Books: Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel

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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
bunting-grounds.

And still the skies grew brighter, the storms grew less, the earth
grew warmer, and "the evening and the morning" constituted the sixth
subdivision of time.

And this process is still going on. Mr. James Geikie says:

"We are sure of this, that since the deposition of the shelly clays,
and the disappearance of the latest local glaciers,

{p. 338}

there have been no oscillations, but only a _gradual amelioration of
climate_."[1]

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.

But the great cosmical catastrophe was substantially over with the
close of the sixth day. We are now in the seventh day. The darkness
has gone; the sun has come back; the waters have returned to their
bounds; vegetation has resumed its place; the fish, the birds, the
animals, men, are once more populous in ocean, air, and on the land;
the comet is gone, and the orderly processes of nature are around us,
and God is "resting" from the great task of restoring his afflicted
world.

The necessity for some such interpretation as this was apparent to
the early fathers of the Christian Church, although they possessed no
theory of a. comet. St. Basil, St. Cæsarius, and Origen, long before
any such theory was dreamed of, argued that the sun, moon, and stars
existed from the beginning, but that they did not _appear_ until the
fourth day. "Who," says Origen, "that has sense, can think that the
first, second, and third days were without sun, moon, or stars?"

But where were they? Why did they not appear? What obscured them?

What could obscure them but dense clouds? Where did the clouds come
from? They were vaporized water. What vaporized the water and caused
this darkness on the face of the deep, so dense that the sun, moon,
and stars did not appear until the world had clothed itself

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 438.]

{p. 389}

again in vegetation? Tremendous heat. Where did the heat come from?
If it was not caused by contact with a comet, _what was it_? And if
it was not caused by contact with a comet, how do you explain the
blazing sword at the gate of Eden; the fire falling from heaven on
"the cities of the plain"; and the fire that fell on Job's sheep and
camels and consumed them; and that drove Job to clamber by ropes down
into the narrow-mouthed bottomless cave; where he tells us of the
leviathan, the twisted, the undulating one, that cast down stones in
the mire, and made the angels in heaven to tremble, and the deep to
boil like a pot? And is it not more reasonable to suppose that this
sublime religious poem, called the Book of Job, represents the
exaltation of the human soul under the stress of the greatest
calamity our race has ever endured, than to believe that it is simply
a record of the sufferings of some obscure Arab chief from a
loathsome disease? Surely inspiration should reach us through a
different channel; and there should be some proportion between the
grandeur of the thoughts and the dignity of the events which produced
them.

And if Origen is right, and it is absurd to suppose that the sun,
moon, and stars were not created until the third day, then the sacred
text is dislocated, transposed; and the second chapter narrates
events which really occurred before those mentioned in the first
chapter; and the "darkness" is something which came millions of years
after that "Beginning," in which God made the earth, and the heavens,
and all the host of them.

In conclusion, let us observe how fully the Bible record accords with
the statements of the Druidical, Hindoo, Scandinavian, and other
legends, and with the great unwritten theory which underlies all our
religion. Here we have:

{p. 340}

1. The Golden Age; the Paradise.

2. The universal moral degeneracy of mankind; the age of crime and
violence.

3. God's vengeance.

4. The serpent; the fire from heaven.

5. The cave-life and the darkness.

6. The cold; the struggle to live.

7. The "Fall of Man," from virtue to vice; from plenty to poverty;
from civilization to barbarism; from the Tertiary to the Drift; from
Eden to the gravel.

8. Reconstruction and regeneration.

Can all this be accident? Can all this mean nothing?

{p. 341}

PART IV.

(Conclusions)

CHAPTER I.

WAS PRE-GLACIAL MAN CIVILIZED?

WE come now to another and very interesting question:

In what stage of development was mankind when the Drift fell upon the
earth?

It is, of course, difficult to attain to certainties in the
consideration of an age so remote as this. We are, as it were,
crawling upon our hands and knees into the dark cavern of an abysmal
past; we know not whether that which we encounter is a stone or a
bone; we can only grope our way. I feel, however, that it is proper
to present such facts as I possess touching this curious question.

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.

In the first place, I shall refer to the legends of mankind, wherein
they depict the condition of our race in the pre-glacial time. If
these statements stood alone, we might dismiss them from
consideration, for there would be a strong probability that later
ages, in repeating the legends, would attribute to their remote
ancestors the civilized advantages which they themselves enjoyed; but
it will be seen that these statements are confirmed by the remains of
man which have been dug out of the earth, and upon which we can rely
to a much greater extent.

First, as to the legends:

If I have correctly interpreted Job as a religious drama, founded on
the fall of the Drift, then we must remember that Job describes the
people overtaken by the catastrophe as a highly civilized race. They
had passed the stage of worshiping sticks and stones and idols, and
had reached to a knowledge of the one true God; they were
agriculturists; they raised flocks of sheep and camels; they built
houses; they had tamed the horse; they had progressed so far in
astronomical knowledge as to have mapped out the heavens into
constellations; they wrote books, consequently they possessed an
alphabet; they engraved inscriptions upon the rocks.

