TheAsas, then, were the civilized race who inhabited a high, precipitous country, the meeting-point of a number of ridges. Atlas was the king, or god, of Atlantis. In the old time all kings were gods. They are something more than men, to the multitude, even yet.And when we reach "Ragnarok" in these Gothic legends, when the jaw of the wolf Fenris reached from the earth to the sun, and he vomits fire and poison, and when Surt, and all the forces of Muspel, "ride over Bifrost,it breaks to pieces." That is to say, in this last great catastrophe of the earth, the ridge of land that led from the British Islands to Atlantis goes down for ever.[1. The Younger Edda," Anderson, note, p. 226.]{p. 383}And in Plato's description of Atlantis, as received by Solon from the Egyptian priests, we read:"There was an island" (Atlantis) "situated in front of the straits which you call the Columns of Hercules; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, andwas the way to other islands, and from the islandsyou might pass through the whole of the opposite continent," (America,) "which surrounds the true ocean."Now this is not very clear, but it may signify that there was continuous land communication between Atlantis and the islands of the half-submerged ridge, and from the islands to the continent of America. It would seem to mean more than a passage-way by boats over the water, for that existed everywhere, and could be traversed in any direction.I have quoted on p. 372,ante, in the last chapter, part of the Sanskrit legend of Adima and Héva, as preserved in the Bagaveda-Gita, and other sacred books of the Hindoos. It refers very distinctly to the bridge which united the island-home of primeval humanity with the rest of the earth. But there is more of it:When, under the inspiration of the prince of demons, Adima and Héva begin to wander, and desire to leave their island, we read:"Arriving at last at the extremity of the island"--We have seen that the bridge Bifrost was connected with the extremity of Asgard--"they beheld a smooth and narrow arm of the sea, and beyond it a vast and apparently boundless country," (Europe?) "connected with their island by a narrow and rocky pathway, arising from the bosom of the waters."This is probably a precise description of the connecting ridge; it united the boundless continent, Europe, with{p. 384}the island; it rose out of the sea, it was rocky; it was the broken crest of a submerged mountain-chain.What became of it? Here again we have a tradition of its destruction. We read that, after Adima and Héva had passed over this rocky bridge--"No sooner did they touch the shore, than trees, flowers, fruit, birds, all that they had seen from the opposite side, vanished in an instant,amidst terrible clamor; the rocks by which they had crossed sank beneath the waves, a few sharp peaks alone remaining above the surface, to indicate the place of the bridge,which had been destroyed by divine displeasure."Here we have the crushing and instant destruction by the Drift, the terrific clamor of the age of chaos, and the breaking down of the bridge Bifrost under the feet of the advancing armies of Muspel; here we have "the earth" of Ovid "settling down a little" in the ocean; here we have the legends of the Cornishmen of the lost land, described in the poetry of Tennyson; here we have the emigrants to Europe cut off from their primeval home, and left in a land of stones and clay and thistles.It is, of course, localized in Ceylon, precisely as the mountain of Ararat and the mountain of Olympus crop out in a score of places, wherever the races carried their legends. And to this day the Hindoo points to the rocks which rise in the Indian Ocean, between the eastern point of India and the Island of Ceylon, as the remnants of the Bridge; and the reader will find them marked on our maps as" Adam's Bridge" (Palam Adima). The people even point out, to this day, a high mountain, from whose foot the Bridge went forth, over which Adima and Héva, crossed to the continent; and it is known in modern geography as "Adam's Peak." So vividly have the traditions of a vast antiquity come down to us! The legends{p. 385}of the Drift have left their stamp even in our schoolbooks.And the memory of this Bridge survives not only in our geographies, but in our religions.Man reasons, at first, from below upward; from godlike men up to man-like gods; from Cæsar, the soldier, up to Cæsar, the deity.Heaven was, in the beginning, a heavenly city on earth; it is transported to the clouds; and there its golden streets and sparkling palaces await the redeemed.This is natural: we can only conceive of the best of the spiritual by the best we know of the material; we can imagine no musical instrument in the bands of the angels superior to a harp; no weapon better than a sword for the grasp of Gabriel.This disproves not a spiritual and superior state; it simply shows the poverty and paucity of our poor intellectual apparatus, which, like a mirror, reflects only that which is around it, and reflects it imperfectly.Men sometimes think they are mocking spiritual things when it is the imperfection of material nature, (which they set so much store by,) that provokes their ridicule.So, among all the races which went out from this heavenly land, this land of high intelligence, this land of the master race, it was remembered down through the ages, and dwelt upon and sung of until it moved upward from the waters of the Atlantic to the distant skies, and became a spiritual heaven. And the ridges which so strangely connected it with the continents, east and west, became the bridges over which the souls of men must pass to go from earth to heaven.For instance:The Persians believe in this bridge between earth and{p. 386}paradise. In his prayers the penitent in his confession says to this day:"I am wholly without doubt in the existence of the Mazdayaçnian faith; in the coming of the resurrection of the latter body; in the steppingover the bridge Chinvat; as well as in the continuance of paradise."The bridge and the land are both indestructible.Over the midst of the Moslem hell stretches the bridge Es-Sirat, "finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword."In the Lyke-Wake Dirge of the English north-country, they sang ofThe Brig of DreadNa braider than a thread."In Borneo the passage for souls to heaven is across a long tree; it is scarcely practicable to any except those who have killed a man.In Burmah, among the Karens, they tie strings across the rivers, for the ghosts of the dead to pass over to their graves.In Java, a bridge leads across the abyss to the dwelling-place of the gods; the evil-doers fall into the depthsbelow.Among the Esquimaux the soul crosses an awful gulf over a stretched rope, until it reaches the abode of "the great female evil spirit below" (beyond?) "the sea."The Ojibways cross to paradise on a great snake, which serves as a bridge.The Choctaw bridge is a slippery pine-log.The South American Manacicas cross on a wooden bridge.Among many of the American tribes, the Milky Way is the bridge to the other world.[1. Poor, "Sanskrit Literature," p. 151.]{p. 387}The Polynesians have no bridge; they pass the chasm in canoes.The Vedic Yama of the Hindoos crossed the rapid waters, and showed the way to our Aryan fathers.The modern Hindoo hopes to get through by holding on to the cow's tail!Even the African tribes, the Guinea negroes, believe that the land of souls can only be reached by crossing a river.Among some of the North American tribes "the souls come to a great lake," (the ocean,) "where there is abeautiful island, toward which they have to paddle in a canoe of white stone. On the way there arises a storm, and the wicked souls are wrecked, and the heaps of their bones are to be seen under the water, but the good reach the happyisland."[1]The Slavs believed in a pathway or road which led to the other world; it was both the rainbow (as in the Gothic legends) and the Milky Way; and, since the journey was long, they put boots into the coffin, (for it was made on foot,) and coins to pay the ferrying across a wide sea, even as the Greeks expected to be carried over the Styx by Charon. This abode of the dead, at the end of this long pathway, wasan island, a warm, fertile land, calledBuyau.[2]In their effort to restore the dead men to the happy island-home, the heavenly land, beyond the water, the Norsemen actually set their dead heroes afloat in boats on the open ocean.[3]Subsequently they raised a great mound over boat, warrior, horses, weapons, and all. These boats are now being dug up in the north of Europe and placed in the[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 362.2. Poor, "Sanskrit and Kindred Literatures," pp. 3 71, 372.3. Ibid.]{p. 388}great museums. They tell a marvelous religious and historical story.I think the unprejudiced reader will agree with me that these legends show that some Atlantic island played an important part in the very beginning of human history. It was the great land of the world before the Drift; it continued to be the great land of the world between the Drift and the Deluge. Here man fell; here he survived; here he renewed the race, and from this center he repopulated the world.We see also that this island was connected with the continents east and west by great ridges of land.The deep-sea soundings show that the vast bulk of land, of which the Azores are the outcroppings, are so connected yet with such ridges, although their crests are below the sea-level; and we know of no other island-mass of the Atlantic that is so united with the continents on both sides of it.Is not the conclusion very strong that Atlantis was the island-home of the race, in whose cave Job dwelt; on whose shores Phaëton fell; on whose fields Adam lived; on whose plain Sodom and Gomorrah stood, and Odin and Thor and Citli died; from which the Quiches and the Aztecs wandered to America; the center of all the races; the root of all the mythologies?{p. 389}CHAPTER IV.OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED.LET ME consider, briefly, those objections to my theory which have probably presented themsevles {sic} to some of my readers.First, it may be said:"We don't understand you. You argue that there could not have been such an ice-age as the glacialists affirm, and yet you speak of a period of cold and ice and snow."True: 'but there is a great difference between such a climate as that of Scotland, damp and cold, snowy and blowy, and a continental ice-sheet, a mile or two thick, reaching from John o' Groat's House to the Mediterranean. We can see that the oranges of Spain can grow to-day within a comparatively short distance of Edinburgh; but we can not realize that any tropical or semitropical plant could have survived in Africa when a precipice of ice, five thousand feet high, frowned on the coast of Italy; or that any form of life could have survived on earth when the equator in South America was covered with a continental ice-sheet a mile in thickness, or even ten feet in thickness. We can conceive of a glacial age of snow-storms, rains, hail, and wind--a terribly trying and disagreeable climate for man and beast--but we can not believe that the whole world was once in the condition that the dead waste of ice-covered Greenland is in now.