Books: Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel
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Ignatius Donnelly >> Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel
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But if it be true, as is conceded, that all the planets and comets of
the solar system were out-throwings from the sun itself, then all
must be as much of one quality of
{p. 399}
material as half a dozen suits of clothes made from the same bolt of
cloth. And hence our-brother-the-comet must be made of just such
matter as our earth is made of. And hence, if a comet did strike the
earth and deposited its ground-up and triturated material upon the
earth's surface, we should find nothing different in that material
from earth-substance of the same kind.
But, says another:
"If the Drift fell from a comet, why would not this clay-dust and
these pebbles have been consumed before reaching the earth by the
friction of our atmosphere just as we have seen the meteoroids
consumed; or, if not entirely used up, why would these pebbles not
show a fused surface, like the iron aėrolites? "
Here is the difference: a meteorite, a small or large stone, is
detached, isolated, lone-wandering, lost in space; it comes within
the tremendous attractive power of our globe; it has no parental
attraction to restrain it; and it rushes headlong with lightning-like
rapidity toward the earth, burning itself away as it falls.
But suppose two heavenly bodies, each with its own center of
attraction, each holding its own scattered materials in place by its
own force, to meet each other; then there is no more probability of
the stones and dust of the comet flying to the earth, than there is
of the stones and dust of the earth flying to the comet. And the
attractive power of the comet, great enough to bold its gigantic mass
in place through the long reaches of the fields of space, and even
close up to the burning eye of the awful sun itself, holds its dust
and pebbles and bowlders together until the very moment of impact
with the earth. In short, they, the dust and stones, do not continue
to follow the comet, because the earth has got in their way and
arrested them. It was this terrific force of the
{p. 400}
comet's attraction, represented in a fearful rate of motion, that
tore and pounded and scratched and furrowed our poor earth's face, as
shown in the crushed and striated rocks under the Drift. They would
have gone clean through the earth to follow the comet, if it had been
possible.
If we can suppose the actual bulk of the comet to have greatly
exceeded the bulk of the earth, then the superior attraction of the
comet may have shocked the earth out of position. It has already been
suggested that the inclination of the axis of the earth may have been
changed at the time of the Drift; and the Esquimaux have a legend
that the earth was, at that time, actually shaken out of its
position. But upon this question I express no opinion.
But another may say:
"Your theory is impossible; these dense masses of clay and gravel
could not have fallen from a comet, because the tails of comets are
composed of material so attenuated that sometimes the stars are seen
through them."
Granted: but remember that the clay did not come to the earth as
clay, but as a finely comminuted powder or dust; it packed into clay
after having been mixed with water. The particles of this dust must
have been widely separated while in the comet's tail; if they had not
been, instead of a deposit of a few hundred feet, we should have had
one of hundreds of miles in thickness. We have seen, (page 94,
_ante_,) that the tail of one comet was thirteen million miles broad;
if the particles of dust composing that tail had been as minute as
those of clay-dust, and if they had been separated from each other by
many feet in distance, they would still have left a deposit on the
face of any object passing through them much greater than the Drift.
To illustrate my meaning: you ride on a summer day a hundred miles in
a railroad-car, seated by an open
{p. 401}
window. There is no dust perceptible, at least not enough to obscure
the landscape; yet at the end of the journey you find yourself
covered with a very evident coating of dust. Now, suppose that,
instead of traveling one hundred miles, your ride had been prolonged
a million miles, or thirteen million miles; and, instead of the
atmosphere being perfectly clear, you had moved through a cloud of
dust, not dense enough to intercept the light of the stars, and yet
dense enough to reflect the light of the sun, even as a smoke-wreath
reflects it, and you can readily see that, long before you reached
the end of your journey, you would be buried alive under hundreds of
feet of dust. To creatures like ourselves, measuring our stature by
feet and inches, a Drift-deposit three hundred feet thick is an
immense affair, even as a deposit a foot thick would be to an ant;
but, measured on an astronomical scale, with the foot-rule of the
heavens, and the Drift is no more than a thin coating of dust, such
as accumulates on a traveler's coat. Even estimating it upon the
scale of our planet, it is a mere wrapping of tissue-paper thickness.
In short, it must be remembered that we are an infinitely
insignificant breed of little creatures, to whom a cosmical
dust-shower is a cataclysm.
And that which is true of the clay-dust is true of the gravel. At a
million miles' distance it, too, is dust; it runs in lines or
streaks, widely separated; and the light shines between its particles
as it does through the leaves of the trees
"And glimmering through the groaning trees
Kirk Alloway seems in a blaze;
Through every bore the beams are glancing."
But another says:
"Why do you think the finer parts of the material of the comet are
carried farthest back from the head?"
