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"They shook their incense-pans and danced for very gladness: sweet
were their tears in dancing, very hot

[1. Poor, "Sanskrit and Kindred Literatures," p. 883.]

{p. 245}

their incense--their precious incense. _At last the sun commenced to
advance_; the animals small and great were full of delight; they
raised themselves to the surface of the water; they fluttered in the
ravines; they gathered at the edge of the mountains, turning their
beads together toward that part from which the sun came. And the lion
and the tiger roared. And the first bird that sang was that called
the Queletzu. All the animals were beside themselves at the sight;
the eagle and the kite beat their wings, and every bird both great
and small. _The men prostrated themselves on the ground_, for their
hearts were full to the brim."[1]

How graphic is all this picture! How life-like! Here we have the
starving and wandering nations, as described in the preceding
chapter, moving in the continual twilight; at last the clouds grow
brighter, the sun appears: all nature rejoices in the unwonted sight,
and mankind fling themselves upon their faces like "the rude and
savage man of Ind, kissing the base ground with obedient breast," at
the first coming of the glorious day.

But the clouds still are mighty; rains and storms and fogs battle
with the warmth and light. The "Popul Vuh" continues:

"And the sun and the moon and the stars were now all established";
that is, they now become visible, moving in their orbits. "Yet was
not the sun then in the beginning the same as now; his _heat wanted
force_, and he was _but as a reflection in a mirror_; verily, say the
historians, not at all the same sun as that of to-day. Nevertheless,
he _dried up and warmed the surface of the earth, and answered many
good ends_."

Could all this have been invented? This people could not themselves
have explained the meaning of their myth, and yet it dove-tails into
every fact revealed by our latest science as to the Drift Age.

[1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 46.]

{p. 246}

And then, the "Popul Vuh" tells us, the sun petrified their gods: in
other words, the worship of lions, tigers, and snakes, represented by
stone idols, gave way before the worship of the great luminary whose
steadily increasing beams were filling the world with joy and light.

And then the people sang a hymn, "the song called 'Kamucu,'" one of
the oldest of human compositions, in memory of the millions who had
perished in the mighty cataclysm:

"We _see;_" they sang, "alas, we ruined ourselves in Tulan; _there
lost we many of our kith and kin;_ they still remain there! left
behind! We, indeed, _have seen the sun_, but they--now that his
golden light begins to appear, where are they?"

That is to say, we rejoice, but the mighty dead will never rejoice
more.

And shortly after Balam-Quitzé, Balam-Agab, Mahucutah, and
Iqui-Balam, the hero-leaders of the race, died and were buried.

This battle between the sun and the comet graduated, as I have shown,
into a contest between light and darkness; and, by a natural
transition, this became in time the unending struggle between the
forces of good and the powers of evil--between God and Satan; and the
imagery associated with it has,--strange to say,--continued down into
our own literature.

That great scholar and mighty poet, John Milton, had the legends of
the Greeks and Romans and the unwritten traditions of all peoples in
his mind, when he described, in the sixth book of "Paradise Lost,"
the tremendous conflict between the angels of God and the followers
of the Fallen One, the Apostate, the great serpent, the dragon,
Lucifer, the bright-shining, the star of the morning, coming, like
the comet, from the north.

{p. 247}

Milton did not intend such a comparison; but he could not tell the
story without his over-full mind recurring to the imagery of the
past. Hence we read the following description of the comet; of that--

"Thunder-cloud of nations,
Wrecking earth and darkening heaven."

Milton tells us that when God's troops went forth to the battle--

"At last,
Far in the horizon, _to the north_, appeared
From skirt to skirt, a _fiery region stretched_,
In battailous aspect, and nearer view
Bristled with upright beams innumerable
Of rigid spears, and helmets thronged and shields
Various, with boastful arguments portrayed,
The banded powers of Satan, hasting on
With furious expedition. . . .
High in the midst, exalted as a god,
The apostate, in _his sun-bright chariot_, sat,
Idol of majesty divine, inclosed
With _flaming cherubim_ and golden shields."

The comet represents the uprising of a rebellious power against the
supreme and orderly dominion of God. The angel Abdiel says to Satan:

"Fool! not to think how vain
Against the Omnipotent to rise in arms;
Who out of smallest things could without end
Have raised incessant armies to defeat
Thy folly; or, with solitary hand,
Reaching beyond all limit, at one blow,
Unaided, could have finished thee, and whelmed
Thy legions under darkness."