{p. 390}Secondly, it may be said--"The whole world is now agreed that ice produced the Drift; what right, then, has any one man to set up a different theory against the opinions of mankind? "One man, Mohammed said, with God on his side, is a majority; and one man, with the truth on his side, must become a majority.All recognized truths once rested, solitary and alone, in some one brain.Truth is born an acorn, not an oak.The Rev. Sydney Smith once said that there was a kind of men into whom you could not introduce a new idea without a surgical operation. He might have added that, when you had once forced an idea into the head of such a man, you could not deliver him of it without instruments.The conservatism of unthinkingness is one of the potential forces of the world. It lies athwart the progress of mankind like a colossal mountain-chain, chilling the atmosphere on both sides of it for a thousand miles. The Hannibal who would reach the eternal city of Truth on the other side of these Alps must fight his way over ice and hew his way through rocks.The world was once agreed that the Drift was due to the Deluge. It abandoned this theory, and then became equally certain that it came from icebergs. This theory was, in turn, given up, and mankind were then positive that glaciers caused the Drift. But the glaciers were found to be inadequate for the emergency; and so the continents were lifted up fifteen hundred feet, and the ice-sheets were introduced. And now we wait to hear that the immense ice-masses of the Himalayas have forsaken their elevations and are moving bodily over the plains of India, grinding up the rocks into clay and gravel{p. 391}as they go, before we accept a theory which declares that they once marched over the land in this fashion from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn, from Spitzbergen to Spain.The universality of an error proves nothing, except that the error is universal. The voice of the people is only the voice of God in the last analysis. We can safely appeal from Caiaphas and Pilate to Time.But, says another:"We find deep grooves or striations under the glaciers of to-day; therefore the glaciers caused the grooves."But we find striations on level plains far remote from mountains, where the glaciers could not have been; therefore the glaciers did not cause the striations. "A short horse is soon curried." Superposition is not paternity. A porcelain nest-egg found under a hen is no proof that the hen laid it.But, says another"The idea of a comet encountering the earth, and covering it withdébris, is so stupendous, so out of the usual course of nature, I refuse to accept it."Ah, my friend, you forget that those Drift deposits, hundreds of feet in thickness, arethere.Theyare out of the usual course of nature. It is admitted that they came suddenly from some source. If you reject my theory, you do not get clear of the phenomena. The facts are a good deal more stupendous than the theory. Go out and look at the first Drift deposit; dig into it a hundred feet or more; follow it for a few hundred miles or more; then come back, and scratch your head, and tell me where it came from! Calculate how many cart-loads there are of it, then multiply this by the area of your own continent, and multiply that again by the area of two or three more continents, and then again tell me where it came from!{p. 392}Set aside my theory as absurd, and how much nearer are you to solving the problem? If neither waves, nor icebergs, nor glaciers, nor ice-sheets, nor comets, produced this world-cloak ofdébris, where did it come from?Remember the essential, the incontrovertible elements of the problem:1. Great heat.2. A sudden catastrophe.3. Great evaporation of the seas and waters.4. Great clouds.5. An age of floods and snows and ice and torrents.6. The human legends.Find a theory that explains and embraces all these elements, and then, and not until then, throw mine aside.Another will say:"But in one place you give us legends about an age of dreadful and long-continued heat, as in the Arabian tale, where no rain is said to have fallen for seven years; and in another place you tell us of a period of constant rains and snows and cold. Are not these statements incompatible?"Not at all. This is a big globe we live on: the tropics are warmer than the poles. Suppose a tremendous heat to be added to our natural temperature; it would necessarily make it hotter on the equator than at the poles, although it would be warm everywhere. There can be no clouds without condensation, no condensation without some degree of cooling. Where would the air cool first? Naturally at the points most remote from the equator, the poles. Hence, while the sun was still blazing in the uncovered heavens of the greater part of the earth, small caps of cloud would form at the north and south poles, and shed their moisture in gentle rain. As the heat brought to the earth by the comet was accidental and{p. 393}adventitious, there would be a natural tendency to return to the pre-comet condition. The extraordinary evaporation would of itself have produced refrigeration. Hence the cloud-caps would grow and advance steadily toward the equator, casting down continually increasing volumes of rain. Snow would begin to form near the poles, and it too would advance. We would finally have, down to say the thirty-fifth degree of north and south latitude, vast belts of rain and snow, while the equator would still be blazing with the tropical heat which would hold the condensation back. Here, then, we would have precisely the condition of things described in the "Younger Edda" of the Northmen:"Then said Jafnhar: 'All that part of Ginungagap' (the Atlantic) 'that turns toward the northwas filled with thick, heavy ice and rime,' (snow,) 'and everywhere within weredrizzling gusts and rain. But the south part of Ginungagap was lighted up by theglowing sparksthat flew out of Muspelheim' (Africa?). Added Thride: 'As cold and all things grim proceeded from Niflheim, so that which bordered on Muspelheim was hot and bright, and Ginungagap' (the Atlantic near Africa?) 'was as warm and mild as windless air.'"Another may say:"But how does all this agree with your theory that the progenitors of the stock from which the white, the yellow, and the brown races were differentiated, were saved in one or two caverns in one place? How did they get to Africa, Asia, and America?"In the first place, it is no essential part of my case that man survived in one place or a dozen places; it can not, in either event, affect the question of the origin of the Drift. It is simply an opinion of my own, open to modification upon fuller information. If, for instance, men dwelt in Asia at that time, and no Drift deposits{p. 394}fell upon Asia, races may have survived there; the negro may have dwelt in India at that time; some of the strange Hill-tribes of China and India may have had no connection with Lif and Lifthraser.But if we will suppose that the scene of man's survival was in that Atlantic island, Atlantis, then this would follow:The remnant of mankind, whether they were a single couple, like Lif and Lifthraser; or a group of men and women, like Job and his companions; or a numerous party, like that referred to in the Navajo and Aztec legends, in any event, they would not and could not stay long in the cave. The distribution of the Drift shows that it fell within twelve hours; but there were probably several days thereafter during which the face of the earth was swept by horrible cyclones, born of the dreadful heat. As soon, however, as they could safely do so, the remnant of the people must have left the cave; the limited nature of their food-supplies would probably drive them out. Once outside, their condition was pitiable indeed. First, they encountered the great heat; the cooling of the atmosphere had not yet begun; water was a pressing want. Hence we read in the legends of Mimer's well, where Odin pawned his eye for a drink. And we are told, in an American legend, of a party who traveled far to find the life-giving well, and found the possessor sitting over it to hide it. It was during this period that the legends originated which refer to the capture of the cows and their recovery by demi-gods, Hercules or Rama.Then the race began to wander. The world was a place of stones. Hunger drove them on. Then came the clouds, the rains, the floods, the snows, the darkness; and still the people wandered. The receded ocean laid bare the great ridges, if they had sunk in the catastrophe,{p. 395}and the race gradually spread to Europe, Africa, and America."But," says one, "how long did all this take?Who shall say? It may have been days, weeks, months, years, centuries. The Toltec legends say that their ancestors wandered for more than a hundred years in the darkness.The torrent-torn face of the earth; the vast rearrangement of the Drift materials by rivers, compared with which our own rivers are rills; the vast continental regions which were evidently flooded, all testify to an extraordinary amount of moisture first raised up from the seas and then cast down on the lands. Given heat enough to raise this mass, given the cold caused by its evaporation, given the time necessary for the great battle between this heat and this condensation, given the time to restore this body of water to the ocean, not once but many times,--for, along the southern border of the floods, where Muspelheim. and Niflheim met, the heat must have sucked up the water as fast almost as it fell, to fall again, and again to be lifted up, until the heat-area was driven back and water fell, at last, everywhere on the earth's face, and the extraordinary evaporation ceased,--this was a gigantic, long-continued battle.But it may be asked:"Suppose further study should disclose the fact that the Driftisfound in Siberia and the rest of Asia, and over all the world, what then? "It will not disprove my theory. It will simply indicate that thedébrisdid not, as I have supposed, strike the earth instantaneously, but that it continued to fall during twenty-four hours. If the comet was split into fragments, if there was the "Midgard-Serpent" as well as the{p. 396}"Fenris Wolf" and "the dog Garm," they need not necessarily have reached the earth at the same time.Another says:"You supposed in your book, 'Atlantis,' that the Glacial Age might have been caused by the ridges radiating from Atlantis shutting off the Gulf Stream and preventing the heated waters of the tropics from reaching the northern shores of the world."True; and I have no doubt that these ridges did play an important part in producing climatic changes, subsequent to the Drift Age, by their presence or absence, their elevation or depression; but on fuller investigation I find that they are inadequate to account for the colossal phenomena of the Drift itself--the presence of the clay and gravel, the great heat and the tremendous downfall of water.It may be asked,"How does your theory account for the removal of great blocks, weighing many tons, for hundreds of miles from their original site?The answer is plain. We know the power of the ordinary hurricanes of the earth. "The largest trees are uprooted, or have their trunks snapped in two; and few if any of the most massive buildings stand uninjured."