{p. 402}
Because the attractive power lodged in the nucleus acts with most
force on the largest masses; even as the rock is not so likely to
leave the earth in a wind-storm as the dust; and in the flight of the
comet through space, at the rate of three hundred and sixty-six miles
per second, its lighter substances would naturally trail farthest
behind it; for--
"The thing that's heavy in itself
Upon enforcement flies with greatest speed."
And it would seem as if in time this trailing material of the comet
falls so far behind that it loses its grip, and is lost; hence the
showers of _meteoroids_.
Another says:
"I can not accept your theory as to the glacial clays they were
certainly deposited in water, formed like silt, washed down from the
adjacent continents."
I answer they were not, because:--
1. If laid down in water, they would be stratified; but they are not.
2. If laid down in water, they would be full of the fossils of the
water, fresh-water shells, sea-shells, bones of fish, reptiles,
whales, seals, etc.; but they are non-fossiliferous.
3. If laid down in water, they would not be made exclusively from
granite. Where are the continents to be found which are composed of
granite and nothing but granite?
4. Where were the continents, of any kind, from which these washings
came? They must have reached from pole to pole, and filled the whole
Atlantic Ocean. And how could the washings of rivers have made this
uniform sheet, reaching over the whole length and half the breadth of
this continent?
5. If these clays were made from land-washings, how comes it that in
some places they are red, in others blue, in others yellow? In
Western Minnesota you penetrate
{p. 403}
through twenty feet of yellow clay until you reach a thin layer of
gravel, about an inch thick, and then pass at once, without any
gradual transition, into a bed of blue clay fifty feet thick; and
under this, again, you reach gravel. What separated these various
deposits? The glacialists answer us that the yellow clay was
deposited in fresh water, and the blue clay in salt water, and hence
the difference in the color. But how did the water change instantly
from salt to fresh? Why was there no interval of brackish water,
during which the blue and yellow clays would have gradually shaded
into each other? The transition from the yellow clay to the blue is
as immediate and marked as if you were to lay a piece of yellow cloth
across a piece of blue cloth. You can not take the salt out of a vast
ocean, big enough to cover half a continent, in a day, a month, a
year, or a century. And where were the bowl-like ridges of land that
inclosed the continent, and kept out the salt water during the ages
that elapsed while the yellow clay was being laid down in fresh
water? And, above all, why are no such clays, blue, yellow, or red,
now being formed anywhere on earth, under sheet-ice, glaciers,
icebergs, or anything else? And how about the people who built
cisterns, and used coins and iron implements before this silt was
accumulated in the seas, a million years ago, for it must have taken
that long to create these vast deposits if they were deposited as
silt in the bottom of seas and lakes.
It may be asked:
"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.
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.
But it may be asked:
"Are you right in supposing that man first rose to civilization in a
great Atlantic island?
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 it is, in this connection, remarkable that the Bible tells us
(Genesis, chap. ii, v. 8):
"And the Lord God planted a garden _eastward, in Eden_; and there he
put the man that he had formed."
He had first (v. 7) "formed man of the dust of the ground," and then
he moves him eastward to Eden, to the garden.
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.
But in all this we do not touch upon the question of where man was
first formed by God.
The original birthplace of the human race who shall tell? It was
possibly in some region now under the ocean, as Professor Winchell
has suggested; there he was evolved during the mild, equable, gentle,
plentiful,
406 CONCLUSIONS.
garden-age of the Tertiary; in the midst of the most favorable
conditions for increasing the vigor of life and expanding it into new
forms. It showed its influence by developing mammalian life in one
direction into the monstrous forms of the mammoth and the mastodon,
the climax of animal growth; and in the other direction into the more
marvelous expansion of mentality found in man.
There are two things necessary to a comprehension of that which lies
around us--development and design, evolution and purpose; God's way
and God's intent. Neither alone will solve the problem. These are the
two limbs of the right angle which meet at the first life-cell found
on earth, and lead out until we find man at one extremity and God at
the other.
Why should the religious world shrink from the theory of evolution?
To know the path by which God has advanced is not to disparage God.
Could all this orderly nature have grown up out of chance, out of the
accidental concatenation of atoms? As Bacon said:
"I would rather believe all the fables in the Talmud and the Koran
than that this universal frame is _without a mind!_"
Wonderful thought! A flash of light through the darkness.
And what greater guarantee of the future can we have than evolution?
If God has led life from the rudest beginnings, whose fossils are
engraved, (blurred and obscured,) on the many pages of the vast
geological volume, up to this intellectual, charitable, merciful,
powerful world of to-day, who can doubt that the same hand will guide
our posterity to even higher levels of development?