The battle begins:

"Now storming fury rose,
And clamor such as heard in heav'n till now
Was never; arms on armor clashing brayed {p. 248}
Horrible discord, and the madding wheels
Of brazen chariots raged; dire was the noise
Of conflict; overhead the dismal _hiss_
Of fiery darts in _flaming volleys flew_,
And, flying, vaulted either host with fire. . . .
Army 'gainst army, numberless to raise
_Dreadful combustion_ warring and disturb
Though not destroy, their happy native seat.
. . . Sometimes on firm ground
A standing fight, then _soaring on main wing_
Tormented all the air, _all air seemed then_
Conflicting fire."

Michael, the archangel, denounces Satan as an unknown being a
stranger:

"Author of evil, _unknown till thy revolt_,
_Unnamed_ in heaven . . . how hast thou disturbed
Heav'n's blessed peace, and into nature brought
Misery, uncreated till the crime
Of thy rebellion! . . . But think not here
To trouble holy rest; heav'n casts thee out
From all her confines: heav'n, the seat of bliss,
Brooks not the works of violence and war.
Hence then, and evil go with thee along,
Thy offspring, to the place of evil, bell,
Thou and thy wicked crew! "

But the comet (Satan) replies that it desires liberty to go where it
pleases; it refuses to submit its destructive and erratic course to
the domination of the Supreme Good; it proposes--

"Here, however, to dwell free
If not to reign."

The result, of the first day's struggle is a drawn battle.

The evil angels meet in a night conference, and prepare gunpowder and
cannon, with which to overthrow God's armies!

"Hollow engines, long and round,
Thick rammed, at th' other bore with touch of fire {p. 249}
Dilated and infuriate, shall send forth
From far, with thund'ring noise, among our foes
Such implements of mischief, as shall dash
To pieces, and overwhelm whatever stands
Adverse."

Thus armed, the evil ones renew the fight. They fire their cannon:

"For sudden all at once their reeds
Put forth, and to a narrow vent applied
With nicest touch. Immediate in a flame,
But soon obscured with clouds, all heav'n appeared,
From these deep-throated engines belched, whose roar
Emboweled with outrageous noise the air,
And all her entrails tore, disgorging foul
Their devilish glut, chained thunder-bolts and hail
Of iron globes."

The angels of God were at first overwhelmed by this shower of
missiles and cast down; but they soon rallied:

"From their foundations, loos'ning to and fro,
They plucked the seated hills, with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods, and by their shaggy tops
Uplifted bore them in their hands."

The rebels seized the hills also:

So hills amid the air encountered hills,
Hurled to and fro with jaculation. dire.

. . . . And now all heaven
Had gone to wrack, with ruin overspread,"

had not the Almighty sent out his Son, the Messiah, to help his
sorely struggling angels. The evil ones are overthrown, overwhelmed,
driven to the edge of heaven:

"The monstrous sight
Struck them with horror backward, but far worse
Urged them behind; headlong themselves they threw
Down from the verge of heav'n; eternal wrath
Burnt after them to the bottomless pit. . . .{p. 250}
Nine days they fell: _confounded Chaos roared_
And felt tenfold confusion in their fall
Through his wide anarchy, so huge a rout
Encumbered him with ruin."

Thus down into our own times and literature has penetrated a vivid
picture of this world-old battle. We see, as in the legends, the
temporary triumph of the dragon; we see the imperiled sun obscured;
we see the flying rocks filling the appalled air and covering all
things with ruin; we see the dragon at last slain, and falling clown
to hell and chaos; while the sun returns, and God and order reign
once more supreme.

And thus, again, Milton paints the chaos that precedes restoration:

On heav'nly ground they stood; and from the shores
They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss,
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom, turned by furious winds
And surging waves, as mountains to assault
Heav'n's height, and with the center mix the poles."

But order, peace, love, and goodness follow this dark, wild age of
cold and wet and chaos:--the Night is slain, and the sun of God's
mercy shines once more on its appointed track in the heavens.

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.

{p. 251}

CHAPTER X.

THE FALL OF THE CLAY AND GRAVEL.

I TRUST that the reader, who has followed me thus far in this
argument, is satisfied that the legends of mankind point unmistakably
to the fact that the earth, in some remote age--before the
Polynesians, Red-men, Europeans, and Asiatics had separated, or been
developed as varieties out of one family--met with a tremendous
catastrophe; that a conflagration raged over parts of its surface;
that mankind took refuge in the caves of the earth, whence they
afterward emerged to wander for a long time, in great poverty and
hardships, during a period of darkness; and that finally this
darkness dispersed, and the sun shone again in the heavens.

I do not see how the reader can avoid these conclusions.

There are but two alternatives before him: he must either suppose
that all this concatenation of legends is the outgrowth of a
prodigious primeval lie, or he must concede that it describes some
event which really happened.

