the event was

["1. Discourses," book iii, chapter xiii.

"2. Brinton's Myths of the New World," p. 215.

"3. Proctor's Pleasant Ways," p. 393.]

{p. 224}

yet fresh, and who were impressed with all its horrors, and who knew well the tenure of danger and terror on which they held all the blessings of the world, turned their attention to the study of the heavenly bodies, and sought to understand the source of the calamity which had so recently overwhelmed the world. Hence they "marked," as far as they were able, "the positions of the 'comets,'" "that they might not" again "do injury, and not trouble any one." The word here given is Nibir, which Mr. Smith says does not mean planets, and, in the above account, Nibir is contradistinguished from the stars; they have already been arranged in constellations; hence it can only mean comets."

................................................................................................

"Byron saw what the effects of the absence of the sunlight would necessarily be upon the world, and that which he prefigured the legends of mankind tell us actually came to pass, in the dark days that followed the Drift."

Donelly quotes Byron's lines describing the life in dark. Which brings a question - was this when humanity in Europe lost its healthy skin, and acquired the albino condition, countered only in Southern latitudes closer to equator? Also nature must have those poor, trapped in dark, humans, by encouraging reproduction of lighter hues of hair and eyes, for sake of helping sheer visibility.

"Instead of the fair face of the world, as they had known it, bright with sunlight, green with the magnificent foliage of the forest, or the gentle verdure of the plain, they go forth upon a wasted, an unknown land, covered with oceans of mud and stones; the very face of the country changed—lakes, rivers, hills, all swept away and lost. They wander, breathing a foul and sickening atmosphere, under the shadow of an awful darkness, a darkness which knows no morning, no stars, no moon; a darkness palpable and visible, lighted only by electrical discharges from the abyss of clouds, with such roars of thunder as we, in this day of harmonious nature, can form no conception of. It is, indeed, "chaos and ancient night." All the forces of nature are there, but disorderly, destructive, battling against each other, and multiplied a thousand-fold in power; the winds are cyclones, magnetism is gigantic, electricity is appalling.

"The world is more desolate than the caves from which they have escaped. The forests are gone; the fruit-trees are swept away; the beasts of the chase have perished; the domestic animals, gentle ministers to man, have disappeared; the cultivated fields are buried deep in drifts of mud and gravel; the people stagger in the darkness against each other; they fall into the chasms of the earth; within them are the two great oppressors of humanity, hunger and terror; hunger that knows not where to turn; fear that shrinks before the whirling blasts, the rolling thunder, the shocks of blinding lightning; that knows not what moment the heavens may again open and rain fire and stones and dust upon them."

Again, no such occurrences described in Sanskrit literature, which merely is another piece of evidence amongst many that show Aryan migration theory is a lie, that Sanskrit and Aryan culture were always of India, and India escaped this particular cataclysmic event, completely.

"The references to the worship of "the morning star," which occur in the legend, seem to relate to some great volcano in the East, which alone gave light when all the world was lost in darkness. As Byron says, in his great poem, "Darkness":"

No, it must have been the comet itself. A volcano visible in East ir any other direction isn't limited to dawn.

"And they did live by watch-fires—and the thrones,

"The palaces of crownèd kings—the huts,

"The habitations of all things which dwell,

"Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,

"And men were gathered round their blazing homes

"To look once more into each other's face;

"Happy were they who dwelt within the eye

"Of the volcanoes and their mountain-torch.""

Notice that he doesn't call it a morning star.

For the rest of the chapter, Donelly quotes prayers, extensively, which sound like church prayers but are of tribes across Atlantic.

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March 23, 2022 - March 23, 2022.

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IX. THE TRIUMPH OF THE SUN 233

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"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 darkness, and the eventual return of the great luminary of the world.

"The Syrian Adonis, the sun-god, the Hebrew Tamheur, and the Assyrian Du-Zu, all suffered a sudden and violent death, disappeared for a time from the sight of men, and were at last raised from the dead."

There again - not so in India. No death, or even illness or day off on sick leave, for Sun.

"The myth is the primeval form of the resurrection.

"All through the Gothic legends runs this thought—the battle of the Light with the Darkness; the temporary death of the Light, and its final triumph over the grave. Sometimes we have but a fragment of the story.

"In the Saxon Beowulf we have Grendel, a terrible monster, who comes to the palace-hall at midnight, and drags out the sleepers and sucks their blood. Beowulf assails him. A ghastly struggle follows in the darkness. Grendel is killed. But his fearful mother, the devil's clam, comes to avenge his death; she attacks Beowulf, and is slain.[1] There comes a third dragon, which Beowulf kills, but is stifled with the breath of the monster and dies, rejoicing, however, that the dragon has brought with him a great treasure of gold, which will make his people rich.[2]"

And now, since he couldn't do the usual lie, twist and shredding fraud, Donelly lies in what he thinks is subtler manner, by quoting a source that says Sanskrit in the title, despite none of the above being anything in Sanskrit:-

"[1. Poor, "Sanskrit and Kindred Literatures," p. 315. 2. Ibid.]

{p. 234}"

"When we turn to Egypt we find that their whole religion was constructed upon legends relating to the ages of fire and ice, and the victory of the sun-god over the evil-one. We find everywhere a recollection of the days of cloud, "when darkness dwelt upon the face of the deep."

"Osiris, their great god, represented the sun in his darkened or nocturnal or ruined condition, before the coming of day. M. Mariette-Bey says:

""Originally, Osiris is the nocturnal sun; he is the primordial night of chaos; he is consequently anterior to Ra, the Sun of Day."[1]

"Mr. Miller says:

""As nocturnal sun, Osiris was also regarded as a type of the sun before its first rising, or of the primordial night of chaos, and as such, according to M. Mariette, his first rising—his original birth to the light under the form of Ra—symbolized the birth of humanity itself in the person of the first man."[2]

""The suffering and death of Osiris," says Sir G. Wilkinson, "were the great mystery of the Egyptian religion, and some traces of it are perceptible among other people of antiquity. His being the divine goodness, and the abstract idea of good; his manifestation upon earth, his death and resurrection, and his office as judge of the dead in a future state, look like the early revelation of a future manifestation of the Deity, converted into a mythological fable."[2]"

There's the source of the mythology of church! Of course!

"Osiris—the sun—had a war with Seb, or Typho, or Typhon, and was killed in the battle; he was subsequently restored to life, and became the judge of the under-world.[3]

"Seb, his destroyer, was a son of Ra, the ancient sun-god, in the sense, perhaps, that the comets, and all other planetary bodies, were originally thrown out from the mass of the sun. Seb, or Typho, was "the personification of all evil." He was the destroyer, the enemy, the evil-one.

"Isis, the consort of Osiris, learns of his death, slain by the great serpent, and ransacks the world in search of his body. She finds it mutilated by Typhon. This is the same mutilation which we find elsewhere, and which covered the earth with fragments of the sun.

"Isis was the wife of Osiris (the dead sun) and the mother of Horus, the new or returned sun; she seems to represent a civilized people; she taught the art of cultivating wheat and barley, which were always carried in her festal processions.

"Rev. O. D. Miller says:

""The wide prevalence of this legend, and its extreme antiquity, are facts familiar to all Orientalists. There was the Egyptian Osiris, the Syrian Adonis, the Hebrew Tamheur, the Assyrian Du-Zu, all regarded as solar deities, vet as having lived a mortal life, suffered a violent death, being subsequently raised from, the dead. . . . How was it possible to conceive the solar orb as dying and rising from the dead, if it had not already been taken for a mortal being, as a type of mortal man? . . . We repeat the proposition: it was impossible to conceive the sun as dying and descending into hades until it had been assumed as a type and representative of man. . . . The reign of Osiris in Egypt, his war with Typhon, his death and resurrection, were events appertaining to the divine dynasties. We can only say, then, that the origin of these symbolical ideas was extremely ancient, without attempting to fix its chronology.""

Again, there's the difference - Sanskrit 6of Aryans has no such death of Sun, he remains a God, battles between Gods and demons have Gods win, always, and no saga of humanity living in darkness.

But Donelly isn't done lying.

"But when, we realize the fact that these ancient religions were built upon the memory of an event which had really happened—an event of awful significance to the human race—the difficulty which perplexed Mr. Miller and other scholars disappears. The sun had, apparently, been slain by an evil thing; for a long period it returned not, it was dead; at length, amid the rejoicings of the world, it arose from the dead, and came in glory to rule mankind.

"And these events, as I have shown, are perpetuated in the sun-worship which still exists in the world in many {p. 237} forms. Even the Christian peasant of Europe still lifts his hat to the rising sun.

"The religion of the Hindoos was also based on the same great cosmical event."

He never did learn! This time he twists and shreds a story about Indra with his deliberate misinterpretations and lies.

"Indra was the great god, the sun. He has a long and dreadful contest with Vritra, "the throttling snake."

"Indra is "the cloud-compeller"; he "shatters the cloud with his bolt and releases the imprisoned waters";[1] that is to say, he slays the snake Vritra, the comet, and thereafter the rain pours down and extinguishes the flames which consume the world.

""He goes in search of the cattle, the clouds, which the evil powers have driven away."[2] That is to say, as the great heat disappears, the moisture condenses and the clouds form. Doubtless mankind remembered vividly that awful period when no cloud appeared in the blazing heavens to intercept the terrible heat.

""He who fixed firm the moving earth; who tranquillized the incensed mountains; who spread the spacious firmament; who consolidated the heavens—he, men, is Indra.

""He who having destroyed Ahi (Vritra, Typhon,) set free the seven rivers, who, recovered the cows, (the clouds,) detained by Bal; who generated fire in the clouds; who is invincible in battle—he, men, is Indra.""

