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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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 _strić_.
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.
"Professor Hitchcock remarks, that Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire,
3,250 feet high, is scarified from top to bottom on its northern side
and western side, but not on, the southern."[1]
This state of things is universal in North America.
[1. Dana's "Manual of Geology," p. 537.]
{p. 28}
But let us look at another point:
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.
Let us see: 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
ĺsar 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]
Think of the significance of all this. 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!_
How pregnant is this admission. It demolishes at one blow the whole
theory that the Drift came of the ice. For surely if we could expect
to find ice, during the so-called Glacial age, anywhere on the face
of our planet, it would be in Siberia. But, if there was an ice-sheet
there, it did not grind up the rocks; it did not striate them; it did
not roll the fragments into bowlders and pebbles; it rested so
quietly on the face of the land that, as Geikie tells us, the
pre-glacial deposits throughout Siberia, with their mammalian
remains, are still found "_lying undisturbed_
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 460, published in 1873.]
{p. 30}
_on the surface_"; and he even thinks that the great mammals, the
mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, "may have survived in Northern
Asia down to a comparatively recent date,"[1] ages after they were
crushed out of existence by the Drift of Europe and America.
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!_
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 461.
2. "The World before the Deluge," p. 451.]
{p. 31}
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.
If the Drift of North America was due to the ice-sheet, why is there
no drift-deposit in "the driftless region" of the Northwestern States
of America? Surely this region must have been as cold as Illinois,
Ohio, etc. It is now the coldest part of the Union. Why should the
ice have left this oasis, and refused to form on it? Or why, if it
did form on it, did it refuse to tear up the rock-surfaces and form
Drift?
Again, no traces of northern drift are found in California, which is
surrounded by high mountains, in some of which fragments of glaciers
are found even to this day.[3]
According to Foster, the Drift did not extend to Oregon; and, in the
opinion of some, it does not reach much beyond the western boundary
of Iowa.
Nor can it be supposed that the driftless regions of Siberia,
Northwestern America, and the Pacific coast are due to the absence of
ice upon them during the Glacial
[1. "Report of the Geological Survey of Wisconsin," vol. i, p. 114.
2. "The Great Ice Age," p. 465.
3. Whitney, "Proceedings of the California Academy of Natural
Sciences."]
{p. 32}
age, for in Siberia the remains of the great mammalia, the mammoth,
the woolly rhinoceros, the bison, and the horse, are found to this
day imbedded in great masses of ice, which, as we shall see, are
supposed to have been formed around them at the very coming of the
Drift age.
But there is another difficulty:
Let us suppose that on all the continents an ice-belt came down from
the north and south poles to 35° or 40° of latitude, and there stood,
massive and terrible, like the ice-sheet of Greenland, frowning over
the remnant of the world, and giving out continually fogs,
snow-storms, and tempests; what, under such circumstances, must have
been the climatic conditions of the narrow belt of land which these
ice-sheets did not cover?
Louis Figuier says:
"Such masses of ice could only have covered the earth when the
temperature of the air was lowered at least some degrees below zero.
But organic life is incompatible with such a temperature; and to this
cause must we attribute the disappearance of certain species of
animals and plants--in particular the rhinoceros and the
elephant--which, before this sudden and extraordinary cooling of the
globe, appeared to have limited themselves, in immense herds, to
Northern Europe, and chiefly to Siberia, where their remains have
been found in such prodigious quantities."[1]
But if the now temperate region of Europe and America was subject to
a degree of cold great enough to destroy these huge animals, then
there could not have been a tropical climate anywhere on the globe.
If the line of 35° or 40°, north and south, was several degrees below
zero, the equator must have been at least below the frost-point. And,
if so, how can we account for the survival,
[1. "The World before the Deluge," p. 462.]
{p. 33}
to our own time, of innumerable tropical plants that can not stand
for one instant the breath of frost, and whose fossilized remains are
found in the rocks prior to the Drift? As they lived through the
Glacial age, it could not have been a period of great and intense
cold. And this conclusion is in accordance with the results of the
latest researches of the scientists:--
"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?
Where did it get the granite? The granite reaches the surface only in
limited areas; as a rule, it is buried many miles in depth under the
sedimentary rocks.
How did the ice pick out its materials so as to grind _nothing but
granite_?
This deposit overlies limestone and sandstone. The ice-sheet rested
upon them. Why were _they_ not ground up with the granite? Did the
ice intelligently pick out a particular kind of rock, and that the
hardest of them all?
But here is another marvel--this clay is red. The red is due to the
grinding up of mica and hornblende. Granite is composed of quartz,
feldspar, and mica. In syenitic granite the materials are quartz,
feldspar, and hornblende. Mica and hornblende contain considerable
oxide of iron, while feldspar has none. When mica and hornblende are
ground up, the result is blue or red clays, as the oxidation of the
iron turns the clay red; while the clay made of feldspar is light
yellow or white.
Now, then, not only did the ice-sheet select for grinding the granite
rocks, and refuse to touch the others, but it put the granite itself
through some mysterious process by which it separated the feldspar
from the mica and hornblende, and manufactured a white or yellow clay
out of the one, which it deposited in great sheets by itself, as west
of the Mississippi; while it ground up the mica and hornblende and
made blue or red clays, which it laid down elsewhere, as the red
clays are spread over that great stretch of fifteen hundred miles to
which I have referred.
{p. 35}
Can any one suppose that ice could so discriminate?