To adopt the theory of a great race-lie, originating at the beginning
of human history, is difficult, inasmuch as these legends do not tell
the same story in anything like the same way, as would have been the
case had they all originated in the first instance from the same
mind. While we have the conflagration in some of the legends, it has

{p. 252}

been dropped out of others; in one it is caused by the sun; in
another by the demon; in another by the moon; in one Phaëton produced
it by driving the sun out of its course; while there are a whole body
of legends in which it is the result of catching the sun in a noose.
So with the stories of the cave-life. In some, men seek the caves to
escape the conflagration; in others, their race began in the caves.
In like manner the age of darkness is in some cases produced by the
clouds; in others by the death of the sun. Again, in tropical regions
the myth turns upon a period of terrible heat when there were neither
clouds nor rain; when some demon had stolen the clouds or dragged
them into his cave: while in more northern regions the horrible age
of ice and cold and snow seems to have made the most distinct
impression on the memory of mankind. In some of the myths the comet
is a god; in others a demon; in others a serpent; in others a
feathered serpent; in others a dragon; in others a giant; in others a
bird in others a wolf; in others a dog; in still others a boar.

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.

In everything else they differ.

Surely, a falsehood, springing out of one mind, would have been more
consistent in its parts than this.

The legends seem to represent the diverging memories which separating
races carried down to posterity of the same awful and impressive
events: they remembered them in fragments and sections, and described
them as the four blind men in the Hindoo story described the
elephant;--to one it was a tail, to another a trunk, to another a
leg, to another a body;--it needs to put all their stories together
to make a consistent whole. We can not understand

{p. 253}

the conflagration without the comet; or the cave-life without both;
or the age of darkness without something that filled the heavens with
clouds; or the victory of the sun without the clouds, and the
previous obscuration of the sun.

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.

The final solution of this question can only be reached when close
and extensive examination of the Drift deposits have been made to
ascertain how far they are of earth-origin.

And here it must be remembered that the matter which composes our
earth and the other planets and the comets was probably all cast out
from the same source, the sun, and hence a uniformity runs through it
all. Humboldt says:

"We are 'astonished at being able to touch, weigh, and chemically
decompose metallic and earthy masses which belong to the outer world,
to celestial space'; to find in them the minerals of our native
earth, making it probable, as the great Newton conjectured, that the
materials which belong to one group of cosmical bodies are for the
most part the same."[1]

[1. "Cosmos," vol. iv, p. 206.]

{p. 254}

Some aërolites are composed of finely granular tissue of olivine,
augite, and labradorite blended together (as the meteoric stone found
at Duvets, in the department de l'Ardèche, France):

"These bodies contain, for instance, crystalline substances,
perfectly similar to those of our earth's crust; and in the Siberian
mass of meteoric iron, investigated by Pallas, the olivine only
differs from common olivine by the absence of nickel, which is
replaced by oxide of tin."

Neither is it true that all meteoric stones are of iron. Humboldt
refers to the aërolites of Siena, "in which the iron scarcely amounts
to two per cent, or the earthy aërolite of Alais, (in the department
du Gard, France,) _which broke up in the water_," (clay?); "or,
lastly, those from Jonzac and Juvenas, which contained _no metallic
iron_."[2]

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?

[1. "Cosmos," vol. i, p. 131.

2. Ibid., vol. i, p. 129.]

{p. 255}

I think the reader will agree with me that 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.

Nothing can be clearer than that the inhabitants of the earth
believed that the stones fell from heaven--to wit, from the comet.
But it would be unsafe to base a theory upon such a belief, inasmuch
as stones, and even fish and toads, taken up by hurricanes, have
often fallen again in showers; and they would appear to an uncritical
population to have fallen from heaven. But it is, at least, clear
that the fall of the stones and the clay are associated in

{p. 256}

the legends with the time of the great catastrophe; they are part of
the same terrible event.

I shall briefly recapitulate some of the evidence.

The Mattoles, an Indian tribe of Northern California, have this
legend:

"As to the creation, they teach that a certain Big Man began by
making the _naked earth, silent and bleak_, with nothing of plant or
animal thereon, save one Indian, who roamed about _in a wofully
hungry and desolate state_. Suddenly there arose a terrible
whirlwind, _the air grew dark and thick with dust and drifting sand_,
and the Indian fell upon his face in sore dread. Then there came a
great calm, and the man rose and looked, and lo, all the earth was
perfect and peopled; the grass and the trees were green on every
plain and hill; the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, the
creeping things, the things that swim, moved everywhere in his
sight."[1]

Here, as often happens, the impressive facts are remembered, but in a
disarranged chronological order. There came a whirlwind, thick with
dust, the clay-dust, and drifting sand and gravel. It left the world
naked and lifeless, "silent and bleak"; only one Indian remained, and
he was dreadfully hungry. But after a time all this catastrophe
passed away, and the earth was once more populous and beautiful.

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. 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.

The reader will see (page 173, _ante_) that the 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.

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. .
. . 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_.