One, didn't Donelly already cooperate one Sanskrit legends first his lie, the Varāha Avatāra chapter of Dashāvatāra? No, actually, he tore Rāmāyaṇa to shreds, as well! So now he's gone and done it to yet another, because the racist has no respect for a culture subjugated by force, any more than Rome did for a king of Jews.

Two, this whole interpretation is ridiculous. The word in Sanskrit for cattle or cows is Gau, which is also for Light. So cattle is never clouds.

Donelly's biggest whopper is "Indra was the great god, the sun"!

Indra is never confused with Sun, or anything ultimate, in Sanskrit, in India. Indra is King of Gods, of Swarga, the plane of existence of Gods. He and Sun are quite separate, as are Moon and various others.

As for "Vritra, the comet, and thereafter the rain pours down and extinguishes the flames which consume the world", again, full of lies.

Knowledge of astronomy wasn't lacking in India, and Vritra the snake is merely one of the famous serodnts with individual names, of which there are several. He isn't a comet.

Most of all, there's no mention in Sanskrit of :flames which consume the world" for a simple reason - India always a world unto herself, wasn't on fire.

If there's any essence of fact in Donelly connecting the first legend he cooped, Varāha Avatāra, as being about the comet, then clearly it ended with the comet entering the ocean, presumably North of India as it existed before vanishing.

India, Sanskrit literature, doesn't have legends of dark era or ice sheets or living in caves with animals, for the excellent reason that none of that happened in India, and Sanskrit literature of Aryans belongs to India, as do Aryans, and always did.

Donelly takes a breather with Persian legends before coming back to butcher those of India! Really obsessed wasn't he, lying his head off!

"The demonology of the Hindoos turns on the battles between the Asuras, the irrational demons of the air, the comets, and the gods:

""They dwell beneath the three-pronged root of the world-mountain, occupying the nadir, while their great enemy Indra," (the sun;) "the highest Buddhist god, sits upon the pinnacle of the mountain, in the zenith. ... "

Here his lies are several notches up, he's lying within quotation marks by inserting his own words.

"Indra," (the sun;) "the highest Buddhist god," is a lie at every stage.

Indra is not Sun, and neither is Buddha; there isn't any Buddhist God whether Indra or Sun, Buddha never preached of any God.

If seen in context of India, Buddha was a born prince within historical era - others recognised as Avatāra were far longer in past - and was eventually recognised as Avatāra but not identified with any of the Gods of level of heaven, whether Indra or Sun.

In Buddhist context, various lands which accepted Buddhism invented their own mythologies for comfort, since teachings of Buddha were too stark. But Indra isn't Sun in any of them, and Buddha is separate from both.

Donelly proceeds with further fraud, identifying an object of legends of India with everything that sounds similar. Thus he did falsely with Rāma, and he could be just as false about what's next.

" ... The Meru, which stands between the earth and the heavens, around which the heavenly bodies revolve, is the battlefield of the Asuras and the Devas."[1]

"That is to say, the land Meru—the same as the island Mero of the ancient Egyptians, from which Egypt was first colonized; the Merou of the Greeks, on which the Meropes, the first men, dwelt—was the scene where this battle between the fiends of the air on one side, and the heavenly bodies and earth on the other, was fought."

Asuras or Dānava-s were demons, not "fiends of the air"! That fraud is to help his lie about this being about the comet.

This legend isn't about the comet! It's about a very different geological event, experienced intimately by India - that of churning of oceans, vanishing of an ocean North of India between India and Asia, rising of the Himālaya ranges, and a river from Himālaya subsequently replacing the ocean that had vanished, and therefore being named Sindhu, which literally means ocean.

Meru Parvata, literally Meru Mountain, is envisioned as used to churn oceans, by the two opposing parties to the claim on the "jewels" obtained thereby, chiefly the nectar of immortality, Amrta.

So Donelly lies in calling it the battlefield. It's not. Meru Parvata is used as a churn.

As for his identification of Meru Parvata with other similar names from Egypt or West Asia, that is probably his usual whopper like one he repeats about Rāma, by identifying everything that sounds similar in name. As one said before, by his logic sons in Europe are often nirn married to mothers, since they are often named after their own fathers.

Donelly goes on to equate this with various legends from New World natives speaking of battles between light and dark.

Again, India never had an era of darkness descend on the land, or an ice sheet cover the land.

So this attempt by Donelly is a racist one, putting India and Sanskrit literature and Aryans down as merely another of the tribes physically subjugated by European forces. Does he recall who he worships? King, of the Jews subjugated by Rome, executed by Rome, and now forced to be worshipped by Rome, at pain of inquisition for centuries.

He jumps from Brazil to Norse to Egypt again, to bring about his conclusions after mixing up various names.

"And what more is needed to prove the original unity of the human race, and the vast antiquity of these legends, than the fact that we find the same story, and almost the same names, occurring among the white-haired races of Arctic Europe, and the dark-skinned people of Egypt, Ph&oelig;nicia, and India. ... "

He's only brought about a couple of tentative conclusions and a definite one, the last one about his lying about India.

""Cacus is the same as Vritra in Sanskrit, Azbidihaka in Zend, Python in Greek, and the worm Fafnir in Norse."[1]

"The cows everywhere are the clouds; they are white and soft; they move in herds across the fields of heaven; they give down their milk in grateful rains and showers to refresh the thirsty earth."

No, in India the word for cattle is Gau, which also means Light, but never cloud. However much India loves clouds, rain et al, cattle remains identified with Light. Not Sun or Moon or stars, Light.

Donelly gives the Russian legend but without quotingvit, mixing his own interpretation along. He goes on back to across Pacific, before returning to Europe, and thence proceeds to quote extensively from Milton's Paradise Lost, and suddenly leap to connect it to biblical fall.

"But never again, they feel, shall the world go back to the completely glorious conditions of the Tertiary Age, the golden age of the Eden-land. The comet has "brought death into the world, and all our woe." Mankind has sustained its great, its irreparable "Fall."

"This is the event that lies, with mighty meanings, at the base of all our theologies."

Again, not true about India. There's no fall at anywhere in India nor the concept of guilt as it engulfs in abrahmic faiths, especially church. Donelly lies in saying "all our theologies", in trying to include India by lying and giving fraudulent interpretations, and more.

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March 23, 2022 - March 23, 2022.

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X. THE FALL OF THE CLAY AND GRAVEL 251

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Donelly begins by generalising conclusions that might be valid for a part of Earth, especially Europe and neighbourhood, but not for India.

He argues that the various legends are distinct, not one lie repeated.

"The legends coincide only in these facts:—the monster in the air; the heat; the fire; the cave-life; the darkness; the return of the light.

None of those is true of anything he quotes from Sanskrit literature. He twists, lies, and misinterprets, to suit his lie.

"If the reader takes the other alternative, that these legends are not fragments of a colossal falsehood, then he must concede that the earth, since man inhabited it, encountered a comet. No other cause or event could produce such a series of gigantic consequences as is here narrated.

"But one other question remains: Did the Drift material come from the comet?

"It could have resulted from the comet in two ways: either it was a part of the comet's substance falling upon our planet at the moment of contact; or it may have been torn from the earth itself by the force of the comet, precisely as it has been supposed that it was produced by the ice."

"Who shall say what chemical changes may take place in remnants of the comet floating for thousands of years through space, and now falling to our earth? And who shall say that the material of all comets assumes the same form?

"I can not but continue to think, however, until thorough scientific investigation disproves the theory, that the cosmical granite-dust which, mixed with water, became clay, and which covers so large a part of the world, we might say one half the earth-surface of the planet, and possibly also the gravel and striated stones, fell to the earth from the comet.

"It is a startling and tremendous conception, but we are dealing with startling and tremendous facts. Even though we dismiss the theory as impossible, we still find ourselves face to face with the question, Where, then, did these continental masses of matter come from?"

" ... the theory of the glacialists, that a world-infolding ice-sheet produced them, is impossible; to reiterate, they are found, (on the equator,) where the ice-sheet could not have been without ending all terrestrial life; and they are not found where the ice must have been, in Siberia and Northwestern America, if ice was anywhere.

"If neither ice nor water ground up the earth-surface into the Drift, then we must conclude that the comet so ground it up, or brought the materials with it already ground up.

"The probability is, that both of these suppositions are in part true; the comet brought down upon the earth the clay-dust and part of the gravel and bowlders; while the awful force it exerted, meeting the earth while moving at the rate of a million miles an hour, smashed the surface-rocks, tore them to pieces, ground them up and mixed the material with its own, and deposited all together on the heated surface of the earth, where the lower part was baked by the heat into "till" or "hardpan," while the rushing cyclones deposited the other material in partly stratified masses or drifts above it; and part of this in time was rearranged by the great floods which followed the condensation of the cloud-masses into rain and snow, in the period of the River or Champlain Drift."

He gives Peruvian legend. But again, he does incorrect interpretation.

"In the Peruvian legends, Apocatequil was the great god who saved them from the powers of the darkness. He restored the light. He produced the lightning by hurling stones with his sling. The thunder-bolts are small, round, smooth stones.[2]

"The stone-worship, which played so large a part in antiquity, was doubtless due to the belief that many of the stones of the earth had fallen from heaven. ... "

Would he also criticism the Western habit of hanging portraits on wall, of not only a customs but of living family members, since it'd look to another culture like idol worship? Or to some like Western rich were in habit of looking up at daubed pieces of paper or canvas, and setting them up in expensive frames of carved wood, even silver?

" ... Dr. Schwarz, [1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 86. 2. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 165.] {p. 257} of Berlin, has shown that the lightning was associated in popular legends with the serpent.