[1] If we will remember the excessive heat and the electrical derangements that must have accompanied the Drift Age, we can realize the tremendous winds spoken of in many of the legends. We have but to multiply the hurricane of the West Indies, or the cyclone of the Mississippi Valley, a hundred or a thousand fold, and we shall have power enough to move all the blocks found scattered over the face of the Drift deposits or mixed with its material.[1. Appletons' "American Cyclopædia," vol. ix, p. 80.]{p. 397}Another asks:"How do you account for the fact that this Drift material does not resemble the usual aërolites, which are commonly composed of iron, and unlike the stones of the earth?"I nave shown that aërolites have fallen that did not contain any iron, and that could not be distinguished from the material native to the earth. And it must be remembered that, while the shining meteoroids that blaze in periodical showers from radiant points in the sky are associated with comets, and are probably lost fragments of comet-tails, these meteoroids do not reach the earth, but are always burned out, far up in our atmosphere, by the friction produced by their motion. The iron aërolite is of different origin. It may be a product of space itself, a condensation of metallic gases. The fact that it reaches the earth without being consumed would seem to indicate that it belongs at a lower level than the meteoric showers, and has, consequently, a less distance to fall and waste.And these views are confirmed by a recent writer,[1] who, after showing that the meteoroids, or shooting-stars, are very different from meteorites or aërolites, and seldom or never reach the earth, proceeds to account for the former. He says:"Many theories have been advanced in the past to account for these strange bodies, but the evidence now accumulated proves beyond reasonable doubt that they are near relatives, and probably thedébrisof comets."Tempel's comet is now known to be traveling in the same orbit as the November meteors, and is near the head of the train, and it appears, in like manner, that the second comet of 1862 (Swift's comet) is traveling in the orbit of the August meteors. And the first comet of 1881 seems to be similarly connected with the April meteors. . . .[1. Ward's "Science Bulletin," E. E. II., 1882, p. 4.]{p. 398}"Although few scientific men now question a relationship between comets and the ordinary meteors, there are those, and among them some of our ablest men, who think that the large meteors, or bolides, and aërolites, may be different astronomically, and perhaps physically, from the ordinary shooting-stars, and in the past some contended that they originated in our atmosphere others that they were ejected from terrestrial volcanoes. . . And at the present time the known facts, and all scientific thought, seem to point to the conclusion that the difference between them and ordinary shooting-stars is analogous to that between rain and mist, and, in addition to the reasons already given for connecting them with comets, may be mentioned the fact that meteorites bring with them carbonic acid, which is known to form so prominent a part of comets' tails; and if fragments of meteoric iron or stone be heated moderately in a vacuum, they yield up gases consisting of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and the spectrum of these gases corresponds to the spectrum of a cornet's coma and tail."By studying their microscopical structure, Mr. Sorby has been able to determine that the material was at one time certainly in a state of fusion; and that the most remote condition of which we have positive evidence was that of small, detached, melted globules, the formation of which can not be explained in a satisfactory manner, except by supposing that their constituents were originally in the state of vapor, as they now exist in the atmosphere of the sun; and, on the temperature becoming lower, condensed into these "ultimate cosmical particles." These afterward collected into larger masses, which have been variously changed by subsequent metamorphic action, and broken up by repeated mutual impact, and often again collected together and solidified. The meteoric irons are probably those portions of the metallic constituents which were separated from the rest by fusion when the metamorphism was carried to that extreme point.'"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 aërolites? "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 treesKirk 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 itselfUpon 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 ofmeteoroids.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 movedeastwardover 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 gardeneastward, 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 wasagain moved eastward; he was driven out of Eden, and the cherubims guarded theeasternextremity 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,eastof 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 regionwest 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 iswithout 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 ofsix years and three quartersfor 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, withintwenty 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 earthmissed 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 aërial 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.At that hour, half past nine o'clock in the evening,at apparently the same moment, at points hundreds of miles{p. 414}apart, in three different States, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, fires of the most peculiar and devastating kind broke out, so far as we know, by spontaneous combustion.In Wisconsin, on its eastern borders, in a heavily timbered country, near Lake Michigan, a region embracingfour hundred square miles, extending north from Brown County, and containing Peshtigo, Manistee, Holland, and numerous villages on the shores of Green Bay, was swept bare by an absolute whirlwind of flame. There wereseven hundred and fifty people killed outright, besides great numbers of the wounded, maimed, and burned, who died afterward. More than three million dollars' worth of property was destroyed.[1]It was no ordinary fire. I quote:"At sundown there was a lull in the wind and comparative stillness. For two hours there were no signs of danger; but at a few minutes after nine o'clock, and by a singular coincidence,precisely the time at which the Chicago fire commenced, the people of the village heard a terrible roar. It was that of a tornado, crushing through the forests.Instantly the heavens were illuminated with a terrible glare.The sky, which had been so dark a moment before,burst into clouds of flame. A spectator of the terrible scene says the fire did not come upon them gradually from burning trees and other objects to the windward, but the first notice they had of it wasa whirlwind of flame in great clouds from above the tops of the trees, which fell upon and entirely enveloped everything. The poor people inhaled it, or the intensely hot air, and fell down dead. This is verified by the appearance of many of the corpses. They were found dead in the roads and open spaces,where there were no visible marks of fire near by, with not a trace of burning upon their bodies or clothing. At the Sugar Bush, which is an extended clearing, in some places four miles in width,[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, pp. 393, 394, etc.]{p. 415}corpses were found in the open road, between fences only slightly burned.No mark of fire was upon them; they lay there as if asleep. This phenomenon seems to explain the fact that so many were killed in compact masses. They seemed to have huddled together, in what were evidently regarded at the moment as the safest places,far away from buildings, trees, or other inflammablematerial, and there to have died together."[1]Another spectator says:"Much has been said of the intense heat of the fires which destroyed Peshtigo, Menekaune, Williamsonville, etc., but all that has been said can give the stranger but a faint conception of the reality. The heat has been compared to that engendered by a flame concentrated on an object by a blow-pipe; but even that would not account for some of the phenomena. For instance, we have in our possession a copper cent taken from the pocket of a dead man in the Peshtigo Sugar Bush, which will illustrate our point.This cent has been partially fused, but still retains its round form, and the inscription upon it is legible. Others, in the same pocket, were partiallymelted, and yetthe clothing and the body of the man were not even singed. We do not know in what way to account for this, unless, as is asserted by some, the tornado and fire were accompanied by electrical phenomena."[2]"It is the universal testimony that the prevailing idea among the people was, that the last day had come. Accustomed as they were to fire, nothing like this had ever been known. They could give no other interpretation to this ominous roar, thisbursting of the sky with fame, and this dropping down of fire out of the very heavens, consuming instantly everything it touched."No two give a like description of the great tornado as it smote and devoured the village. It seemed as if 'the fiery fiends of hell had been loosened,' says one. 'It came in great sheetedflames from heaven,' says another. 'There wasa pitiless rain of fire andSAND.' 'The[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 372.2. Ibid., p. 373.]{p. 416}atmosphere was all afire.' Some speak of 'great balls of fire unrolling and shooting forth, in streams.' The fire leaped over roofs and trees, and ignited whole streets at once. No one could stand before the blast. It was a race with death, above, behind, and before them."