But it may be said truly that the book of Job, although it may be
really a description of the Drift catastrophe, was not necessarily
written at the time of, or even immediately after, that event. So
gigantic and terrible a thing must have been the overwhelming
consideration and memory of mankind for thousands of years after it
occurred. We will see that its impress still exists on the

{p. 343}

imagination of the race. Hence we may assign to the book of Job an
extraordinary antiquity, and nevertheless it may have been written
long ages after the events to which it refers occurred; and the
writer may have clothed those events with the associations and
conditions of the age of its composition. Let us, then, go forward to
the other legends, for in such a case we can _prove_ nothing. We can
simply build up cumulative probabilities.

In Ovid we read that the Earth, when the dread affliction fell upon
her, cried out:

"O sovereign of the gods, if thou approvest of this, if I have
deserved it, why do thy lightnings linger? . . . And dost thou give
this as my recompense? This as the reward of my fertility and of my
duty, in that _I endure wounds from the crooked plow and harrows_,
and am harassed all the year through? In that I supply green leaves
to the _cattle_, and _corn_, a wholesome food for mankind, and
_frankincense_ for yourselves? "

Here we see that 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.

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.

When we turn to the Scandinavian legends, we see

{p. 344}

that those who transmitted them from the early ages believed that
pre-glacial man was civilized. The Asas, the godlike, superior race,
dwelt, we are told, "in stone houses."

In describing, in the Elder Edda, the corrupt condition of mankind
before the great catastrophe occurred, the world, we are told, was
given over to all manner of sin and wickedness. We read:

"Brothers will fight together,
And become each other's bane
Sisters' children
Their sib shall spoil.
Hard is the world;
Sensual sins grow huge.
There are _axe_-ages, _sword_-ages
_Shields_ are cleft in twain,
There are wind-ages,
murder-ages,
Ere the world falls dead."[1]

When the great day of wrath comes, Heimdal blows in the
Gjallar-_horn_, Odin _rides_ to Mimer's well, Odin puts on his
_golden helmet_, the Asas hold counsel before their _stone doors_.

All these things indicate a people who had passed far beyond
barbarism. Here we have axes, swords, helmets, shields, musical
instruments, domesticated horses, the use of gold, and stone
buildings. And after the great storm was over, and the remnant of
mankind crept out of the caves, and came back to reoccupy the houses
of the slain millions, we read of the delight with which they found
in the grass "the golden tablets" of the _Asas_--additional proof
that they worked in the metals, and possessed some kind of a written
language; they also had "the runes," or runic letters of Odin.

[1. "The Vala's Prophecy," 48, 49.]

{p. 345}

In the Norse legends we read that Loke, the evil genius, carried off
Iduna, and her _apples_.

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.

We turn now to the more reliable evidences of man's condition, which
have been exhumed from the caves and the Drift.

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."

Boucher de Perthes found remains of man _thirty to forty feet_ below
the surface of the earth.

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";
in some

[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 330.

2. Maclean's "Manual of Antiquity of Man," p. 60; Buchner, p. 242.

3. Foster's "Prehistoric Races," p. 56, etc.]

{p. 347}

cases these remains of pottery formed "veritable strata, three and
six inches thick"; in many cases the bones of the mastodon were found
_above_ these strata of pottery. Fragments of baskets and matting
were also found.

Here we have evidence of the long-continued occupation of this spot
by man prior to the Drift Age, and that the human family had
progressed far enough to manufacture pottery, and weave baskets and
matting.

The cave of Chaleux, Belgium, was buried by a mass of rubbish caused
by the falling in of the roof, consequently preserving all its
implements. There were found the split bones of mammals, and the
bones of birds and fishes. There was an immense number of objects,
chiefly manufactured from reindeer-horn, such as needles,
arrow-heads, daggers, and hooks. Besides these, there were ornaments
made of shells, pieces of slate with engraved figures, mathematical
lines, remains of very coarse pottery, hearthstones, ashes, charcoal,
and last, but not least, thirty thousand worked flints mingled with
the broken bones. In the hearth, placed in the center of the cave,
was discovered a stone, with certain but unintelligible signs
engraved upon it. M. Dupont also found about twenty pounds of the
bones of the water-rat, either scorched or roasted.[1]

###

EARTHEN VASE, FOUND IN THE CAVE OF FURFOOZ, BELGIUM.

[1. Maclean's "Antiquity of Man," p. 87.]

{p. 348}

Here we have the evidence that the people who inhabited this cave, or
some race with whom they held intercourse, manufactured pottery; that
they wore clothing which they sewed with needles; that they used the
bow and arrow; that they caught fish with hooks; that they ornamented
themselves; that they cooked their food; that they engraved on stone;
and that they had already reached some kind of primitive alphabet, in
which signs were used to represent things.