""When the lightning kindles the woods it is associated with the descent of fire from heaven, and, as in popular imagination, where it falls it scatters the thunderbolts in all directions, the flint-stones, which flash when struck, were supposed to be these fragments, and gave rise to the stone-worship so frequent in the old world."[1]

"In Europe, in old times, the bowlders were called devil-stones; they were supposed. to have originated from "the malevolent agency of man's spiritual foes." This was a reminiscence of their real source."

Hmm! They really do believe in that guy, don't they, in West! That far, church succeeded - and why not, having preached fear of him for centuries since inception!

Also, it explains why West is so vehement against what they perceive as idol worship in other cultures - its because of their own superstitious fears!

Again he interprets -

"Iroquois legends represent the great battle between the White One, the sun, and the Dark One, the comet. The Dark One was wounded to death, and, as it fled for life, "the blood gushed from him at every step, and as it fell turned into flint-stones."

"Here we have the red clay and the gravel both represented."

Wonder if he thinks that the Dark One would bleed rainbow hues if that's what the clay or stones looked like?

Incidentally, who sees a white Sun? Isn't it always a Golden Orange hued orb, red when it's close to horizon?

"Among the Central Americans the flints were associated with Hurakan, Haokah, and Tlaloe {Tlaloc?—jbh}, the gods of storm and thunder:

" "The thunder-bolts, as elsewhere, were believed to be flints, and thus, as the emblem of the fire and the storm, this stone figures conspicuously in their myths. Tohil, the god who gave the Quiches fire by shaking his sandals, was represented by a flint-stone. Such a stone, in the beginning of things, fell from heaven to earth, and broke into sixteen hundred pieces, each of which sprang up a god. . . . "

Here Donelly proceeds to interpret without closing quotation marks -

" ... This is the germ of the adoration of stones as emblems of the fecundating rains. This is why, for example) the Navajos use, as their charm for rain, certain

[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 117.]

{p. 258}

long, round stones, which they think fall from the cloud when it thunders."[1]

"In the Algonquin legends of Manibozho, or Manobosbu, or Nanabojou, the great ancestor of all the Algic tribes, the hero man-god, we learn, had a terrific battle with "his brother Chakekenapok, the flint-stone, whom he broke in pieces, and scattered over the land, and changed his entrails into fruitful vines. The conflict was long and terrible. The face of nature was desolated as by a tornado, and the gigantic bowlders and loose rocks found on the prairies are the missiles hurled by the mighty combatants."[2]

"We read in the Ute legends, given on page —-, ante, that when the magical arrow of Ta-wats "struck the sun-god full in the face, the sun was shivered into a thousand fragments, which fell to the earth, causing a general conflagration."[3]

"Here we have the same reference to matter falling on the earth from the heavens, associated with devouring fire. And we have the same sequence of events, for we learn that when all of Ta-wats was consumed but the head, "his tears gushed forth in a flood, which spread over the earth and extinguished the fires."

"The Aleuts of the Aleutian Archipelago have a tradition that a certain Old Man, called Traghdadakh, created men "by casting stones on the earth; he flung also other stones into the air, the water, and over the land, thus making beasts, birds, and fishes."[4]

"It is a general belief in many races that the stone axes and celts fell from the heavens. In Japan, the stone

"[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 170.

"2. Ibid., p. 181.

"3. Major J. W. Powell, "Popular Science Monthly," 1879, p. 799.

"4 Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 104.]

"{p. 259}

"arrow-heads are rained from heaven by the flying spirits, who shoot them. Similar beliefs are found in Brittany, in Madagascar, Ireland, Brazil, China, the Shetlands, Scotland, Portugal, etc.[1]

"In the legends of Quetzalcoatl, the central figure of the Toltec mythology, we have a white man—a bearded man—from an eastern land, mixed up with something more than man. He was the Bird-serpent, that is, the winged or flying serpent, the great snake of the air, the son of Iztac Mixcoatl, "the white-cloud serpent, the spirit of the tornado."[2] He created the world. He was overcome by Tezcatlipoca, the spirit of the night.

""When he would promulgate his decrees, his herald proclaimed them from Tzatzitepec, the hill of shouting, with such a mighty voice that it could be heard a hundred leagues around. The arrows which he shot transfixed great trees; the stones he threw leveled forests; and when he laid his hands on the rocks the mark was indelible."[3]

""His symbols were the bird, the serpent, the cross, and the flint."[4]

"In the Aztec calendar the sign for the age of fire is the flint."

That last might be natural connection, between flint and fire, rather than a memory of comet strike. But the question worth discussing is how they thought of an Age of fire.

In India, in ancient Sanskrit literature, the separate four Yuga, great and exactly measured periods of time, are titled quite differently, the first one titled Truth (duting which Rāmāyana took place), while the current one named Kaliyuga (not after the Goddess Kaalie, but the last and still expected, Avatāra, Kalki) is of strife.

"In the Chinese Encyclopædia of the Emperor Kang-hi, 1662, we are told:

""In traveling from the shores of the Eastern Sea toward Che-lu, neither brooks nor ponds are met with in the country, although it is intersected by mountains and valleys. Nevertheless, there are found in the sand, very far away from the sea, oyster-shells and the shields of crabs. The tradition of the Mongols who inhabit the country is, that it has been said from time immemorial that in a

"[1. Tyler's "Early Mankind," p. 224.

"2. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 197.

"3. Ibid., p. 197.

"4. Ibid., p. 198.]

"{p. 260}

"remote antiquity the waters of the deluge flooded the district, and when they retired the places where they had been made their appearance covered with sand. . . . This is why these deserts are called the 'Sandy Sea,' which indicates that they were not always covered with sand and gravel."[1]

"In the Russian legends, a "golden ship sails across the heavenly sea; it breaks into fragments, which neither princes nor people can put together again,"—reminding one of Humpty-Dumpty, in the nursery-song, who, when he fell from his elevated position on the wall—

""Not all the king's horses,

" Nor all the king's men,

" Can ever make whole again."

" In another Russian legend, Perun, the thunder-god, destroys the devils with stone hammers. On Ilya's day, the peasants offer him a roasted animal, which is cut up and scattered over the fields,[2] just as we have seen the great dragon or serpent cut to pieces and scattered over the world.

"In addition to the legend of "Phaëton," already given, Ovid derived from the legends of his race another story,

"[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 328.

"2. Poor, "Sanskrit Literature," p. 400.

"3. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 222.]

"{p. 261}

"which seems to have had reference to the same event. He says (Fable XI):

""After the men who came from the Tyrian nation had touched this grove with ill-fated steps, and the urn let down into the water made a splash, the azure dragon stretched forth his head from the deep cave, and uttered dreadful hissings."

"We are reminded of the flying monster of Hesiod, which roared and hissed so terribly.

"Ovid continues:

""The urns dropped from their hands, and the blood left their bodies, and a sudden trembling seized their astonished limbs. He wreathes his scaly orbs in rolling spirals, and, with a spring, becomes twisted into mighty folds; and, uprearing himself from below the middle into the light air, he looks down upon all the grove, and is of" (as) "large size, as, if you were to look on him entire, the serpent which separates the two Bears" (the constellations).

"He slays the Ph&oelig;nicians; "some he kills with his sting, some with his long folds, some breathed upon by the venom of his baleful poison."

"Cadmus casts a huge stone, as big as a millstone, against him, but it falls harmless upon his scales, "that were like a coat-of-mail"; then Cadmus pierced him with his spear. In his fall he crushes the forests; the blood flows from his poisonous palate and changes the color of the grass. He is slain.

"Then, under the advice of Pallas, Cadmus sows the earth with the dragon's teeth, "under the earth turned up, as the seeds of a future people." Afterward, the earth begins to move, and armed men rise up; they slay Cadmus, and then fight with and slay each other.

"This seems to be a recollection of the comet, and the stones falling from heaven; and upon the land so afflicted

"{p. 262}

"subsequently a warlike and aggressive and quarrelsome race of men springs up.

"In the contest of Hercules with the Lygians, on the road from Caucasus to the Hesperides, "there is an attempt to explain mythically the origin of the round quartz blocks in the Lygian field of stones, at the mouth of the Rhône."[1]

"In the "Prometheus Delivered" of Æsechylus, Jupiter draws together a cloud, and causes "the district round about to be covered with a shower of round stones."[2]"

That could just be hailstones!

Donelly again lies about india, as he periodically and completely unnecessarily does.

"In the Hindoo legend (see page 171, ante) of the great battle between Rama, the sun-god, and Ravana, the evil one, Rama persuaded the monkeys to help him build a bridge to the Island of Lanka, "and the stones which crop out through Southern India are said to have been dropped by the monkey builders.""

Again, Rāma is NOT Sun or "the sun-god", never was, and Donnelly is lying. As for stones to build the bridge, yes, they aren't local.

Donelly discusses biblical excerpts in the context.

"The "book of Jasher" was, we are told, a very ancient work, long since lost. Is it not possible that a great, dim memory of a terrible event was applied by tradition to the mighty captain of the Jews, just as the doings of Zeus have been attributed, in the folk-lore of Europe, to Charlemagne and Barbarossa?

"If the contact of Lexell's comet with the earth would, as shown on page 84, ante, have increased the length of the sidereal year three hours, what effect might not a comet, many times larger than the mass of the earth, have had upon the revolution of the earth? Were the heat,

{p. 265}

the conflagrations, and the tearing up of the earth's surface caused by such an arrestment or partial slowing-up of the earth's revolution on its axis?"

That seems like the very explanation of why ancients of India were supposed to have lived for several centuries, at the very least.

" ... The American and Polynesian legends represent that the catastrophe increased the length of the days. ... "

"We find also many allusions in the legends to the clay."

He quotes several examples, and proceeds to another matter.

"There is another curious fact to be considered in connection with these legends—that the calamity seems to have brought with it some compensating wealth.