[1]A civil engineer, doing business in Peshtigo, says"The heat increased so rapidly, as things got well afire, that,when about four hundred feet from the bridge and the nearest building, I was obliged to lie down behind a log that was aground in about two feet of water, and by going under water now and then, and holding my head close to the water behind the log, I managed to breathe. There were a dozen others behind the same log. If I had succeeded in crossing the river and gone among the buildings on the other side, probably I should have been lost, as many were."We have seen Ovid describing the people of "the earth" crouching in the same way in the water to save themselves from the flames of the Age of Fire.In Michigan, one Allison Weaver, near Port Huron, determined to remain, to protect, if possible, some mill-property of which he had charge. He knew the fire was coming, and dug himself a shallow well or pit, made a thick plank cover to place over it, and thus prepared to bide the conflagration.I quote:"He filled it nearly full of water, and took care to saturate the ground around it for a distance of several rods. Going to the mill, he dragged out a four-inch plank, sawed it in two, and saw that the parts tightly covered the mouth of the little well. 'I kalkerated it would be tech and go,' said he, 'but it was the best I could do.' At midnight he had everything arranged, and the roaring then was[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 374.]{p. 417}awful to hear. The clearing was ten to twelve acres in extent, and Weaver says that, for two hours before the fire reached him, there was a constant flight across the ground of small animals. As he rested a moment from giving the house another wetting down, a horse dashed into the opening at full speed and made for the house. Weaver could see him tremble and shake with excitement and terror, and felt a pity for him. After a moment the animal gave utterance to a snort of dismay, ran two or three times around the house, and then shot on into the woods like a rocket."We have, in the foregoing pages, in the legends of different nations, descriptions of the terrified animals flying with the men into the caves of the earth to escape the great conflagration.'I Not long after this the fire came. Weaver stood by his well, ready for the emergency, yet curious to see the breaking-in of the flames. The roaring increased in volume, the air became oppressive, a cloud of dust and cinders came showering down, and he could see the flame through the trees. It did not run along the ground, or leap from tree to tree, but it came on like a tornado,a sheet of flame reaching from the earth to the tops of the trees. As it struck the clearing he jumped into his well, and closed over the planks. He could no longer see, but he could hear. He says that the flames made no halt whatever, or ceased their roaring for an instant, but he hardly got the opening closed before the house and mill were burning tinder, and both were down in five minutes. The smoke came down upon him powerfully, and his den was so hot he could hardly breathe."He knew that the planks above him were on fire, but, remembering their thickness, he waited till the roaring of the flames had died away, and then with his head and hands turned them over and put out the fire by dashing up water with his hands. Although it was a cold night, and the water had at first chilled him, the heat gradually warmed him up until he felt quite comfortable. He remained in his den until daylight, frequently turning{p. 418}over the planks and putting out the fire, and then the worst had passed. The earth around was on fire in spots, house and mill were gone, leaves, brush, and logs were swept clean away as if shaved off and swept with a broom, and nothing but soot and ashes were to be seen."[1]In Wisconsin, at Williamson's Mills, there was a large but shallow well on the premises belonging to a Mr. Boorman. The people, when cut off by the flames and wild with terror, and thinking they would find safety in the water, leaped into this well. "The relentless fury of the flames drove them pell-mell into the pit, to struggle with each other and die--some by drowning, and others by fire and suffocation. None escaped.Thirty-two bodies were found there. They were in every imaginable position; but the contortions of their limbs and the agonizing expressions of their faces told the awful tale."[2]The recital of these details, horrible though they may be, becomes excusable when we remember that the ancestors of our race must have endured similar horrors in that awful calamity which I have discussed in this volume.James B. Clark, of Detroit, who was at Uniontown, Wisconsin, writes:"The fire suddenly made a rush, like the flash of a train of gunpowder, and swept in the shape of a crescent around the settlement. It is almost impossible to conceivethe frightful rapidity of the advance of the flames. The rushing fire seemed to eat up and annihilate the trees."They saw a black mass coming toward them from the wall of flame:"It was a stampede of cattle and horses thundering toward us, bellowing moaning, and neighing as they galloped[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 390.2. Ibid., p. 386.]{p. 419}on; rushing with fearful speed, their eyeballs dilated and glaring with terror, and every motion betokening delirium of fright. Some had been badly burned, and must have plunged through a long space of flame in the desperate effort to escape. Following considerably behind came a solitary horse, panting and snorting and nearly exhausted. He was saddled and bridled, and, as we first thought, had a bag lashed to his back. As he came up we were startled at the sight of a young lad lying fallen over the animal's neck, the bridle wound around his hands, and the mane being clinched by the fingers. Little effort was needed to stop the jaded horse, and at once release the helpless boy. He was taken into the house, and all that we could do was done; but he had inhaled the smoke, and was seemingly dying. Some time elapsed and he revived enough to speak. He told his name--Patrick Byrnes--and said: 'Father and mother and the children got into the wagon. I don't know what became of them. Everything is burned up. I am dying. Oh! is hell any worse than this?'"[1]How vividly does all this recall the book of Job and the legends of Central America, which refer to the multitudes of the burned, maimed, and wounded lying in the caverns, moaning and crying like poor Patrick Byrnes, suffering no less in mind than in body!When we leave Wisconsin and pass about two hundred and fifty miles eastward, over Lake Michigan and across the whole width of the State of Michigan, we find much the same condition of things, but not so terrible in the loss of human life. Fullyfifteen thousand people were rendered homeless by the fires; and their food, clothing, crops, horses, and cattle were destroyed. Of these five to six thousand were burned out thesame night that the fires broke out in Chicago and Wisconsin. The[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 383.]{p. 420}total destruction of property exceeded one million dollars; not only villages and cities, but whole townships, were swept bare.But it is to Chicago we must turn for the most extraordinary results of this atmospheric disturbance. It is needless to tell the story in detail. The world knows it by heart:Blackened and bleeding, helpless, panting, prone,On the charred fragments of her shattered throne,Lies she who stood but yesterday alone."I have only space to refer to one or two points.The fire was spontaneous. The story of Mrs. O'Leary's cow having started the conflagration by kicking over a lantern was proved to be false. It was the access of gas from the tail of Biela's comet that burned up Chicago!The fire-marshal testified:"I felt it in my bones that we were going to have a burn."He says, speaking of O'Leary's barn:"We got the fire under control, and it would not have gone a foot farther; but the next thing I knew they came and told me that St. Paul's church, about two squares north, was on fire."[1]They checked the church-fire, but--"The next thing I knew the fire was in Bateham's planing-mill."A writer in the New York "Evening Post" says he saw in Chicago "buildings far beyond the line of fire,and in no contact with it, burst into flames from the interior."[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 163.]{p. 421}It must not be forgotten that the fall of 1871 was marked by extraordinary conflagrations in regions widely separated. On the 8th. of October,the same daythe Wisconsin, Michigan, and Chicago fires broke out, the States of Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, and Illinois were severely devastated by prairie-fires; while terrible fires raged on the Alleghanies, the Sierras of the Pacific coast, and the Rocky Mountains, and in the region of the Red River of the North."The Annual Record of Science and Industry" for 1876, page 84, says:"For weeks before and after the great fire in Chicago in 1872, great areas of forest and prairie-land, both in the United States and the British Provinces, were on fire."The flames that consumed a great part of Chicago were of an unusual character and produced extraordinary effects. They absolutelymeltedthe hardest building-stone, which had previously been considered fire-proof. Iron, glass, granite, were fused and run together into grotesque conglomerates, as if they had been put through a blast-furnace. No kind of material could stand its breath for a moment.I quote again from Sheahan & Upton's Work:"The huge stone and brick structures melted before the fierceness of the flames as a snow-flake melts and disappears in water, and almost as quickly. Six-story buildings would take fire anddisappear for ever from sight in five minutes by the watch. . . . The fire also doubled on its track at the great Union Depot and burned half a mile southwardin the very teeth of the gale--a gale which blew a perfect tornado, and in which no vessel could have lived on the lake. . . .Strange, fantastic fires of blue, red, and green played along the cornices of buildings."[1][1. "History of the Chicago Fire," pp. 85, 86.]{p. 422}Hon. William B. Ogden wrote at the time:
TheAsas, then, were the civilized race who inhabited a high, precipitous country, the meeting-point of a number of ridges. Atlas was the king, or god, of Atlantis. In the old time all kings were gods. They are something more than men, to the multitude, even yet.
And when we reach "Ragnarok" in these Gothic legends, when the jaw of the wolf Fenris reached from the earth to the sun, and he vomits fire and poison, and when Surt, and all the forces of Muspel, "ride over Bifrost,it breaks to pieces." That is to say, in this last great catastrophe of the earth, the ridge of land that led from the British Islands to Atlantis goes down for ever.
[1. The Younger Edda," Anderson, note, p. 226.]