{p. 407}
If our thread of life has expanded from Cain to Christ, from the man
who murders to him who submits to murder for the love of man, who can
doubt that the Cain-like in the race will gradually pass away and the
Christ-like dominate the planet?
Religion and science, nature and spirit, knowledge of God's works and
reverence for God, are brethren, who should stand together with
twined arms, singing perpetual praises to that vast atmosphere,
ocean, universe of spirituality, out of which matter has been born,
of which matter is but a condensation; that illimitable,
incomprehensible, awe-full Something, before the conception of which
men should go down upon the very knees of their hearts in adoration.
{p. 408}
CHAPTER V.
BIELA'S COMET.
HUMBOLDT Says:
"It is probable that the vapor of the tails of comets mingled with
our atmosphere in the years 1819 and 1823."[1]
There is reason to believe that the present generation has passed
through the gaseous prolongation of a comet's tail, and that hundreds
of human beings lost their lives, somewhat as they perished in the
Age of Fire and Gravel, burned up and poisoned by its exhalations.
And, although this catastrophe was upon an infinitely smaller scale
than that of the old time, still it may throw some light upon the
great cataclysm. At least it is a curious story, with some marvelous
features:
On the 27th day of February, 1826, (to begin as M. Dumas would
commence one of his novels,) M. Biela, an Austrian officer, residing
at Josephstadt, in Bohemia, discovered a comet in the constellation
Aries, which, at that time, was seen as a small round speck of filmy
cloud. Its course was watched during the following month by M.
Gambart at Marseilles and by M. Clausen at Altona, and those
observers assigned to it an elliptical orbit, with a period of _six
years and three quarters_ for its revolution.
M. Damoiseau subsequently calculated its path, and announced that on
its next return the comet would cross
[1. "Cosmos," Vol. i, p. 100.]
{p. 409}
the orbit of the earth, within _twenty thousand miles of its track,
and but about one month before the earth would have arrived at the
same spot!_
This was shooting close to the bull's-eye!
He estimated that it would lose nearly ten days on its return trip,
through the retarding influence of Jupiter and Saturn; but, if it
lost forty days instead of ten, what then?
But the comet came up to time in 1832, and the earth _missed it by
one month_.
And it returned in like fashion in 1839 and 1846. But here a
surprising thing occurred. _Its proximity to the earth had split it
in two_; each half had a head and tail of its own; each had set up a
separate government for itself; and they were whirling through space,
side by side, like a couple of race-horses, about sixteen thousand
miles apart, or about twice as wide apart as the diameter of the
earth. Here is a picture of them, drawn from life.
###
BIELA'S COMET, SPLIT IN TWO, (From Guillemin's "The Heavens," page
247.)
{p. 410} Did the Fenris-Wolf, the Midgard-Serpent, and the Dog-Garm
look like this?
In 1852, 1859, and 1866, the comet SHOULD have returned, but it did
not. It was lost. It was dissipated. Its material was banging around
the earth in fragments somewhere. I quote from a writer in a recent
issue of the "Edinburgh Review":
The puzzled astronomers were left in a state of tantalizing
uncertainty as to what had become of it. At the beginning of the year
1866 this feeling of bewilderment gained expression in the Annual
Report of the Council of the Royal Astronomical Society. The matter
continued, nevertheless, in the same state of provoking uncertainty
for another six years. The third period of the perihelion passage had
then passed, and nothing had been seen of the missing luminary. But
on the night of November 27, 1872, night-watchers were startled by a
sudden and a very magnificent display of falling stars or meteors, of
which there had been no previous forecast, and Professor
Klinkerflues, of Berlin, having carefully noted the common radiant
point in space from which this star-shower was discharged into the
earth's atmosphere, with the intuition of ready genius jumped at once
to the startling inference that here at last were traces of the
missing luminary. There were eighty of the meteors that furnished a
good position for the radiant point of the discharge, and that
position, strange to say, was very much the same as the position in
space which Biela's comet should have occupied just about that time
on its fourth return toward perihelion. Klinkerflues, therefore,
taking this spot as one point in the path of the comet, and carrying
the path on as a track into forward space, fixed the direction there
through which it should pass as a 'vanishing-point' at the other side
of the starry sphere, and having satisfied himself of that further
position he sent off a telegram to the other side of the world, where
alone it could be seen--that is to say, to Mr. Pogson, of the Madras
Observatory--which may be best told in his own nervous and simple
words.
{p. 411}
Herr Klinkerflues's telegram to Mr. Pogson, of Madras, was to the
following effect:
"'November 30th--Biela touched the earth on the 27th of November.
Search for him near Theta Centauri.'