"Thus we find Beowulf, when destroyed by the midnight monster, rejoicing to think that his people would receive a treasure, a fortune by the monster's death.

"Hence we have a whole mass of legends wherein a dragon or great serpent is associated with a precious horde of gold or jewels.

""The Scythians had a saga of the sacred gold which fell burning from heaven. The ancients had also some strange fictions of silver which fell from heaven, and with which it had been attempted, under the Emperor Severus, to cover bronze coins."[1]

""In Peru the god of riches was worshiped under the image of a rattlesnake, horned and hairy, with a tail of gold. It was said to have descended from the heavens in

"[1. "Cosmos," vol. i, p. 115.]

"{p. 267}

"the sight of all the people, and to have been seen by the whole army of the Inca."[1]

"The Peruvians—probably in reference to this event—chose as their arms two serpents with their tails interlaced. Among the Greeks and ancient Germans the fiery dragon was the dispenser of riches, and "watches a treasure in the earth."[2]

"These legends may be explained by the fact that in the Ural Mountains, on the east of Europe, in South America, in South Africa, and in other localities, the Drift gravels contain gold and precious stones.

"The diamond is found in drift-gravels alone. It is pure carbon crystallized. Man has been unable to reproduce it, except in minute particles; nor can he tell in what laboratory of nature it has been fabricated. It is not found in situ in any of the rocks of an earth-origin. Has it been formed in space? Is it an outcome of that pure carbon which the spectroscope has revealed to us as burning in some of the comets?"

Africa, in that case, didn't escape the comet strike, but had the biggest hit obviously.

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March 23, 2022 - March 23, 2022.

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XI. THE ARABIAN MYTHS 268

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He devotes a whole chapter to this, unlike the jumbled account of others. Why, because they are close to biblical?

"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 these widely diverse races, Aryan and Semitic, were one, but we find in them many allusions to the battle between good and evil, between God and the serpent."

"And then we have the legend of "the City of Brass," or bronze. It relates to "an ancient age and period in the olden time." One of the caliphs, Abdelmelik, the son of Marwan, has heard from antiquity that Solomon, (Solomon is, in Arabic, like Charlemagne in the middle-age myths of Europe, the synonym for everything venerable and powerful,) had imprisoned genii in bottles of brass, and the Caliph desired to procure some of these bottles.

"{p. 269}

"Then Talib (the son of Sahl) tells the Caliph that a man once voyaged to the Island of Sicily, but a wind arose and blew him away "to one of the lands of God."

""This happened during the black darkness of night."

"It was a remote, unfrequented land; the people were black and lived in caves, and were naked and of strange speech. They cast their nets for Talib and brought up a bottle of brass or bronze, containing one of the imprisoned genii, who came out of it, as a blue smoke, and cried in a horrible voice, "Repentance, repentance, O prophet of God!""

"All this was in a Western land. And Abdelmelik sent Talib to find this land. It was "a journey of two years and some months going, and the like returning." It was in a far country. They first reach a deserted palace in a desolate land, the palace of "Kosh the son of Sheddad the son of Ad, the greater." He read an inscription:

""Here was a people, whom, after their works, thou shalt see wept over for their lost dominion.

""And in this palace is the last information respecting lords collected in the dust.

""Death hath destroyed them and disunited them, and in the dust they have lost what they amassed.""

Donelly proceeds to quote it at great length, a story involving a journey, finding a monster, an idol carved of red carnelian, several genii, and more.

""I am an Afrite of the genii, and my name is Dahish, the son of Elamash, and I am restrained here by the majesty of God.

" "There belonged to one of the sons of Eblis an idol of red carnelian, of which I was made guardian; and there used to worship it one of the kings of the sea, of illustrious dignity, of great glory, leading, among his troops of the genii, a million warriors who smote with swords before him, and who answered his prayer in cases of difficulty. These genii, who obeyed him, were under my command and authority, following my words when I ordered them: all of them were in rebellion against Solomon the son of David (on both of whom be peace!), and I used to enter the body of the idol, to command them and to forbid them."

"Solomon sent word to this king of the sea that he must give up the worship of the idol of red carnelian; the king consulted the idol, and this Afrite, speaking through the idol, encouraged the king to refuse. What,—he said to him,—can Solomon do to thee, "when thou art in the midst of this great sea?" And so Solomon came to compel the island-race to worship the true God; he surrounded his island, and filled the land with his troops, assisted by birds and wild beasts, and a dreadful battle followed in the air:

""After this they came upon us all together, and we contended with him in a wide tract for a period of two days; and calamity befell us on the third day, and the decree of God (whose name be exalted!) was executed among us. The first who charged upon Solomon were I and my troops: and I said to my companions, 'Keep in your places in the battle-field while I go forth to them and challenge Dimiriat."'

"(Dimiriat was the Sun, the {p. 272} bright one.)

""And lo, he came forth, like a great mountain, his fires flaming and his smoke ascending; and he approached and smote me with a flaming fire; and his arrow prevailed over my fire. He cried out at me with a prodigious cry, so that I imagined the heaven had fallen and closed over me, and the mountains shook at his voice.

"Then he commanded his companions, and they charged upon us all together: we also charged upon them, and we cried out one to another: the fires rose and the smoke ascended, the hearts of the combatants were almost cleft asunder, and the battle raged. The birds fought in the air, and the wild beasts in the dust; and I contended with Dimiriat until he wearied me and I wearied him;

{p. 273}

after which I became weak, and my companions and troops were enervated and my tribes were routed."

"The birds tore out the eyes of the demons, and cut them in pieces until the earth was covered with the fragments, like the trunks of palm-trees. "As for me, I flew from before Dimiriat, but he followed me a journey of three months until he overtook me." And Solomon hollowed out the black pillar, and sealed him in it with his signet, and chained him until the day of resurrection.

"And Talib and his party go on still farther, and find "the City of Brass," a weird, mysterious, lost city, in a desolate land; silent, and all its people dead; a city once of high civilization, with mighty, brazen walls and vast machinery and great mysteries; a city whose inhabitants had perished suddenly in some great calamity. And on the walls were tablets, and on one of them were inscribed these solemn words:

""'Where are the kings and the peoples of the earth? They have quitted that which they have built and peopled. And in the grave they are pledged for their past actions. There, after destruction, they have become putrid corpses. Where are the troops? They repelled not nor profited. And where is that which they collected and boarded? The decree of the Lord of the Throne surprised them. Neither riches nor refuge saved them from it.'

""And they saw the merchants dead in their shops; their skins were dried, and their bones were carious, and they had become examples to him who would be admonished.""

The rest seems very abrahmic.

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March 23, 2022 - March 23, 2022.

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XII. THE BOOK OF JOB 276

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""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, and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.""

"We have here the record of a great convulsion. Fire fell from heaven; the fire of God. It was not lightning, for it killed the seven thousand sheep, (see chap. i, 3,) belonging to Job, and all his shepherds; and not only killed but consumed them—burned them up. A fire falling from heaven great enough to kill seven thousand sheep must have been an extensive conflagration, extending over a large area of country. And it seems to have been accompanied by a great wind—a cyclone—which killed all Job's sons and daughters."

"In the first place it is, I believe, conceded by the foremost {p. 277} scholars that the book of Job is not a Hebrew work; it was not written by Moses; it far antedates even the time of Abraham."

Is this to point out to antisemitics, which then meant all church flock, that this source was respectable?

"That very high orthodox authority, George Smith, F. S. A., in his work shows that—

""Everything relating to this patriarch has been violently controverted. His country; the age in which he lived; the author of the book that bears his name; have all been fruitful themes of discord, and, as if to confound confusion, these disputants are interrupted by others, who would maintain that no such person ever existed; that the whole tale is a poetic fiction, an allegory!"[1]

"Job lived to be two hundred years old, or, according to the Septuagint, four hundred. This great age relegates him to the era of the antediluvians, or their immediate descendants, among whom such extreme ages were said to have been common.

"C. S. Bryant says:

""Job is in the purest Hebrew. The author uses only the word Elohim for the name of God. The compiler or reviser of the work, Moses, or whoever he was, employed at the heads of chapters and in the introductory and concluding portions the name of Jehovah; but all the verses where Jehovah occurs, in Job, are later interpolations in a very old poem, written at a time when the Semitic race had no other name for God but Elohim; before Moses obtained the elements of the new name from Egypt."[2]

"Hale says: "The cardinal constellations of spring and autumn, in Job's time, were Chima and Chesil, or Taurus and Scorpio, of which the principal stars are Aldebaran, the Bull's Eye, and Antare, the Scorpion's Heart. Knowing, therefore, the longitudes of these stars at present, the interval

"[1. "The Patriarchal Age," vol. i, p. 351.

"2. MS. letter to the author, from C. S. Bryant, St. Paul, Minnesota.]

"{p. 278}

"of time from thence to the assumed date of Job's trial will give the difference of these longitudes, and ascertain their positions then with respect to the vernal and equinoctial points of intersection of the equinoctial and ecliptic; according to the usual rate of the precession of the equinoxes, one degree in seventy-one years and a half."[1]

"A careful calculation, based on these principles, has proved that this period was 2338 B. C. According to the Septuagint, in the opinion of George Smith, Job lived, or the book of Job was written, from 2650 B. C. to 2250 B. C. Or the events described may have occurred 25,740 years before that date."

That certainly means that none of the legends from Sanskrit quoted by Donelly fit, since they are all far more in the past, compared to this recent date.