{p. 383}
And in Plato's description of Atlantis, as received by Solon from the Egyptian priests, we read:
"There was an island" (Atlantis) "situated in front of the straits which you call the Columns of Hercules; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, andwas the way to other islands, and from the islandsyou might pass through the whole of the opposite continent," (America,) "which surrounds the true ocean."
Now this is not very clear, but it may signify that there was continuous land communication between Atlantis and the islands of the half-submerged ridge, and from the islands to the continent of America. It would seem to mean more than a passage-way by boats over the water, for that existed everywhere, and could be traversed in any direction.
I have quoted on p. 372,ante, in the last chapter, part of the Sanskrit legend of Adima and Héva, as preserved in the Bagaveda-Gita, and other sacred books of the Hindoos. It refers very distinctly to the bridge which united the island-home of primeval humanity with the rest of the earth. But there is more of it:
When, under the inspiration of the prince of demons, Adima and Héva begin to wander, and desire to leave their island, we read:
"Arriving at last at the extremity of the island"--
We have seen that the bridge Bifrost was connected with the extremity of Asgard--
"they beheld a smooth and narrow arm of the sea, and beyond it a vast and apparently boundless country," (Europe?) "connected with their island by a narrow and rocky pathway, arising from the bosom of the waters."
This is probably a precise description of the connecting ridge; it united the boundless continent, Europe, with
{p. 384}
the island; it rose out of the sea, it was rocky; it was the broken crest of a submerged mountain-chain.
What became of it? Here again we have a tradition of its destruction. We read that, after Adima and Héva had passed over this rocky bridge--
"No sooner did they touch the shore, than trees, flowers, fruit, birds, all that they had seen from the opposite side, vanished in an instant,amidst terrible clamor; the rocks by which they had crossed sank beneath the waves, a few sharp peaks alone remaining above the surface, to indicate the place of the bridge,which had been destroyed by divine displeasure."
Here we have the crushing and instant destruction by the Drift, the terrific clamor of the age of chaos, and the breaking down of the bridge Bifrost under the feet of the advancing armies of Muspel; here we have "the earth" of Ovid "settling down a little" in the ocean; here we have the legends of the Cornishmen of the lost land, described in the poetry of Tennyson; here we have the emigrants to Europe cut off from their primeval home, and left in a land of stones and clay and thistles.
It is, of course, localized in Ceylon, precisely as the mountain of Ararat and the mountain of Olympus crop out in a score of places, wherever the races carried their legends. And to this day the Hindoo points to the rocks which rise in the Indian Ocean, between the eastern point of India and the Island of Ceylon, as the remnants of the Bridge; and the reader will find them marked on our maps as" Adam's Bridge" (Palam Adima). The people even point out, to this day, a high mountain, from whose foot the Bridge went forth, over which Adima and Héva, crossed to the continent; and it is known in modern geography as "Adam's Peak." So vividly have the traditions of a vast antiquity come down to us! The legends
{p. 385}
of the Drift have left their stamp even in our schoolbooks.
And the memory of this Bridge survives not only in our geographies, but in our religions.
Man reasons, at first, from below upward; from godlike men up to man-like gods; from Cæsar, the soldier, up to Cæsar, the deity.
Heaven was, in the beginning, a heavenly city on earth; it is transported to the clouds; and there its golden streets and sparkling palaces await the redeemed.
This is natural: we can only conceive of the best of the spiritual by the best we know of the material; we can imagine no musical instrument in the bands of the angels superior to a harp; no weapon better than a sword for the grasp of Gabriel.
This disproves not a spiritual and superior state; it simply shows the poverty and paucity of our poor intellectual apparatus, which, like a mirror, reflects only that which is around it, and reflects it imperfectly.
Men sometimes think they are mocking spiritual things when it is the imperfection of material nature, (which they set so much store by,) that provokes their ridicule.
So, among all the races which went out from this heavenly land, this land of high intelligence, this land of the master race, it was remembered down through the ages, and dwelt upon and sung of until it moved upward from the waters of the Atlantic to the distant skies, and became a spiritual heaven. And the ridges which so strangely connected it with the continents, east and west, became the bridges over which the souls of men must pass to go from earth to heaven.
For instance:
The Persians believe in this bridge between earth and
{p. 386}
paradise. In his prayers the penitent in his confession says to this day:
"I am wholly without doubt in the existence of the Mazdayaçnian faith; in the coming of the resurrection of the latter body; in the steppingover the bridge Chinvat; as well as in the continuance of paradise."
The bridge and the land are both indestructible.
Over the midst of the Moslem hell stretches the bridge Es-Sirat, "finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword."
In the Lyke-Wake Dirge of the English north-country, they sang of
The Brig of DreadNa braider than a thread."
The Brig of DreadNa braider than a thread."
The Brig of DreadNa braider than a thread."
In Borneo the passage for souls to heaven is across a long tree; it is scarcely practicable to any except those who have killed a man.
In Burmah, among the Karens, they tie strings across the rivers, for the ghosts of the dead to pass over to their graves.
In Java, a bridge leads across the abyss to the dwelling-place of the gods; the evil-doers fall into the depthsbelow.
Among the Esquimaux the soul crosses an awful gulf over a stretched rope, until it reaches the abode of "the great female evil spirit below" (beyond?) "the sea."
The Ojibways cross to paradise on a great snake, which serves as a bridge.
The Choctaw bridge is a slippery pine-log.
The South American Manacicas cross on a wooden bridge.
Among many of the American tribes, the Milky Way is the bridge to the other world.
[1. Poor, "Sanskrit Literature," p. 151.]
{p. 387}
The Polynesians have no bridge; they pass the chasm in canoes.
The Vedic Yama of the Hindoos crossed the rapid waters, and showed the way to our Aryan fathers.
The modern Hindoo hopes to get through by holding on to the cow's tail!
Even the African tribes, the Guinea negroes, believe that the land of souls can only be reached by crossing a river.
Among some of the North American tribes "the souls come to a great lake," (the ocean,) "where there is abeautiful island, toward which they have to paddle in a canoe of white stone. On the way there arises a storm, and the wicked souls are wrecked, and the heaps of their bones are to be seen under the water, but the good reach the happyisland."[1]
The Slavs believed in a pathway or road which led to the other world; it was both the rainbow (as in the Gothic legends) and the Milky Way; and, since the journey was long, they put boots into the coffin, (for it was made on foot,) and coins to pay the ferrying across a wide sea, even as the Greeks expected to be carried over the Styx by Charon. This abode of the dead, at the end of this long pathway, wasan island, a warm, fertile land, calledBuyau.[2]
In their effort to restore the dead men to the happy island-home, the heavenly land, beyond the water, the Norsemen actually set their dead heroes afloat in boats on the open ocean.[3]
Subsequently they raised a great mound over boat, warrior, horses, weapons, and all. These boats are now being dug up in the north of Europe and placed in the
[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 362.
2. Poor, "Sanskrit and Kindred Literatures," pp. 3 71, 372.
3. Ibid.]
{p. 388}
great museums. They tell a marvelous religious and historical story.
I think the unprejudiced reader will agree with me that these legends show that some Atlantic island played an important part in the very beginning of human history. It was the great land of the world before the Drift; it continued to be the great land of the world between the Drift and the Deluge. Here man fell; here he survived; here he renewed the race, and from this center he repopulated the world.
We see also that this island was connected with the continents east and west by great ridges of land.
The deep-sea soundings show that the vast bulk of land, of which the Azores are the outcroppings, are so connected yet with such ridges, although their crests are below the sea-level; and we know of no other island-mass of the Atlantic that is so united with the continents on both sides of it.
Is not the conclusion very strong that Atlantis was the island-home of the race, in whose cave Job dwelt; on whose shores Phaëton fell; on whose fields Adam lived; on whose plain Sodom and Gomorrah stood, and Odin and Thor and Citli died; from which the Quiches and the Aztecs wandered to America; the center of all the races; the root of all the mythologies?
{p. 389}
LET ME consider, briefly, those objections to my theory which have probably presented themsevles {sic} to some of my readers.
First, it may be said:
"We don't understand you. You argue that there could not have been such an ice-age as the glacialists affirm, and yet you speak of a period of cold and ice and snow."
True: 'but there is a great difference between such a climate as that of Scotland, damp and cold, snowy and blowy, and a continental ice-sheet, a mile or two thick, reaching from John o' Groat's House to the Mediterranean. We can see that the oranges of Spain can grow to-day within a comparatively short distance of Edinburgh; but we can not realize that any tropical or semitropical plant could have survived in Africa when a precipice of ice, five thousand feet high, frowned on the coast of Italy; or that any form of life could have survived on earth when the equator in South America was covered with a continental ice-sheet a mile in thickness, or even ten feet in thickness. We can conceive of a glacial age of snow-storms, rains, hail, and wind--a terribly trying and disagreeable climate for man and beast--but we can not believe that the whole world was once in the condition that the dead waste of ice-covered Greenland is in now.