And if it by any means effected this separation of the particles of
granite, indissolubly knit together, how could it perpetuate that
separation while moving over the land, crushing all beneath and
before it, and leave it on the face of the earth free from commixture
with the surface rocks?
Again: the ice-sheets which now exist in the remote north do not move
with a constant and regular motion southward, grinding up the rocks
as they go. A recent writer, describing the appearance of things in
Greenland, says:
"The coasts are deeply indented with numerous bays and fiords or
firths, which, when traced inland, are almost invariably found to
terminate against glaciers. Thick ice frequently appears, too,
crowning the exposed sea-cliffs, from the edges of which _it droops
in thick, tongue-like, and stalactitic projections_, until its own
weight forces it to break away and topple down the precipices into
the sea."[1]
This does not represent an ice-sheet moving down continuously from
the high grounds and tearing up the rocks. It rather breaks off like
great icicles from the caves of a house.
Again: the ice-sheets to-day do not striate or groove the rocks over
which they move.
Mr. Campbell, author of two works in defense of the iceberg
theory--"Fire and Frost," and "A Short American Tramp"--went, in
1864, to the coasts of Labrador, the Strait of Belle Isle, and the
Gulf of St. Lawrence, for the express purpose of witnessing the
effects of icebergs, and testing the theory he had formed. On the
coast of Labrador he reports that at Hanly Harbor, where
[1. "Popular Science Monthly," April, 1874, p. 646.]
{p. 36}
the whole strait is blocked up with ice each winter, and the great
mass swung bodily up and down, "grating along the bottom at all
depths," he "found the rocks ground smooth, but _not striated_."[1]
At Cape Charles and Battle Harbor, he reports, "the rocks at the
water-line are _not striated_."[2] At St. Francis Harbor, "the
water-line is much rubbed smooth, but _not striated_."[3] At Sea
Islands, he says, "No strić are to be seen at the land-wash in these
sounds or on open sea-coasts near the present waterline."[4]
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."[5] Captain
Bach tells us[6] that he saw great chains of sand-hills, stretching
[1. "A Short American Tramp," pp. 68, 107.
2. Ibid., p. 68.
3. Ibid., p. 72.
4. Ibid., p. 76.
5. "The Great Ice Age," p. 391.
6. "Narrative of Arctic Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great
Fish River," pp. 140, 346.]
{p. 37}
away from each side of the valley of the Great Fish River, in north
latitude 66°, of great height, and crowned with gigantic bowlders.
Why did not the advancing ice-sheet drive these deposits southward
over the plains of the United States? Can we conceive of a force that
was powerful enough to grind up the solid rocks, and yet was not able
to remove its own _débris_?
But there is still another reason which ought to satisfy us, once for
all, that the drift-deposits were not due to the pressure of a great
continental ice-sheet. It is this:
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.
Professor 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.
Professor Hartt gives a cut from which I copy the following
representation of drift-clay and pebbles overlying a gneiss hillock
of the Serra do Mar, Brazil:
###
DRIFT-DEPOSITS IN THE TROPICS.
_a_, drift-clay; _f f_, angular fragments of quartz; _c_.
sheet of pebbles; _d d_, gneiss in situ; _g g_, quartz and
granite veins traversing the gneiss.
But here is the dilemma to which the glacialists are reduced: If an
ice-sheet a mile in thickness, or even one hundred feet in thickness,
was necessary to produce the Drift, and if it covered the equatorial
regions of Brazil, then there is no reason why the same climatic
conditions should not have produced the same results in Africa and
Asia; and the result would be that the entire globe, from pole to
pole, must have rolled for days, years, or centuries, wrapped in a
continuous easing, mantle, or shroud of ice, under which all
vegetable and animal life must have utterly perished.
[1. "Geology of Brazil," p. 488.]
{p. 39}
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 palćolithic 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.
Bayard Taylor describes in the center of Africa
[1. "The Palćolithic Implements of the Valley of the Delaware,"
Cambridge, 1881.]
{p. 40}
great plains of coarse gravel, dotted with gray granite bowlders.[1]
In the United States Professor Winchell shows that the drift-deposits
_extend to the Gulf of Mexico_. At Jackson, in Southern Alabama, be
found deposits of pebbles one hundred feet in thickness.[2]
If there are no drift-deposits except where the great ice-sheet
ground them out of the rocks, then a shroud of death once wrapped the
entire globe, and _all life ceased_.
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.
There is no escaping these conclusions. Agassiz himself says,
describing the Glacial age:
"All the springs were dried up; the rivers ceased to flow. To the
movements of a numerous and animated creation _succeeded the silence
of death_."
If the verdure was covered with ice a mile in thickness, all animals
that lived on vegetation of any kind must have perished;
consequently, all carnivores which lived on these must have ceased to
exist; and man himself, without animal or vegetable food, must have
disappeared for ever.
A writer, describing Greenland wrapped in such an ice-sheet, says
[1. "Travels in Africa," p. 188.
2. "Sketches of Creation," pp. 222, 223.]
{p. 41}
"The whole interior seems to be buried beneath a great depth of snow
and ice, which loads up the valleys and wraps over the hills. The
scene opening to view in the interior is desolate in the
extreme--nothing but one dead, dreary expanse of white, so far as the
eye can reach--_no living creature frequents this wilderness--neither
bird, beast, nor insect_. The silence, deep as death, is broken only
when the roaring storm arises to sweep before it the pitiless,
blinding snow."[1]
And yet the glacialists would have us believe that Brazil and Africa,
and the whole globe, were once wrapped in such a shroud of death!
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.
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