We have already seen, (page 124, _ante_,) that there is reason to
believe that pre-glacial Europe contained a very barbarous race,
represented by the Neanderthal skull, side by side with a cultivated
race, represented by the fine lines and full brow of the Engis skull.
The latter race, I have suggested, may have come among the former as
traders, or have been captured in war; precisely as today in Central
Africa the skulls of adventurous, civilized Portuguese or Englishmen
or Americans might be found side by side with the rude skulls of the
savage populations of the country. The possession of a piece of
pottery, or carving, by an African tribe would not prove that the
Africans possessed the arts of engraving or manufacturing pottery,
but it would prove that somewhere on the earth's surface a race had
advanced far enough, at that time, to be capable of such works of
art. And so, in the remains of the pre-glacial age of Europe, we have
the evidence that some of these people, or their captives, or those
with whom they traded or fought, had gone so far in the training of
civilized life as to have developed a sense of art and a capacity to
represent living forms in pictures or carvings, with a considerable
degree of taste and skill. And these works are found in the most
ancient caves, "the archaic caves," associated with the bones of the
animals _that ceased to exist in Europe at the time of the_

{p. 349}

###

PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE MAMMOTH

{p. 350}

_Drift deposits_. Nay, more, a picture of a mammoth has been found
engraved _upon a piece of mammoth-tusk_. The engraving on page 349
represents this most curious work of art.

The man who carved this must have seen the creature it represented;
and, as the mammoth did not survive the Drift, that man must have
lived before or during the Drift. And he was no savage. Says Sir John
Lubbock:

"No representation, however rude, of any animal has yet been found in
any of the Danish shell-mounds, or the Stone-Age lake-villages. Even
on objects of the Bronze Age they are so rare that it is doubtful
whether a single well-authenticated instance could be produced."[1]

In the Dordogne caves the following spirited drawing was found,
representing a group of reindeer:

###

PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF REINDEER.

Here it would appear as if the reindeer were fastened together by
lines or reins; if so, it implies that they were

[1. "Prehistoric Times," p. 333.]

{p. 351}

domesticated. In this picture they seem to have become entangled in
their lines, and some have fallen to the ground.

And it does not follow from the presence of the reindeer that the
climate was Lapland-like. The ancestors of all our so-called Arctic
animals must have lived during the mild climate of the Tertiary Age;
and those only survived after the Drift, in the north, that were
capable of accommodating themselves to the cold; the rest perished or
moved southwardly.

Another group of animals was found, engraved on a piece of the palm
of a reindeer's horn, as follows:

###

PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE HORSE.

Here the man stands alongside the horse's head--a very natural
position if the horse was domesticated, a very improbable one if he
was not.

Pieces of pottery have also been found accompanying these palæolithic
remains of man.

The oldest evidence of the existence of man is probably the fragment
of a cut rib from the Pliocenes of Tuscany, preserved in the museum
at Florence; it was associated with flint-flakes and _a piece of rude
pottery_.[1]

But the art-capacity of these people was not limited to the drawing
of animals; they also carved figures out

[1. Dawkins's "Early Man in Britain," p. 91.]

{p. 352}

of hard substances. The following engraving represents a poniard cut
from a reindeer's horn.

###

A SPECIMEN OF PRE-GLACIAL CARVING.

Sir John Lubbock says:

"The artist bas ingeniously adapted the position of the animal to the
necessities of the case. The horns are thrown back on the neck, the
fore-legs are doubled up under the belly, and the hind-legs are
stretched out along the blade."[1]

These things seem to indicate quite an advanced condition; the people
who made them manufactured pottery, possessed. domesticated animals,
and were able to engrave and carve images of living objects. It is
difficult to believe that they could have carved and engraved these
hard substances without metallic gravers or tools of some kind.

The reader will see, on page 130, _ante_, a representation of a
sienite plummet found _thirty feet below the surface_, in a well, in
the San Joaquin Valley, California, which Professor Foster pronounces
to be--

"A finer exhibition of the lapidary's skill than has yet been
furnished by the Stone Age of either continent. "[2]

[1. "Prehistoric Times," p. 335.

2. Foster's "Prehistoric Races of the United States," p. 56.]

{p. 353}

The following picture represents a curious image carved out of black
marble, about twice as large as the cut, found near Marlboro, Stark
County, Ohio, by some workmen, while digging a well, at a depth of
_twelve feet below the surface_. The ground above it had never been
disturbed. It was imbedded in _sand and gravel_. The black or
variegated marble out of which this image is carved has not been
found in place in Ohio.

###

STONE IMAGE FOUND IN OHIO

T. W. Kinney, of Portsmouth, Ohio, writes as follows:

"Last summer, while digging a vault for drainage, at the _depth of
twenty-seven feet_, the workmen found the tusk of a mastodon. The
piece was about four feet long and four inches in diameter at the
thickest part. It was nearly all lost, having, crumbled very much
when exposed to the air. I have a large piece of it; also several
flakes of flint found near the same depth.

"I also have several of the flakes from other vaults, some of which
show evidence of work.

"We also found a log at the depth of _twenty-two feet_. The log was
_burned at one end_, and at the other end was a _gap, the same as an
axeman's kerf_. Shell-banks below the level of the base of
mound-builders' works, from six to fifteen feet."[1]

Was this burned log, thus found at a depth of twenty-two feet, a
relic of the great conflagration? Was that

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