{p. 390}
Secondly, it may be said--
"The whole world is now agreed that ice produced the Drift; what right, then, has any one man to set up a different theory against the opinions of mankind? "
One man, Mohammed said, with God on his side, is a majority; and one man, with the truth on his side, must become a majority.
All recognized truths once rested, solitary and alone, in some one brain.
Truth is born an acorn, not an oak.
The Rev. Sydney Smith once said that there was a kind of men into whom you could not introduce a new idea without a surgical operation. He might have added that, when you had once forced an idea into the head of such a man, you could not deliver him of it without instruments.
The conservatism of unthinkingness is one of the potential forces of the world. It lies athwart the progress of mankind like a colossal mountain-chain, chilling the atmosphere on both sides of it for a thousand miles. The Hannibal who would reach the eternal city of Truth on the other side of these Alps must fight his way over ice and hew his way through rocks.
The world was once agreed that the Drift was due to the Deluge. It abandoned this theory, and then became equally certain that it came from icebergs. This theory was, in turn, given up, and mankind were then positive that glaciers caused the Drift. But the glaciers were found to be inadequate for the emergency; and so the continents were lifted up fifteen hundred feet, and the ice-sheets were introduced. And now we wait to hear that the immense ice-masses of the Himalayas have forsaken their elevations and are moving bodily over the plains of India, grinding up the rocks into clay and gravel
{p. 391}
as they go, before we accept a theory which declares that they once marched over the land in this fashion from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn, from Spitzbergen to Spain.
The universality of an error proves nothing, except that the error is universal. The voice of the people is only the voice of God in the last analysis. We can safely appeal from Caiaphas and Pilate to Time.
But, says another:
"We find deep grooves or striations under the glaciers of to-day; therefore the glaciers caused the grooves."
But we find striations on level plains far remote from mountains, where the glaciers could not have been; therefore the glaciers did not cause the striations. "A short horse is soon curried." Superposition is not paternity. A porcelain nest-egg found under a hen is no proof that the hen laid it.
But, says another
"The idea of a comet encountering the earth, and covering it withdébris, is so stupendous, so out of the usual course of nature, I refuse to accept it."
Ah, my friend, you forget that those Drift deposits, hundreds of feet in thickness, arethere.Theyare out of the usual course of nature. It is admitted that they came suddenly from some source. If you reject my theory, you do not get clear of the phenomena. The facts are a good deal more stupendous than the theory. Go out and look at the first Drift deposit; dig into it a hundred feet or more; follow it for a few hundred miles or more; then come back, and scratch your head, and tell me where it came from! Calculate how many cart-loads there are of it, then multiply this by the area of your own continent, and multiply that again by the area of two or three more continents, and then again tell me where it came from!
{p. 392}
Set aside my theory as absurd, and how much nearer are you to solving the problem? If neither waves, nor icebergs, nor glaciers, nor ice-sheets, nor comets, produced this world-cloak ofdébris, where did it come from?
Remember the essential, the incontrovertible elements of the problem:
1. Great heat.
2. A sudden catastrophe.
3. Great evaporation of the seas and waters.
4. Great clouds.
5. An age of floods and snows and ice and torrents.
6. The human legends.
Find a theory that explains and embraces all these elements, and then, and not until then, throw mine aside.
Another will say:
"But in one place you give us legends about an age of dreadful and long-continued heat, as in the Arabian tale, where no rain is said to have fallen for seven years; and in another place you tell us of a period of constant rains and snows and cold. Are not these statements incompatible?"
Not at all. This is a big globe we live on: the tropics are warmer than the poles. Suppose a tremendous heat to be added to our natural temperature; it would necessarily make it hotter on the equator than at the poles, although it would be warm everywhere. There can be no clouds without condensation, no condensation without some degree of cooling. Where would the air cool first? Naturally at the points most remote from the equator, the poles. Hence, while the sun was still blazing in the uncovered heavens of the greater part of the earth, small caps of cloud would form at the north and south poles, and shed their moisture in gentle rain. As the heat brought to the earth by the comet was accidental and
{p. 393}
adventitious, there would be a natural tendency to return to the pre-comet condition. The extraordinary evaporation would of itself have produced refrigeration. Hence the cloud-caps would grow and advance steadily toward the equator, casting down continually increasing volumes of rain. Snow would begin to form near the poles, and it too would advance. We would finally have, down to say the thirty-fifth degree of north and south latitude, vast belts of rain and snow, while the equator would still be blazing with the tropical heat which would hold the condensation back. Here, then, we would have precisely the condition of things described in the "Younger Edda" of the Northmen:
"Then said Jafnhar: 'All that part of Ginungagap' (the Atlantic) 'that turns toward the northwas filled with thick, heavy ice and rime,' (snow,) 'and everywhere within weredrizzling gusts and rain. But the south part of Ginungagap was lighted up by theglowing sparksthat flew out of Muspelheim' (Africa?). Added Thride: 'As cold and all things grim proceeded from Niflheim, so that which bordered on Muspelheim was hot and bright, and Ginungagap' (the Atlantic near Africa?) 'was as warm and mild as windless air.'"
Another may say:
"But how does all this agree with your theory that the progenitors of the stock from which the white, the yellow, and the brown races were differentiated, were saved in one or two caverns in one place? How did they get to Africa, Asia, and America?"
In the first place, it is no essential part of my case that man survived in one place or a dozen places; it can not, in either event, affect the question of the origin of the Drift. It is simply an opinion of my own, open to modification upon fuller information. If, for instance, men dwelt in Asia at that time, and no Drift deposits
{p. 394}
fell upon Asia, races may have survived there; the negro may have dwelt in India at that time; some of the strange Hill-tribes of China and India may have had no connection with Lif and Lifthraser.
But if we will suppose that the scene of man's survival was in that Atlantic island, Atlantis, then this would follow:
The remnant of mankind, whether they were a single couple, like Lif and Lifthraser; or a group of men and women, like Job and his companions; or a numerous party, like that referred to in the Navajo and Aztec legends, in any event, they would not and could not stay long in the cave. The distribution of the Drift shows that it fell within twelve hours; but there were probably several days thereafter during which the face of the earth was swept by horrible cyclones, born of the dreadful heat. As soon, however, as they could safely do so, the remnant of the people must have left the cave; the limited nature of their food-supplies would probably drive them out. Once outside, their condition was pitiable indeed. First, they encountered the great heat; the cooling of the atmosphere had not yet begun; water was a pressing want. Hence we read in the legends of Mimer's well, where Odin pawned his eye for a drink. And we are told, in an American legend, of a party who traveled far to find the life-giving well, and found the possessor sitting over it to hide it. It was during this period that the legends originated which refer to the capture of the cows and their recovery by demi-gods, Hercules or Rama.
Then the race began to wander. The world was a place of stones. Hunger drove them on. Then came the clouds, the rains, the floods, the snows, the darkness; and still the people wandered. The receded ocean laid bare the great ridges, if they had sunk in the catastrophe,
{p. 395}
and the race gradually spread to Europe, Africa, and America.
"But," says one, "how long did all this take?
Who shall say? It may have been days, weeks, months, years, centuries. The Toltec legends say that their ancestors wandered for more than a hundred years in the darkness.
The torrent-torn face of the earth; the vast rearrangement of the Drift materials by rivers, compared with which our own rivers are rills; the vast continental regions which were evidently flooded, all testify to an extraordinary amount of moisture first raised up from the seas and then cast down on the lands. Given heat enough to raise this mass, given the cold caused by its evaporation, given the time necessary for the great battle between this heat and this condensation, given the time to restore this body of water to the ocean, not once but many times,--for, along the southern border of the floods, where Muspelheim. and Niflheim met, the heat must have sucked up the water as fast almost as it fell, to fall again, and again to be lifted up, until the heat-area was driven back and water fell, at last, everywhere on the earth's face, and the extraordinary evaporation ceased,--this was a gigantic, long-continued battle.
But it may be asked:
"Suppose further study should disclose the fact that the Driftisfound in Siberia and the rest of Asia, and over all the world, what then? "
It will not disprove my theory. It will simply indicate that thedébrisdid not, as I have supposed, strike the earth instantaneously, but that it continued to fall during twenty-four hours. If the comet was split into fragments, if there was the "Midgard-Serpent" as well as the
{p. 396}
"Fenris Wolf" and "the dog Garm," they need not necessarily have reached the earth at the same time.