"The telegram reached Madras, through Russia, in one hour and
thirty-five minutes, and the sequel of this curious passage of
astronomical romance may be appropriately told in the words in which
Mr. Pogson replied to Herr Klinkerflues's pithy message. The answer
was dated Madras, the 6th of December, and was in the following words:
"'On the 30th of November, at sixteen hours, the time of the comet
rising here, I was at my post, but hopelessly; clouds and rain gave
me no chance. The next morning I had the same bad luck. But on the
third trial, with a line of blue break, about 17¼ hours mean time, _I
found Biela immediately!_ Only four comparisons in successive minutes
could be obtained, in strong morning twilight, with an anonymous
star; but direct motion of 2.5 seconds decided that I had got the
comet all right. I noted it--circular, bright, with, a decided
nucleus, but NO TAIL, and about forty-five seconds in diameter. Next
morning I got seven good comparisons with an anonymous star, showing
a motion of 17.9 seconds in twenty-eight minutes, and I also got two
comparisons with a Madras star in our current catalogue, and with
7,734 Taylor. I was too anxious to secure one good place for the one
in hand to look for the other comet, and the fourth morning was
cloudy and rainy.'
"Herr Klinkerflues's commentary upon this communication was that he
forthwith proceeded to satisfy himself that no provoking accident had
led to the discovery of a comet altogether unconnected with Biela's,
although in this particular place, and that he was ultimately quite
confident of the identity of the comet observed by Mr. Pogson with
one of the two heads of Biela. It was subsequently settled that Mr.
Pogson had, most probably, seen both heads of the comet, one on the
first occasion of his successful search, and the second on the
following day; and the meteor-shower experienced in Europe on
November 27th was unquestionably due to the passage
{p. 412}
near the earth of a meteoric trail traveling in the track of the
comet. When the question of a possible collision was mooted in 1832,
Sir John Herschel remarked that such an occurrence might not be
unattended with danger, and that on account of the intersection of
the orbits of the earth and the comet a rencontre would in all
likelihood take place within the lapse of some millions of years. As
a matter of fact the collision did take place on November 27, 1872,
and the result, so far as the earth was concerned, was a magnificent
display of aėrial fireworks! But a more telling piece of ready-witted
sagacity than this prompt employment of the telegraph for the
apprehension of the nimble delinquent can scarcely be conceived. The
sudden brush of the comet's tail, the instantaneous telegram to the
opposite side of the world, and the glimpse thence of the vagrant
luminary as it was just whisking itself off into space toward the
star Theta Centauri, together constitute a passage that stands quite
without a parallel in the experience of science."
But did the earth escape with a mere shower of fireworks?
I have argued that the material of a comet consists of a solid
nucleus, giving out fire and gas, enveloped in a great gaseous mass,
and a tail made up of stones, possibly gradually diminishing in size
as they recede from the nucleus, until the after-part of it is
composed of fine dust ground from the pebbles and bowlders; while
beyond this there may be a still further prolongation into gaseous
matter.
Now, we have seen that Biela's comets lost their tails. What became
of them? There is no evidence to show whether they lost them in 1852,
1859, 1866, or 1872. The probabilities are that the demoralization
took place before 1852, as otherwise the comets would have been seen,
tails and all, in that and subsequent years. It is true that the
earth came near enough in 1872 to attract some of the wandering
gravel-stones toward itself, and that they fell,
{p. 413}
blazing and consuming themselves with the friction of our atmosphere,
and reached the surface of our planet, if at all, as cosmic dust. But
where were the rest of the assets of these bankrupt comets? They were
probably scattered around in space, _disjecta membra_, floating
hither and thither, in one place a stream of stones, in another a
volume of gas; while the two heads had fled away, like the fugitive
presidents of a couple of broken banks, to the Canadian refuge of
"_Theta Centauri_"--shorn of their splendors and reduced to first
principles.
Did anything out of the usual order occur on the face of the earth
about this time?
Yes. In the year 1871, on Sunday, the 8th of October, at half past
nine o'clock in the evening, events occurred which attracted the
attention of the whole world, which caused the death of hundreds of
human beings, and the destruction of millions of property, and which
involved three different States of the Union in the wildest alarm and
terror.
The summer of 1871 had been excessively dry; the moisture seemed to
be evaporated out of the air; and on the Sunday above named the
atmospheric conditions all through the Northwest were of the most
peculiar character. The writer was living at the time in Minnesota,
hundreds of miles from the scene of the disasters, and he can never
forget the condition of things. There was a parched, combustible,
inflammable, furnace-like feeling in the air, that was really
alarming. It felt as if there were needed but a match, a spark, to
cause a world-wide explosion. It was weird and unnatural. I have
never seen nor felt anything like it before or since. Those who
experienced it will bear me out in these statements.
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