"It appears, therefore, that the book of Job was written, even according to the calculations of the orthodox, long before the time of Abraham, the founder of the Jewish nation, and hence could not have been the work of Moses or any other Hebrew. Mr. Smith thinks that it was produced soon after the Flood, by an Arabian. He finds in it many proofs of great antiquity. He sees in it (xxxi, 26, 28) proof that in Job's time idolatry was an offense under the laws, and punishable as such; and he is satisfied that all the parties to the great dialogue were free from the taint of idolatry. Mr. Smith says:

""The Babylonians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Canaanites, Midianites, Ethiopians of Abyssinia, Syrians, and other contemporary nations, had sunk into gross idolatry long before the time of Moses.""

How's the accusations of idol worship against church of Rome, leveled by the Jehovah's Witness sect, not correct?

How's respefor Bible or fir churches, cathedrals, paintings, icons etc al, not idol worship, other than an arbitrary definition of worship?

Who authorised this particular limited definition of worship?

"Dr. Magee says:

""If, in short, there be on the whole, that genuine air of the antique which those distinguished scholars, Schultens, Lowth, and Michaelis, affirm in every respect to pervade the work, we can scarcely hesitate to pronounce, with Lowth and Sherlock, that the book of Job is the oldest in the world now extant."[2]"

Isn't thus worship of antiques an idol worship, quite apart from the obvious incorrect nature of that statement?

Nothing is older than Sanskrit literature, which includes, but predates, vanishing of an ocean North of India between India and Asia, and the rising of the Himālaya ranges.

Donelly, having quoted extensively, remarks -

"All this is most remarkable: here is the delineation of a great catastrophe—the mountains are removed and leveled; the earth shakes to its foundations; the sun fails to appear, and the stars are sealed up. How? In the dense masses of clouds?"

He quotes further, extensively.

"What does this mean? When in history have the waters failed from the sea? Job believes in the immortality of the soul (xix, 26): "Though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." Can these words then be of general application, and mean that those who lie down and rise not shall not awake for ever? No; he is simply telling that when the conflagration came and dried up the seas, it slaughtered the people by the million; they fell and perished, never to live again; and he calls on God to hide him in a grave, a tomb, a cavern—until the day of his wrath be past, and then to remember him, to come for him, to let him out."

More extensive quoting, before Donelly remarks -

"What is the meaning of all this? And why this association of the flint-stones, referred to in so many legends; and the gold believed to have fallen from heaven in torrents, is it not all wonderful and inexplicable upon any other theory than that which I suggest?"

"What does this mean? Where was "the island of the innocent"? What was the way which the wicked, who did not live on "the island of the innocent," had trodden, but which was swept away in the flood as the bridge Bifrost was destroyed, in the Gothic legends, by the forces of Muspelheim?"

"What is the meaning of all this? The dead under the waters tremble; hell is naked, in the blazing heat, and destruction is uncovered; the north, the cold, descends on the world; the waters are bound up in thick clouds; the face of God's throne, the sun, is bidden by the clouds spread upon it; darkness has come, day and night are all one; the earth trembles; he has lighted up the heavens with the fiery comet, shaped like a crooked serpent, but he has struck him as Indra struck Vritra."

Why the unnecessary whiplash corraling India, when it's evident that it's forced by Donelly via lies and misinterpretations to fit India in his scheme, when Sanskrit literature clearly is way farther back in past?

"And this land the next verse tells us:

""6. The stones of it are the place of sapphires, and the clods of it" (King James, "dust") "are gold."

"We are again reminded of those legends of America and Europe where gold and jewels fell from heaven among the stones. We are reminded of the dragon-guarded hoards of the ancient myths."

"The commentators tell us that this expression, "which cover all from above," means literally, "the bottom of the sea is laid bare"; and they confess their inability to understand it. But is it not the same story told by Ovid of the bottom of the Mediterranean having been rendered

{p. 306}

"a bed of dry sand by Phaëton's conflagration; and does it not remind us of the Central American legend of the starving people migrating in search of the sun, through rocky places where the sea had been separated to allow them to pass?

"And the King James version continues

""32. With clouds he covereth the light; and commandeth it not to shine by the cloud that cometh betwixt.

""33. The noise thereof sheweth concerning it, the cattle also concerning the vapor."

"This last line shows how greatly the original text has been garbled; what have the cattle to do with it? Unless, indeed, here, as in the other myths, the cows signify the clouds. The meaning of the rest is plain: God draws up the water, sends it down as rain, which covers all things; the clouds gather before the sun and hide its light; and the vapor restores the cows, the clouds; and all this is accompanied by great disturbances and noise."

So that's one of the many sources of why Donelly lies about india and twists the quotes from Sanskrit literature - if biblical interpretation is cattle~clouds, that's be true of Sanskrit literature too, India subjugated by European forces must obey!

Did he then think that Buddha was supposed to be a great cloud? Having his epithet alternatively "Gautama", literally, Most Enlightened, doesn't that tell Donelly that cattle is held as Light, NOT as clouds, by India, since antiquity?

No, racism makes them stupid in their arrogance.

""38. When was the dust poured on the earth, and the clods hardened together?" {p. 309}

"One version makes this read: "Poured itself into a mass by the rain, like molten metal."

"And another translates it— "Is caked into a mass by heat, like molten metal, BEFORE THE RAIN FALLS."

"This is precisely in accordance with my theory that the "till" or "hard-pan," next the earth, was caked and baked by the heat into its present pottery-like and impenetrable condition, long before the work of cooling and condensation set loose the floods to rearrange and form secondary Drift out of the upper portion of the débris."

"In the Norse legends we read of three destructive objects which appeared in the heavens one of these was shaped like a serpent; it was called "the Midgard-serpent"; then there was "the Fenris wolf"; and, lastly, "the dog Garm." In Hesiod we read, also, of three monsters: first, Echidna, "a serpent huge and terrible and vast"; second, Chimæra, a lion-like creature; and, thirdly, Typh&oelig;us, worst of all, a fierce, fiery dragon. And in Job, in like manner, we have three mighty objects alluded to or described: first the "winding" or "twisting" serpent with which God has "adorned the heavens"; then "behemoth," monstrous enough to "drink up rivers," "the chief of the ways of God"; and lastly,

{p. 310}

and most terrible of all, "leviathan"; the name meaning, the twisting animal, gathering itself into folds.""

"By this serpent some of the commentators understand "a constellation, the devil, the leviathan." In the Septuagint he is called "the apostate dragon.""

" ... Donati's great comet in 1858:

""On the 16th of September two diverging streams of light shot out from the nucleus across the coma, and, having separated to about the extent of its diameter, they turned back abruptly and streamed out in the tail. Luminous substance could be distinctly seen rushing out from the nucleus, and then flowing back into the tail. M. Rosa described the streams of light as resembling long hair brushed upward from the forehead, and then allowed to fall back on each side of the head."[1]"

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March 23, 2022 - March 23, 2022.

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XIII. GENESIS READ BY THE LIGHT OF THE COMET 316

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"It is conceded that in some of the verses of these chapters God is spoken of as Elohim, while in the remaining verses he is called Jehovah Elohim. This is very much as if a book were discovered to-day in part of which God was referred to as Jove, and in the rest as Jehovah-Jove. The conclusion would be very strong that the first part was written by one who know the Deity only as Jove, while the other portion was written by one who had come under Hebraic influences. And this state of facts in Genesis indicates that it was not the work of one inspired mind, faultless and free from error; but the work of two minds, relating facts, it is true, but jumbling them together in an incongruous order."

"Rain is the product of two things—heat which evaporates the waters of the oceans, lakes, and rivers; and cold which condenses them again into rain or snow. Both heat and cold are necessary, In the tropics the water is sucked up by the heat of the sun; it rises to a cooler stratum, and forms clouds; these clouds encounter the colder air flowing in from the north and south, condensation follows, accompanied probably by some peculiar electrical action, and then the rain falls.

"But when the lemon and the banana grew in Spitzbergen, as geology assures us they did in pre-glacial days, where was the cold to come from? The very poles must then have possessed a warm climate. There were, therefore, at that time, no movements of cold air from the poles to the equator; when the heat drew up the moisture it rose into a vast body of heated atmosphere, surrounding the whole globe to a great height; it would have to pass through this cloak of warm air, and high up above the earth, even to the limits of the earth-warmth, before it reached an atmosphere sufficiently cool to condense it, and from that great height it would fall as a fine mist.

"We find an illustration of this state of things on the coast of Peru, from the river Loa to Cape Blanco,[1] where no rain ever falls, in consequence of the heated air which ascends from the vast sand wastes, and keeps the moisture of the air above the point of condensation."

Again he assaults India and fraudulently compares the snake of bible and other things of Norse legends with Raavana.

He is hunting for signs of comet in bible, and locates it in story of Lot. He goes back and forth between bible and Norse legends.

"To recapitulate, we have here, in due chronological order:

"1. The creation of the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them.

"2. The creation of the plants, animals, and man.

"3. The fair and lovely age of the Pliocene, the summer-land, when the people went naked, or clothed themselves in the leaves of trees; it was the fertile land where Nature provided abundantly everything for her children.

"4. The serpent appears and overthrows this Eden.

"5. Fire falls from heaven and destroys a large part of the human race.

"6. A remnant take refuge in a cave.

"7. Man is driven out of the Edenic land, and a blazing sword, a conflagration, waves between him and Paradise, between Niflheim and Muspelheim."

"The true meaning probably is, that this was the region that had been for ages, before the Drift and the Darkness, regarded as the home of the godlike, civilized race; situated high above the ocean, "in the midst of the waters," in mid-sea; precipitous and mountainous, it was the first region to clear itself of the descending torrents."

Flattery racist there. He's just finished saying humanity needed covering only after the comet strike brought cold!

"Instead of being, compelled to argue, as Religion now does, that the whole heavens and the earth, with its twenty miles in thickness of stratified rocks, were made in six actual days, or to interpret "days" to mean vast periods

{p. 336}

of time, notwithstanding the record speaks of "the evening and the morning" constituting these "days," as if they were really subdivisions of sun-marked time; we here see that the vast Creation, and the great lapses of geologic time, all lie far back of the day when darkness was on the face of the deep; and that the six days which followed, and in which the world was gradually restored to its previous condition, were the natural subdivisions into which events arranged themselves. The Chinese divided this period of reconstruction into "branches" or "stems"; the race from whom the Jews received their traditions divided it into days.

"The first subdivision was, as I have said, that of the twilight age, when light began to invade the total darkness; it was subdivided again into the evening and the morning, as the light grew stronger.

"The next subdivision of time was that period, still in the twilight, when the floods fell and covered a large part of the earth, but gradually gathered themselves together in the lower lands, and left the mountains bare. And still the light kept increasing, and the period was again subdivided into evening and morning.

"And why does the record, in each case, tell us that the evening and the morning "constituted the day, instead of the morning and the evening? The answer is plain:—mankind were steadily advancing from darkness to light; each stage terminating in greater clearness and brightness; they were moving steadily forward to the perfect dawn. And it is a curious fact that the Israelites, even now, commence the day with the period of darkness: they begin their Sabbath on Friday at sunset.

"The third subdivision was that in which the continents cleared themselves more and more of the floods, and the increasing light and warmth called forth grass and the

{p. 337}

trees, and clothed nature in a mantle of green. Man had come out of his cave, and there were scattered remnants of the animal kingdom here and there, but the world, in the main, was manless and lifeless—a scene of waste and desolation.

"In the fourth subdivision of time, the sun, moon, and stars appeared;—dimly, and wrapped in clouds, in the evening; clearer and brighter in the morning.

"In the next subdivision of time, the fish, which spawn by the million, and the birds, which quadruple their numbers in a year, began to multiply and scatter themselves, and appear everywhere through the waters and on the land. And still the light kept increasing, and "the evening and the morning were the fifth day."

"And on the sixth day, man and the animals, slower to increase, and requiring a longer period to reach maturity, began to spread and show themselves everywhere on the face of the earth.

"There was a long interval before man sent out his colonies and repossessed the desolated continents. In Europe, as I have shown, twelve feet of stalagmite intervenes in the caves between the remains of pre-glacial and post-glacial man. As this deposit forms at a very slow rate, it indicates that, for long ages after the great destruction, man did not dwell in Europe. Slowly, "like a great blot that spreads," the race expanded again over its ancient hunting-grounds."

"The world, like Milton's lion, is still trying to disengage its binder limbs from the superincumbent weight of the Drift. Every snow-storm, every chilling blast that blows out from the frozen lips of the icy North, is but a reminiscence of Ragnarok."

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March 23, 2022 - March 23, 2022.

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PART IV. CONCLUSIONS.

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I. WAS PRE-GLACIAL MAN CIVILIZED? 341

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Donelly won't like it, but answer, from India, is yes, of course. It's a continuous civilisation since long before, abrahmic invaders having failed in wiping it out despite their desperate efforts.

Elsewhere, it's uncertain, comet strike having darkened their lands and driven them under ice-sheet into caves, and worse.

"The conclusion at which I have arrived is, that mankind, prior to the Drift, had, in some limited localities, reached a high stage of civilization, and that many of our most important inventions and discoveries were known in the pre-glacial age. Among these were pottery, metallurgy, architecture, engraving, Carving, the use of money, the domestication of some of our animals, and even the use of an alphabet. I shall present the proofs of this startling conclusion, and leave the reader to judge for himself. {p. 342}

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

Obviously he's going to present Europe, Atlantis et al, as his selections.

But Ramayana civilisation already is far advanced beyond West.

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

Again he lies about Indian Sanskrit literature of antiquity.

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

Ravana was a king, not a comet, and he kidnapped another man's wife, whose name is not anything like Donelly claims, "her name indicates that she represented "the furrowed earth". No, it's nothing of the kind.

Donnelly is lying.

What's more, he ignores the various other startling things of the epic. There's the airplane flight that the reunited couple returned to their home city in, for example, with his brother and the new devotee Hanuman who was to forever serve him.

There's the prosperous kingdoms, several of them, spread from north to south and east to west, in India.

There are two cities of gold, Ravana's Lanka in south and that of his half brother in Himalayas.

And much more.

Donelly ignores it all, preferring his lies.

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

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

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

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

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

"In the seventeenth century, Fray Pedro Simon relates that some miners, running an adit into a hill near Callao,

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

{p. 346}

"met with a ship, which had on top of it the great mass of the hill, and did not agree in its make and appearance with our ships."

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

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

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

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

"At considerable depths below the surface of the earth, fifteen to twenty feet, immediately overlying the salt-rocks, and underneath what Dr. Foster believes to be the equivalent of the Drift in Europe, "associated with the bones of elephants and other huge extinct quadrupeds," "incredible quantities of pottery were found"; ... "

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

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March 23, 2022 - March 24, 2022.

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II. THE SCENE OF MAN'S SURVIVAL 366

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"We are told by Ovid that it was the tremendous heat of the comet-age that baked the negro black; in this Ovid doubtless spoke the opinion of antiquity. Whether or not that period of almost insufferable temperature produced any effect upon the color of that race I shall not undertake to say; nor shall I dare to assert that the white race was bleached to its present complexion by the long absence of the sun during the Age of Darkness."

The latter is certainly far more likely.

"It is true Professor Hartt tells us[1] that there is a marked difference in the complexion of the Botocudo Indians who have lived in the forests of Brazil and those, of the same tribe, who have dwelt on its open prairies; and that those who have resided for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years in the dense forests of that tropical land are nearly white in complexion. If this be the case in a merely leaf-covered tract, what must have been the effect upon a race dwelling for a long time in the remote north, in the midst of a humid atmosphere, enveloped in constant clouds, and much of the time in almost total darkness?

"There is no doubt that here and then were developed the rude, powerful, terrible "ice-giants" of the legends, out of whose ferocity, courage, vigor, and irresistible energy have been evolved the dominant races of the west of Europe—the land-grasping, conquering, colonizing races; the men of whom it was said by a Roman poet, in the Viking Age: "The sea is their school of war and the storm their friend they are sea-wolves that prey on the pillage of the world."

"They are now taking possession of the globe."

"What are the proofs of my proposition that man survived on an Atlantic island?"

"And, as I have shown, in Genesis it appears that, after the Age of Darkness, God separated the floods which overwhelmed the earth and made a firmament, a place of solidity, a refuge, (chap. i, vs. 6, 7,) "in the midst of the waters." A firm place in the midst of the waters is necessarily an island.

"And the location of this Eden was westward from. Europe, for we read, (chap. iii, v. 24):

""So he drove out the man; and he placed at the EAST of the garden of Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life."

"The man driven out of the Edenic land was, therefore, driven eastward of Eden, and the cherubims in the east of Eden faced him. The land where the Jews dwelt was eastward of paradise; in other words, paradise was west of them.

"And, again, when Cain was driven out be too moved eastward; he "dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden," (chap. iv, verse 16.) There was, therefore, a constant movement of the human family eastward. The land of Nod may have been Od, Ad, Atlantis; and from Od may have come the name of Odin, the king, the god of Ragnarok."

"It must not be forgotten that Phaëton was the son of Merops; and Theopompus tells us that the people who inhabited Atlantis were the Meropes, the people of Merou. And the Greek traditions[1] show that the human race issued from Upa-Merou; and the Egyptians claim that their ancestors came from the Island of Mero; and among the Hindoos the land of the gods and the godlike men was Meru."

Donelly lies in the last bit.

"And here it is, we are told, where in deep caves, and from the seas, receding under the great heat, the human race, crying out for mercy, with uplifted and blistered hands, survived the cataclysm.

"And Ovid informs us that this land, "with a mighty trembling, sank down a little" in the ocean, and the Gothic and Briton (Druid) legends tell us of a prolongation of Western Europe which went down at the same time."

Donelly proceeds again with his lies about ancient Sanskrit literature from India.

"In the Hindoo legends the great battle between Rama and Ravana, the sun and the comet, takes place on an island, the Island of Lanka, and Rama builds a stone bridge sixty miles long to reach the island."

Now this is height of fraud, if he's quoting ghost to support his thesis that Atlantis existed, or another island nest Europe did! Lanka, and the bridge built by Rāma, are still very much in place where they've always been since Rāmāyaṇa.

Donelly proceeds with a horrific lie, claiming that Krishna in Bhagawadgeeta told Arjuna the story of Adam and Eve, and that they left Lanka walking to India on a bridge while the bridge was destroyed behind them. He claims this is the comet strike.

It's an asinine fraud. There's no such part in Bhagawadgeeta. There's no such story in any Sanskrit scriptures. No such legends are any part of India.

Donelly quotes Bible in India as his source.

"[1. Jacolliet, "The Bible in India," p. 195.]"

That makes it, Bible in India, a fraud.

Besides, if the comet strike was so horrific elsewhere, how does it affect India and Lanka only in loss of a bridge?

No, this lie has been manufactured by missionaries, to wipe out the truth, that the bridge was not natural, but constructed by Rāma.

Donelly repeats the lie throughout his book about Rāmāyaṇa being about the comet.

"In the Hindoo legend of the battle between Rama, the [1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 177.] {p. 375} sun, and Ravana, the comet, the scene is laid on the Island of Lanka."

Donelly lies in this interpretation. Lanka us an island regardless of whether Atlantis existed, and Rāmāyaṇa took place as written by the witness Vālmīki. Rāma was a prince in exile, not Sun, and Rāvaṇa a king, the then king of Lanka, not a comet. This is history of India, not a play toy for racists.

"In short, we may say that, wherever any of these legends refer to the locality where the disaster came and where man survived, the scene is placed upon an island, in the ocean, in the midst of the waters; and this island, wherever the points of the compass are indicated, lies to the west of Europe and to the east of America: it is, therefore, in the Atlantic Ocean; and the island, we shall see, is connected with these continents by long bridges or ridges of land."

One, Lanka is an actual place. Two, it's not west of Europe and east of Peru, not simultaneously, unless one wraps around the globe three quarters each time. Three, "locality where the disaster came and where man survived, the scene is placed upon an island" does not fit Rāmāyaṇa.

And Donelly is a racist who lies about Sanskrit heritage, about Aryans and about India.

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March 24, 2022 - March 24, 2022.

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III. THE BRIDGE 376

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So Donelly is now getting ready to sally forth with whoppers about Rāma Setu? He goes on fir several oaraabout Mid-Atlantic ridge, and suddenly goes

"We have seen in the Hindoo legends that when Rama went to the Island of Lanka to fight the demon Ravana, he built a bridge of stone, sixty miles long, with the help of the monkey-god, in order to reach the island."

Did he think Rāmāyana was written so he could invent Atlantis, if it never existed?

"Here the gods have their doomstead. The Asas ride hither every day over Bifrost, which is also called Asa-bridge."

"And these three mountain-chains going out to the different continents were the three roots of the tree Ygdrasil, the sacred tree of the mountain-top; and it is to this "three-pronged root of the world-mountain" that the

{p. 380}

Hindoo legends refer, (see page 238, ante): on its top was heaven, Olympus; below it was hell, where the Asuras, the comets, dwelt; and between was Meru, (Mero Merou,) the land of the Meropes, Atlantis."

He's lying, when he inserts the bit about Hindu, and mixing things. No Hindu literature mentions Olympus or Atlantis. Meru Parvata has nothing to do with his Meropes just because names are similar, any more than Indian classical music has to do with opera just because a note is similar. Asuras were not comets. Hindus were proficient at Astronomy and knew comets. There's no confusion of comets with Asuras except this deliberate lie by Donelly.

"But here we have Bifrost, a bridge, but not a continuous structure, interrupted in places by water, reaching from Europe to some Atlantic island. And the island-people regarded it very much as some of the English look {p. 382} upon the proposition to dig a tunnel from Dover to Calais, as a source of danger, a means of invasion, a threat; and at the end of the island, where the ridge is united to it, they did what England will probably do at the end of the Dover tunnel: they erected fortifications and built a castle, and in it they put a ruler, possibly a sub-king, Heimdal, who constantly, from a high lookout, possibly with a field-glass, watches the coming of the turbulent Goths, or Gauls, or Gael, from afar off. Doubtless the white-headed and red-headed, hungry, breekless savages had the same propensity to invade the civilized, wealthy land, that their posterity had to descend on degenerate Rome."

Well, the tunnel is a reality.

"And when we reach "Ragnarok" in these Gothic legends, when the jaw of the wolf Fenris reached from the earth to the sun, and he vomits fire and poison, and when Surt, and all the forces of Muspel, "ride over Bifrost, it breaks to pieces." That is to say, in this last great catastrophe of the earth, the ridge of land that led from the British Islands to Atlantis goes down for ever."

Again lies about Hindu scriptures, Sanskrit literature, India, Aryan heritage and anything related. The following is a lie, partly concocted by Donelly and partly lie he quotes from his source.

"I have quoted on p. 372, ante, in the last chapter, part of the Sanskrit legend of Adima and Héva, as preserved in the Bagaveda-Gita, and other sacred books of the Hindoos. It refers very distinctly to the bridge which united the island-home of primeval humanity with the rest of the earth. But there is more of it:

"When, under the inspiration of the prince of demons, Adima and Héva begin to wander, and desire to leave their island, we read:

""Arriving at last at the extremity of the island"—

"We have seen that the bridge Bifrost was connected with the extremity of Asgard—

""they beheld a smooth and narrow arm of the sea, and beyond it a vast and apparently boundless country," (Europe?) "connected with their island by a narrow and rocky pathway, arising from the bosom of the waters."

"This is probably a precise description of the connecting ridge; it united the boundless continent, Europe, with {p. 384} the island; it rose out of the sea, it was rocky; it was the broken crest of a submerged mountain-chain.

"What became of it? Here again we have a tradition of its destruction. We read that, after Adima and Héva had passed over this rocky bridge—

""No sooner did they touch the shore, than trees, flowers, fruit, birds, all that they had seen from the opposite side, vanished in an instant, amidst terrible clamor; the rocks by which they had crossed sank beneath the waves, a few sharp peaks alone remaining above the surface, to indicate the place of the bridge, which had been destroyed by divine displeasure."

Complete lie.

No Hindu scriptures, no Sanskrit literature, no legends of India say anything of the sort.

Never mind Bifrost or Atlantis there's no Adam or Héva, no such concept as first man or liss of a homeland.

Missionaries made up a lie to convert India. But Donelly insists on the lie.

"It is, of course, localized in Ceylon, precisely as the mountain of Ararat and the mountain of Olympus crop out in a score of places, wherever the races carried their legends. And to this day the Hindoo points to the rocks which rise in the Indian Ocean, between the eastern point of India and the Island of Ceylon, as the remnants of the Bridge; and the reader will find them marked on our maps as" Adam's Bridge" (Palam Adima). The people even point out, to this day, a high mountain, from whose foot the Bridge went forth, over which Adima and Héva, crossed to the continent; and it is known in modern geography as "Adam's Peak." So vividly have the traditions of a vast antiquity come down to us!"

Ceylon is European deformation of Sri Lanka, just as Indus is European deformation of Sindhu. The bridge was built from India to Lanka, exists, is visible, and Donnelly is forcing a missionary lie to claim Rāmāyana isn't what it's known to be to India.

But church lies, of course. Anything to kill all else. And Donelly is using missionary murder of Hindu heritage for his thesis of Atlantis as origin of all civilisation, including Sanskrit and Aryans

"So, among all the races which went out from this heavenly land, this land of high intelligence, this land of the master race, it was remembered down through the ages, and dwelt upon and sung of until it moved upward from the waters of the Atlantic to the distant skies, and became a spiritual heaven. And the ridges which so strangely connected it with the continents, east and west, became the bridges over which the souls of men must pass to go from earth to heaven."

He's wrong in this.

He next quotes various cultures, including India, about their concepts regarding a bridge to heaven for souls.

Needless to say that doesn't make Rāma or Rāmāyana a myth about Atlantis and comet strike any more than any proof of crucifixion makes Henry VIIIth a fib, or vice versa.

"I think the unprejudiced reader will agree with me that these legends show that some Atlantic island played an important part in the very beginning of human history. It was the great land of the world before the Drift; it continued to be the great land of the world between the Drift and the Deluge. Here man fell; here he survived; here he renewed the race, and from this center he repopulated the world. "

If not, Donelly calls him prejudiced, the church trick of lier.

"We see also that this island was connected with the continents east and west by great ridges of land. "

Doesn't prove the source of civilisation thesis.

"The deep-sea soundings show that the vast bulk of land, of which the Azores are the outcroppings, are so connected yet with such ridges, although their crests are below the sea-level; and we know of no other island-mass of the Atlantic that is so united with the continents on both sides of it. "

Doesn't make it the Rāma Setu. That's between India and Lanka.

"Is not the conclusion very strong that Atlantis was the island-home of the race, in whose cave Job dwelt; on whose shores Phaëton fell; on whose fields Adam lived; on whose plain Sodom and Gomorrah stood, and Odin and Thor and Citli died; from which the Quiches and the Aztecs wandered to America; the center of all the races; the root of all the mythologies?"

Not aryans, not Sanskrit, not anything to do with India.

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March 24, 2022 - March 24, 2022.

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IV. OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED 389

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More lies by Donelly to suit his thesis, apart from the leads over chasms in evidence and logic. He also exhibits his arrogance in full.

" ... 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."

But he does claim Atlantis survived intact and civilized, despite ice sheets on both shores down to Africa but covering continent across Southern Atlantic.

"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 {p. 394} 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."

No, he posits strenuously only that Sanskrit and culture was only from Atlantis, not possible in India. This above racist statement explains why!

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

" ... 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."

He clearly is claiming that Hercules and Rama alike were imaginary, nothing to do with India in any case, and cows were clouds, not only in European but also in Sanskrit literature of ancient India. Except, of course, he asserts that Sanskrit belonged to Atlantis and only cane to India with Aryan migration.

" ... The receded ocean laid bare the great ridges, if they had sunk in the catastrophe, {p. 395} and the race gradually spread to Europe, Africa, and America."

He's claiming Egypt there.

Now comes his real source, wherein he attempts to fit everything everything and assaults India and Sanskrit literature with lies to claim them fir his faith and his thesis respectively by sundering them.

""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

"{p. 404}

"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."

There's his justification for setting the comet strike and deluge so far apart.

"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."

"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

{p. 405}

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, 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."

This agenda thus exposed as being based in not only racism and a conversionist abrahmic creed, but coupled with humongous assaults against Sanskrit literature and India's culture via lies and fraudulent claims unsupported by evidence, renders the whole thesis of his very dubious.

No wonder he's unknown today. But with him drowned again Atlantis too, if it existed where he claims.

Satellite discovery has researchers question if it was in Sahara.

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March 24, 2022 - March 24, 2022.

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V. BIELA'S COMET 408

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Donelly describes the discovery, subsequent confirmation of orbit, and Durden disappearance of the comet before a rediscovery in 1872, before describing unexplained and inexplicable fires across three states in Western US causing deaths of hundreds, and more inexplicable phenomena related, contending that the comet's poisonous tail can be the only explanation.

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

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

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

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

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

[1. "History of the Chicago Fire," pp. 85, 86.] {p. 422}"

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

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

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

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

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March 24, 2022 - March 24, 2022.

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VI. THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF OF MANKIND 424

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"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, {p. 425} 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."

First, fid he expect other colours? Even interiors of churches and their windows too use the same primary colours, except in India.

And he's again racist about India, saying "The gods carved on Hindoo temples", instead of saying what's true - namely, Gods and Godesses are worshipped in Hindu temples, usually each with his or hers separate enclosure for worship, except for groupings in some cases, for example in case of Rāma with his wife, brother and devotee Hanuman all together, or so forth.

Gods are usually not carved "on" temples, except where a whole Swarga is depicted on roofs, with residents thereof.

Temple walls are carved, often with flying Apsara and Gandharva figures, who are not Gods but are beings above humans.

And "Rama, Siva, Vishnu" aren't painted certain colours due to a comet very, it's because they are specific in firms including colours, and depicted only thus. That's true of every God and Goddess of India.

"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."

None of that is true.

Various figures depicted might be just exactly that, while astronomy taught formally or otherwise usually ignores comets, for most part. That includes the tremendous Chicago Fire of 1872. Nobody mentions a comet in that connection, and, until one reads this work by Donelly, one gas no clue of such a possibility.

US could and should have taught people to change to houses built of bricks with shelters that could work against such occurrences, but not a word.

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

No, it's forgotten, if it did happen as for the ancient strike by comet, and disregarded as far as 1872 goes. Completely.

What Donelly quotes next are abrahmic faith's exhortations to keep paying club dues, so to speak. Not informative and instructive reminders teaching what could be done, but using the cataclysm to instil and enforce guilt.

India doesn't do that, Hinduism has only Gods win, ancient Sanskrit literature only reassure protectively.

"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

[1. Brinton's "Myths," p. 235. 2. Ibid.]

{p. 429}

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.

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

India is completely different.

"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."

That could be memory of jurassic era, of trying to run from dinosaurs and raptors.

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March 24, 2022 - March 24, 2022.

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VII. THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES 431

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

""Strata were upraised and flexed into great (olds, some of the folds a score or more of miles in span. Deep fissures were opened in the earth's crust," like the fiords or great rock-cracks which accompanied the Diluvial or Drift Age. "Rocks were consolidated; and over some parts sandstones and shales were crystallized into gneiss, [1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 150.] {p. 432} mica-schist, and other related rocks, and limestone into architectural and statuary marble. Bituminous coal was turned into anthracite in Pennsylvania."[1]"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"In the Lower Silurian of the south of Scotland, large blocks and bowlders (from one foot to five feet in diameter)

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

{p. 434}

are found, "of gneiss, syenite, granite, etc., none of which belong to the rocks of that neighborhood.""

Donelly reveals the discovery that granite isn't single matter but is made of sedimentary rocks fused.

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March 24, 2022 - March 24, 2022.

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VIII. THE AFTER-WORD 437 {p. iv}

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Donelly goes exhibiting his religion

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March 24, 2022 - March 24, 2022.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE DRIFT Frontispiece.

TILL OVERLAID WITH BOWLDER-CLAY 5

SCRATCHED STONE, FROM THE TILL 6

RIVER ISSUING FROM A SWISS GLACIER 19

TERMINAL MORAINE 20

GLACIER-FURROWS AND SCRATCHES AT STONY POINT, 26

LAKE ERIE DRIFT-DEPOSITS IN THE TROPICS 38

STRATIFIED BEDS IN TILL, LEITHEN WATER, 54

PEEBLESSHIRE, SCOTLAND SECTION AT JOINVILLE 54

ORBITS OF THE PERIODIC COMETS 83

ORBIT OF EARTH AND COMET 88

THE EARTH'S ORBIT 89

THE COMET SWEEPING PAST THE EARTH 92

THE SIDE OF THE EARTH STRUCK BY THE COMET 93

THE SIDE NOT STRUCK BY THE COMET 93

THE GREAT COMET OF 1811 95

CRAG AND TAIL 98

SOLAR SPECTRUM 105

SECTION AT ST. ACHEUL 122

THE ENGIS SKULL 124

THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL 125

PLUMMET FROM SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA 180 {p. v}

COMET OF 1862 137

COURSE OF DONATI'S COMET 157

THE PRIMEVAL STORM 220

THE AFRITE IN THE PILLAR 270

DAHISH OVERTAKEN BY DIMIRIAT 272

EARTHEN VASE, FOUND IN THE CAVE OF FURFOOZ, 347

BELGIUM PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE MAMMOTH 349

PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF REINDEER 350

PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE HORSE 351

SPECIMEN OF PRE-GLACIAL CARVING 352

STONE IMAGE FOUND IN OHIO 353

COPPER COIN, FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN FEET 356

UNDER GROUND, IN ILLINOIS {front}

COPPER COIN, FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN FEET 356

UNDER GROUND, IN ILLINOIS {back}

BIELA'S COMET, SPLIT IN TWO 409

SECTION ON THE SCHUYLKILL 432

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March 08, 2022 - March 24, 2022.

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March 08, 2022 - March 24, 2022.

Purchased January 29, 2022

Kindle Edition, 424 pages

Published May 11th 2012

by Public Domain Books

(first published January 1883)

Original Title

Ragnarok : The Age of Fire and Gravel

ASIN:- B0082R7LAA

................................................

March 08, 2022 - March 24, 2022.

Purchased January 29, 2022

Kindle Edition, 424 pages

Published May 11th 2012

by Public Domain Books

(first published January 1883)

Original Title

Ragnarok : The Age of Fire and Gravel

ASIN:- B0082R7LAA

................................................................................................

................................................

January 30, 2022 - March 08, 2022

- March 24, 2022.

Purchased December 09, 2021.

Kindle Edition

Published

(first published January 1883)

Original Title

Ragnarok : The Age of Fire and Gravel

ASIN:- B002VECQ46

................................................

................................................................................................

CONTENTS.

PART I. THE DRIFT.

I. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DRIFT 1

II. THE ORIGIN OF THE DRIFT NOT KNOWN 8

III. THE ACTION OF WAVES 10

IV. WAS IT CAUSED BY ICEBERGS? 13

V. WAS IT CAUSED By GLACIERS? 17

VI. WAS IT CAUSED BY A CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEET? 23

VII. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE 43

VIII. GREAT HEAT A PREREQUISITE 58

PART II. THE COMET.

I. A COMET CAUSED THE DRIFT 63

II. WHAT IS A COMET? 65

III. COULD A COMET STRIKE THE EARTH? 82

IV. THE CONSEQUENCES TO THE EARTH 91 {p. iii}

PART III. THE LEGENDS.

I. THE NATURE OF MYTHS 113

II. DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT? 121

III. LEGENDS OF THE COMING OF THE COMET 132

IV. RAGNAROK 141

V. THE CONFLAGRATION OF PHAËTON 154

VI. OTHER LEGENDS OF THE CONFLAGRATION 166

VII. LEGENDS OF THE CAVE-LIFE 195

VIII. LEGENDS OF THE AGE OF DARKNESS 208

IX. THE TRIUMPH OF THE SUN 233

X. THE FALL OF THE CLAY AND GRAVEL 251

XI. THE ARABIAN MYTHS 268

XII. THE BOOK OF JOB 276

XIII. GENESIS READ BY THE LIGHT OF THE COMET 316

PART IV. CONCLUSIONS.

I. WAS PRE-GLACIAL MAN CIVILIZED? 341

II. THE SCENE OF MAN'S SURVIVAL 366

III. THE BRIDGE 376

IV. OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED 389

V. BIELA'S COMET 408

VI. THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF OF MANKIND 424

VII. THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES 431

VIII. THE AFTER-WORD 437 {p. iv}

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE DRIFT Frontispiece.

TILL OVERLAID WITH BOWLDER-CLAY 5

SCRATCHED STONE, FROM THE TILL 6

RIVER ISSUING FROM A SWISS GLACIER 19

TERMINAL MORAINE 20

GLACIER-FURROWS AND SCRATCHES AT STONY POINT, 26

LAKE ERIE DRIFT-DEPOSITS IN THE TROPICS 38

STRATIFIED BEDS IN TILL, LEITHEN WATER, 54

PEEBLESSHIRE, SCOTLAND SECTION AT JOINVILLE 54

ORBITS OF THE PERIODIC COMETS 83

ORBIT OF EARTH AND COMET 88

THE EARTH'S ORBIT 89

THE COMET SWEEPING PAST THE EARTH 92

THE SIDE OF THE EARTH STRUCK BY THE COMET 93

THE SIDE NOT STRUCK BY THE COMET 93

THE GREAT COMET OF 1811 95

CRAG AND TAIL 98

SOLAR SPECTRUM 105

SECTION AT ST. ACHEUL 122

THE ENGIS SKULL 124

THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL 125

PLUMMET FROM SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA 180 {p. v}

COMET OF 1862 137

COURSE OF DONATI'S COMET 157

THE PRIMEVAL STORM 220

THE AFRITE IN THE PILLAR 270

DAHISH OVERTAKEN BY DIMIRIAT 272

EARTHEN VASE, FOUND IN THE CAVE OF FURFOOZ, 347

BELGIUM PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE MAMMOTH 349

PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF REINDEER 350

PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE HORSE 351

SPECIMEN OF PRE-GLACIAL CARVING 352

STONE IMAGE FOUND IN OHIO 353

COPPER COIN, FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN FEET 356

UNDER GROUND, IN ILLINOIS {front}

COPPER COIN, FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN FEET 356

UNDER GROUND, IN ILLINOIS {back}

BIELA'S COMET, SPLIT IN TWO 409

SECTION ON THE SCHUYLKILL 432

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Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, by Ignatius L. Donnelly.

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