Another says:
"You supposed in your book, 'Atlantis,' that the Glacial Age might have been caused by the ridges radiating from Atlantis shutting off the Gulf Stream and preventing the heated waters of the tropics from reaching the northern shores of the world."
True; and I have no doubt that these ridges did play an important part in producing climatic changes, subsequent to the Drift Age, by their presence or absence, their elevation or depression; but on fuller investigation I find that they are inadequate to account for the colossal phenomena of the Drift itself--the presence of the clay and gravel, the great heat and the tremendous downfall of water.
It may be asked,
"How does your theory account for the removal of great blocks, weighing many tons, for hundreds of miles from their original site?
The answer is plain. We know the power of the ordinary hurricanes of the earth. "The largest trees are uprooted, or have their trunks snapped in two; and few if any of the most massive buildings stand uninjured."[1] If we will remember the excessive heat and the electrical derangements that must have accompanied the Drift Age, we can realize the tremendous winds spoken of in many of the legends. We have but to multiply the hurricane of the West Indies, or the cyclone of the Mississippi Valley, a hundred or a thousand fold, and we shall have power enough to move all the blocks found scattered over the face of the Drift deposits or mixed with its material.
[1. Appletons' "American Cyclopædia," vol. ix, p. 80.]
{p. 397}
Another asks:
"How do you account for the fact that this Drift material does not resemble the usual aërolites, which are commonly composed of iron, and unlike the stones of the earth?"
I nave shown that aërolites have fallen that did not contain any iron, and that could not be distinguished from the material native to the earth. And it must be remembered that, while the shining meteoroids that blaze in periodical showers from radiant points in the sky are associated with comets, and are probably lost fragments of comet-tails, these meteoroids do not reach the earth, but are always burned out, far up in our atmosphere, by the friction produced by their motion. The iron aërolite is of different origin. It may be a product of space itself, a condensation of metallic gases. The fact that it reaches the earth without being consumed would seem to indicate that it belongs at a lower level than the meteoric showers, and has, consequently, a less distance to fall and waste.
And these views are confirmed by a recent writer,[1] who, after showing that the meteoroids, or shooting-stars, are very different from meteorites or aërolites, and seldom or never reach the earth, proceeds to account for the former. He says:
"Many theories have been advanced in the past to account for these strange bodies, but the evidence now accumulated proves beyond reasonable doubt that they are near relatives, and probably thedébrisof comets.
"Tempel's comet is now known to be traveling in the same orbit as the November meteors, and is near the head of the train, and it appears, in like manner, that the second comet of 1862 (Swift's comet) is traveling in the orbit of the August meteors. And the first comet of 1881 seems to be similarly connected with the April meteors. . . .
[1. Ward's "Science Bulletin," E. E. II., 1882, p. 4.]
{p. 398}
"Although few scientific men now question a relationship between comets and the ordinary meteors, there are those, and among them some of our ablest men, who think that the large meteors, or bolides, and aërolites, may be different astronomically, and perhaps physically, from the ordinary shooting-stars, and in the past some contended that they originated in our atmosphere others that they were ejected from terrestrial volcanoes. . . And at the present time the known facts, and all scientific thought, seem to point to the conclusion that the difference between them and ordinary shooting-stars is analogous to that between rain and mist, and, in addition to the reasons already given for connecting them with comets, may be mentioned the fact that meteorites bring with them carbonic acid, which is known to form so prominent a part of comets' tails; and if fragments of meteoric iron or stone be heated moderately in a vacuum, they yield up gases consisting of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and the spectrum of these gases corresponds to the spectrum of a cornet's coma and tail.
"By studying their microscopical structure, Mr. Sorby has been able to determine that the material was at one time certainly in a state of fusion; and that the most remote condition of which we have positive evidence was that of small, detached, melted globules, the formation of which can not be explained in a satisfactory manner, except by supposing that their constituents were originally in the state of vapor, as they now exist in the atmosphere of the sun; and, on the temperature becoming lower, condensed into these "ultimate cosmical particles." These afterward collected into larger masses, which have been variously changed by subsequent metamorphic action, and broken up by repeated mutual impact, and often again collected together and solidified. The meteoric irons are probably those portions of the metallic constituents which were separated from the rest by fusion when the metamorphism was carried to that extreme point.'"
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 aërolites? "
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 treesKirk Alloway seems in a blaze;Through every bore the beams are glancing."
"And glimmering through the groaning treesKirk Alloway seems in a blaze;Through every bore the beams are glancing."
"And glimmering through the groaning treesKirk 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 itselfUpon enforcement flies with greatest speed."
"The thing that's heavy in itselfUpon enforcement flies with greatest speed."
"The thing that's heavy in itselfUpon 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 ofmeteoroids.
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 movedeastwardover 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 gardeneastward, 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 wasagain moved eastward; he was driven out of Eden, and the cherubims guarded theeasternextremity 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,eastof 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 regionwest 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 iswithout 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}
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 ofsix years and three quartersfor 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, withintwenty 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 earthmissed 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 aërial 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.
At that hour, half past nine o'clock in the evening,at apparently the same moment, at points hundreds of miles
{p. 414}
apart, in three different States, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, fires of the most peculiar and devastating kind broke out, so far as we know, by spontaneous combustion.
In Wisconsin, on its eastern borders, in a heavily timbered country, near Lake Michigan, a region embracingfour hundred square miles, extending north from Brown County, and containing Peshtigo, Manistee, Holland, and numerous villages on the shores of Green Bay, was swept bare by an absolute whirlwind of flame. There wereseven hundred and fifty people killed outright, besides great numbers of the wounded, maimed, and burned, who died afterward. More than three million dollars' worth of property was destroyed.[1]
It was no ordinary fire. I quote:
"At sundown there was a lull in the wind and comparative stillness. For two hours there were no signs of danger; but at a few minutes after nine o'clock, and by a singular coincidence,precisely the time at which the Chicago fire commenced, the people of the village heard a terrible roar. It was that of a tornado, crushing through the forests.Instantly the heavens were illuminated with a terrible glare.The sky, which had been so dark a moment before,burst into clouds of flame. A spectator of the terrible scene says the fire did not come upon them gradually from burning trees and other objects to the windward, but the first notice they had of it wasa whirlwind of flame in great clouds from above the tops of the trees, which fell upon and entirely enveloped everything. The poor people inhaled it, or the intensely hot air, and fell down dead. This is verified by the appearance of many of the corpses. They were found dead in the roads and open spaces,where there were no visible marks of fire near by, with not a trace of burning upon their bodies or clothing. At the Sugar Bush, which is an extended clearing, in some places four miles in width,
[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, pp. 393, 394, etc.]
{p. 415}
corpses were found in the open road, between fences only slightly burned.No mark of fire was upon them; they lay there as if asleep. This phenomenon seems to explain the fact that so many were killed in compact masses. They seemed to have huddled together, in what were evidently regarded at the moment as the safest places,far away from buildings, trees, or other inflammablematerial, and there to have died together."[1]
Another spectator says:
"Much has been said of the intense heat of the fires which destroyed Peshtigo, Menekaune, Williamsonville, etc., but all that has been said can give the stranger but a faint conception of the reality. The heat has been compared to that engendered by a flame concentrated on an object by a blow-pipe; but even that would not account for some of the phenomena. For instance, we have in our possession a copper cent taken from the pocket of a dead man in the Peshtigo Sugar Bush, which will illustrate our point.This cent has been partially fused, but still retains its round form, and the inscription upon it is legible. Others, in the same pocket, were partiallymelted, and yetthe clothing and the body of the man were not even singed. We do not know in what way to account for this, unless, as is asserted by some, the tornado and fire were accompanied by electrical phenomena."[2]
"It is the universal testimony that the prevailing idea among the people was, that the last day had come. Accustomed as they were to fire, nothing like this had ever been known. They could give no other interpretation to this ominous roar, thisbursting of the sky with fame, and this dropping down of fire out of the very heavens, consuming instantly everything it touched.
"No two give a like description of the great tornado as it smote and devoured the village. It seemed as if 'the fiery fiends of hell had been loosened,' says one. 'It came in great sheetedflames from heaven,' says another. 'There wasa pitiless rain of fire andSAND.' 'The
[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 372.
2. Ibid., p. 373.]
{p. 416}
atmosphere was all afire.' Some speak of 'great balls of fire unrolling and shooting forth, in streams.' The fire leaped over roofs and trees, and ignited whole streets at once. No one could stand before the blast. It was a race with death, above, behind, and before them."[1]
A civil engineer, doing business in Peshtigo, says
"The heat increased so rapidly, as things got well afire, that,when about four hundred feet from the bridge and the nearest building, I was obliged to lie down behind a log that was aground in about two feet of water, and by going under water now and then, and holding my head close to the water behind the log, I managed to breathe. There were a dozen others behind the same log. If I had succeeded in crossing the river and gone among the buildings on the other side, probably I should have been lost, as many were."
We have seen Ovid describing the people of "the earth" crouching in the same way in the water to save themselves from the flames of the Age of Fire.
In Michigan, one Allison Weaver, near Port Huron, determined to remain, to protect, if possible, some mill-property of which he had charge. He knew the fire was coming, and dug himself a shallow well or pit, made a thick plank cover to place over it, and thus prepared to bide the conflagration.
I quote:
"He filled it nearly full of water, and took care to saturate the ground around it for a distance of several rods. Going to the mill, he dragged out a four-inch plank, sawed it in two, and saw that the parts tightly covered the mouth of the little well. 'I kalkerated it would be tech and go,' said he, 'but it was the best I could do.' At midnight he had everything arranged, and the roaring then was
[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 374.]
{p. 417}
awful to hear. The clearing was ten to twelve acres in extent, and Weaver says that, for two hours before the fire reached him, there was a constant flight across the ground of small animals. As he rested a moment from giving the house another wetting down, a horse dashed into the opening at full speed and made for the house. Weaver could see him tremble and shake with excitement and terror, and felt a pity for him. After a moment the animal gave utterance to a snort of dismay, ran two or three times around the house, and then shot on into the woods like a rocket."
We have, in the foregoing pages, in the legends of different nations, descriptions of the terrified animals flying with the men into the caves of the earth to escape the great conflagration.
'I Not long after this the fire came. Weaver stood by his well, ready for the emergency, yet curious to see the breaking-in of the flames. The roaring increased in volume, the air became oppressive, a cloud of dust and cinders came showering down, and he could see the flame through the trees. It did not run along the ground, or leap from tree to tree, but it came on like a tornado,a sheet of flame reaching from the earth to the tops of the trees. As it struck the clearing he jumped into his well, and closed over the planks. He could no longer see, but he could hear. He says that the flames made no halt whatever, or ceased their roaring for an instant, but he hardly got the opening closed before the house and mill were burning tinder, and both were down in five minutes. The smoke came down upon him powerfully, and his den was so hot he could hardly breathe.
"He knew that the planks above him were on fire, but, remembering their thickness, he waited till the roaring of the flames had died away, and then with his head and hands turned them over and put out the fire by dashing up water with his hands. Although it was a cold night, and the water had at first chilled him, the heat gradually warmed him up until he felt quite comfortable. He remained in his den until daylight, frequently turning
{p. 418}
over the planks and putting out the fire, and then the worst had passed. The earth around was on fire in spots, house and mill were gone, leaves, brush, and logs were swept clean away as if shaved off and swept with a broom, and nothing but soot and ashes were to be seen."[1]
In Wisconsin, at Williamson's Mills, there was a large but shallow well on the premises belonging to a Mr. Boorman. The people, when cut off by the flames and wild with terror, and thinking they would find safety in the water, leaped into this well. "The relentless fury of the flames drove them pell-mell into the pit, to struggle with each other and die--some by drowning, and others by fire and suffocation. None escaped.Thirty-two bodies were found there. They were in every imaginable position; but the contortions of their limbs and the agonizing expressions of their faces told the awful tale."[2]
The recital of these details, horrible though they may be, becomes excusable when we remember that the ancestors of our race must have endured similar horrors in that awful calamity which I have discussed in this volume.
James B. Clark, of Detroit, who was at Uniontown, Wisconsin, writes:
"The fire suddenly made a rush, like the flash of a train of gunpowder, and swept in the shape of a crescent around the settlement. It is almost impossible to conceivethe frightful rapidity of the advance of the flames. The rushing fire seemed to eat up and annihilate the trees."
They saw a black mass coming toward them from the wall of flame:
"It was a stampede of cattle and horses thundering toward us, bellowing moaning, and neighing as they galloped
[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 390.
2. Ibid., p. 386.]
{p. 419}
on; rushing with fearful speed, their eyeballs dilated and glaring with terror, and every motion betokening delirium of fright. Some had been badly burned, and must have plunged through a long space of flame in the desperate effort to escape. Following considerably behind came a solitary horse, panting and snorting and nearly exhausted. He was saddled and bridled, and, as we first thought, had a bag lashed to his back. As he came up we were startled at the sight of a young lad lying fallen over the animal's neck, the bridle wound around his hands, and the mane being clinched by the fingers. Little effort was needed to stop the jaded horse, and at once release the helpless boy. He was taken into the house, and all that we could do was done; but he had inhaled the smoke, and was seemingly dying. Some time elapsed and he revived enough to speak. He told his name--Patrick Byrnes--and said: 'Father and mother and the children got into the wagon. I don't know what became of them. Everything is burned up. I am dying. Oh! is hell any worse than this?'"[1]
How vividly does all this recall the book of Job and the legends of Central America, which refer to the multitudes of the burned, maimed, and wounded lying in the caverns, moaning and crying like poor Patrick Byrnes, suffering no less in mind than in body!
When we leave Wisconsin and pass about two hundred and fifty miles eastward, over Lake Michigan and across the whole width of the State of Michigan, we find much the same condition of things, but not so terrible in the loss of human life. Fullyfifteen thousand people were rendered homeless by the fires; and their food, clothing, crops, horses, and cattle were destroyed. Of these five to six thousand were burned out thesame night that the fires broke out in Chicago and Wisconsin. The
[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 383.]
{p. 420}
total destruction of property exceeded one million dollars; not only villages and cities, but whole townships, were swept bare.
But it is to Chicago we must turn for the most extraordinary results of this atmospheric disturbance. It is needless to tell the story in detail. The world knows it by heart:
Blackened and bleeding, helpless, panting, prone,On the charred fragments of her shattered throne,Lies she who stood but yesterday alone."
Blackened and bleeding, helpless, panting, prone,On the charred fragments of her shattered throne,Lies she who stood but yesterday alone."
Blackened and bleeding, helpless, panting, prone,On the charred fragments of her shattered throne,Lies she who stood but yesterday alone."
I have only space to refer to one or two points.
The fire was spontaneous. The story of Mrs. O'Leary's cow having started the conflagration by kicking over a lantern was proved to be false. It was the access of gas from the tail of Biela's comet that burned up Chicago!
The fire-marshal testified:
"I felt it in my bones that we were going to have a burn."
He says, speaking of O'Leary's barn:
"We got the fire under control, and it would not have gone a foot farther; but the next thing I knew they came and told me that St. Paul's church, about two squares north, was on fire."[1]
They checked the church-fire, but--
"The next thing I knew the fire was in Bateham's planing-mill."
A writer in the New York "Evening Post" says he saw in Chicago "buildings far beyond the line of fire,and in no contact with it, burst into flames from the interior."
[1. See "History of the Great Conflagration," Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, 1871, p. 163.]
{p. 421}
It must not be forgotten that the fall of 1871 was marked by extraordinary conflagrations in regions widely separated. On the 8th. of October,the same daythe Wisconsin, Michigan, and Chicago fires broke out, the States of Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, and Illinois were severely devastated by prairie-fires; while terrible fires raged on the Alleghanies, the Sierras of the Pacific coast, and the Rocky Mountains, and in the region of the Red River of the North.
"The Annual Record of Science and Industry" for 1876, page 84, says:
"For weeks before and after the great fire in Chicago in 1872, great areas of forest and prairie-land, both in the United States and the British Provinces, were on fire."
The flames that consumed a great part of Chicago were of an unusual character and produced extraordinary effects. They absolutelymeltedthe hardest building-stone, which had previously been considered fire-proof. Iron, glass, granite, were fused and run together into grotesque conglomerates, as if they had been put through a blast-furnace. No kind of material could stand its breath for a moment.
I quote again from Sheahan & Upton's Work:
"The huge stone and brick structures melted before the fierceness of the flames as a snow-flake melts and disappears in water, and almost as quickly. Six-story buildings would take fire anddisappear for ever from sight in five minutes by the watch. . . . The fire also doubled on its track at the great Union Depot and burned half a mile southwardin the very teeth of the gale--a gale which blew a perfect tornado, and in which no vessel could have lived on the lake. . . .Strange, fantastic fires of blue, red, and green played along the cornices of buildings."[1]
[1. "History of the Chicago Fire," pp. 85, 86.]
{p. 422}
Hon. William B. Ogden wrote at the time: