RAGNAROK: THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL. BY IGNATIUS DONNELLY

[Lisa Wolfe]

If the Arctic ice-sheet does not create such a clay now, why did it create it centuries ago on the plains of England or Illinois?

The other day I traveled from Minnesota to Cape May, on the shore of the Atlantic, a distance of about fifteen hundred miles. At scarcely any point was I out of sight of the red clay and gravel of the Drift: it loomed up amid the beach-sands of New Jersey; it was laid bare by railroad-cuts in the plains of New York and Pennsylvania; it covered the highest tops of the Alleghanies at Altoona; the farmers of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin were raising crops upon it; it was everywhere. If one had laid down a handful of the Wisconsin Drift alongside of a handful of the New Jersey deposit, he could scarcely have perceived any difference between them.

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Here, then, is a geological formation, almost identical in character, fifteen hundred miles long from east to west, and reaching through the whole length of North and South America, from the Arctic Circle to Patagonia.

Did ice grind this out of the granite?

Where did it get the granite? The granite reaches the surface only in limited areas; as a rule, it is buried many miles in depth under the sedimentary rocks.

How did the ice pick out its materials so as to grind nothing but granite?

This deposit overlies limestone and sandstone. The ice-sheet rested upon them. Why were they not ground up with the granite? Did the ice intelligently pick out a particular kind of rock, and that the hardest of them all?

But here is another marvel--this clay is red. The red is due to the grinding up of mica and hornblende. Granite is composed of quartz, feldspar, and mica. In syenitic granite the materials are quartz, feldspar, and hornblende. Mica and hornblende contain considerable oxide of iron, while feldspar has none. When mica and hornblende are ground up, the result is blue or red clays, as the oxidation of the iron turns the clay red; while the clay made of feldspar is light yellow or white.

Now, then, not only did the ice-sheet select for grinding the granite rocks, and refuse to touch the others, but it put the granite itself through some mysterious process by which it separated the feldspar from the mica and hornblende, and manufactured a white or yellow clay out of the one, which it deposited in great sheets by itself, as west of the Mississippi; while it ground up the mica and hornblende and made blue or red clays, which it laid down elsewhere, as the red clays are spread over that great stretch of fifteen hundred miles to which I have referred.

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[Lisa Wolfe]

Can any one suppose that ice could so discriminate?

And if it by any means effected this separation of the particles of granite, indissolubly knit together, how could it perpetuate that separation while moving over the land, crushing all beneath and before it, and leave it on the face of the earth free from commixture with the surface rocks?

Again: the ice-sheets which now exist in the remote north do not move with a constant and regular motion southward, grinding up the rocks as they go. A recent writer, describing the appearance of things in Greenland, says:

"The coasts are deeply indented with numerous bays and fiords or firths, which, when traced inland, are almost invariably found to terminate against glaciers. Thick ice frequently appears, too, crowning the exposed sea-cliffs, from the edges of which it droops in thick, tongue-like, and stalactitic projections, until its own weight forces it to break away and topple down the precipices into the sea."[1]

This does not represent an ice-sheet moving down continuously from the high grounds and tearing up the rocks. It rather breaks off like great icicles from the caves of a house.

Again: the ice-sheets to-day do not striate or groove the rocks over which they move.

[Lisa Wolfe]

Mr. Campbell, author of two works in defense of the iceberg theory--"Fire and Frost," and "A Short American Tramp"--went, in 1864, to the coasts of Labrador, the Strait of Belle Isle, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, for the express purpose of witnessing the effects of icebergs, and testing the theory he had formed. On the coast of Labrador he reports that at Hanly Harbor, where

[1. "Popular Science Monthly," April, 1874, p. 646.]

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the whole strait is blocked up with ice each winter, and the great mass swung bodily up and down, "grating along the bottom at all depths," he "found the rocks ground smooth, but not striated."[1] At Cape Charles and Battle Harbor, he reports, "the rocks at the water-line are not striated."[2] At St. Francis Harbor, "the water-line is much rubbed smooth, but not striated."[3] At Sea Islands, he says, "No striæ are to be seen at the land-wash in these sounds or on open sea-coasts near the present waterline."[4]

Again: if these drift-deposits, these vast accumulations of sand, clay, gravel, and bowlders, were caused by a great continental ice-sheet scraping and tearing the rocks on which it rested, and constantly moving toward the sun, then not only would we find, as I have suggested in the case of glaciers, the accumulated masses of rubbish piled up in great windrows or ridges along the lines where the face of the ice-sheet melted, but we would naturally expect that the farther north we went the less we would find of these materials; in other words, that the ice, advancing southwardly, would sweep the north clear of débris to pile it up in the more southern regions. But this is far from being the case. On the contrary, the great masses of the Drift extend as far north as the land itself. In the remote, barren grounds of North America, we are told by various travelers who have visited those regions, "sand-hills and erratics appear to be as common as in the countries farther south."[5] Captain Bach tells us[6] that he saw great chains of sand-hills, stretching

[1. "A Short American Tramp," pp. 68, 107.

2. Ibid., p. 68.

3. Ibid., p. 72.

4. Ibid., p. 76.

5. "The Great Ice Age," p. 391.

6. "Narrative of Arctic Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great Fish River," pp. 140, 346.]

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[Lisa Wolfe]

away from each side of the valley of the Great Fish River, in north latitude 66°, of great height, and crowned with gigantic bowlders.

Why did not the advancing ice-sheet drive these deposits southward over the plains of the United States? Can we conceive of a force that was powerful enough to grind up the solid rocks, and yet was not able to remove its own débris?

But there is still another reason which ought to satisfy us, once for all, that the drift-deposits were not due to the pressure of a great continental ice-sheet. It is this:

If the presence of the Drift proves that the country in which it is found was once covered with a body of ice thick and heavy enough by its pressure and weight to grind up the surface-rocks into clay, sand, gravel, and bowlders, then the tropical regions of the world must have been covered with such a great ice-sheet, upon the very equator; for Agassiz found in Brazil a vast sheet of "ferruginous clay with pebbles," which covers the whole country, "a sheet of drift," says Agassiz, "consisting of the same homogeneous, unstratified paste, and containing loose materials of all sorts and sizes," deep red in color, and distributed, as in the north, in uneven hills, while sometimes it is reduced to a thin deposit. It is recent in time, although overlying rocks ancient geologically. Agassiz had no doubt whatever that it was of glacial origin.

Professor Hartt, who accompanied Professor Agassiz in his South American travels, and published a valuable work called "The Geology of Brazil," describes drift-deposits as covering the province of Pará, Brazil, upon the equator itself. The whole valley of the Amazon is covered with stratified and unstratified and unfossiliferous

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[Lisa Wolfe]

Drift,[1] and also with a peculiar drift-clay (argile plastique bigarrée), plastic and streaked.

Professor Hartt gives a cut from which I copy the following representation of drift-clay and pebbles overlying a gneiss hillock of the Serra do Mar, Brazil:

[Lisa Wolfe]

DRIFT-DEPOSITS IN THE TROPICS.

a, drift-clay; f f, angular fragments of quartz; c. sheet of pebbles; d d, gneiss in situ; g g, quartz and granite veins traversing the gneiss.

But here is the dilemma to which the glacialists are reduced: If an ice-sheet a mile in thickness, or even one hundred feet in thickness, was necessary to produce the Drift, and if it covered the equatorial regions of Brazil, then there is no reason why the same climatic conditions should not have produced the same results in Africa and Asia; and the result would be that the entire globe, from pole to pole, must have rolled for days, years, or centuries, wrapped in a continuous easing, mantle, or shroud of ice, under which all vegetable and animal life must have utterly perished.

[1. "Geology of Brazil," p. 488.]

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[Lisa Wolfe]

And we are not without evidences that the drift-deposits are found in Africa. We know that they extend in Europe to the Mediterranean. The "Journal of the Geographical Society" (British) has a paper by George Man, F. G. S., on the geology of Morocco, in which he says:

"Glacial moraines may be seen on this range nearly eight thousand feet above the sea, forming gigantic ridges and mounds of porphyritic blocks, in some places damming up the ravines, and at the foot of Atlas are enormous mounds of bowlders."

These mounds oftentimes rise two thousand feet above the level of the plain, and, according to Mr. Man, were produced by glaciers.

We shall see, hereafter, that the sands bordering Egypt belong to the Drift age. The diamond-bearing gravels of South Africa extend to within twenty-two degrees of the equator.

It is even a question whether that great desolate land, the Desert of Sahara, covering a third of the Continent of Africa, is not the direct result of this signal catastrophe. Henry W. Haynes tells us that drift-deposits are found in the Desert of Sahara, and that--

[Lisa Wolfe]

"In the bottoms of the dry ravines, or wadys, which pierce the hills that bound the valley of the Nile, I have found numerous specimens of flint axes of the type of St. Acheul, which have been adjudged to be true palæolithic implements by some of the most eminent cultivators of prehistoric science."[1]

The sand and gravel of Sahara are underlaid by a deposit of clay.

Bayard Taylor describes in the center of Africa

[1. "The Palæolithic Implements of the Valley of the Delaware," Cambridge, 1881.]

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great plains of coarse gravel, dotted with gray granite bowlders.[1]

In the United States Professor Winchell shows that the drift-deposits extend to the Gulf of Mexico. At Jackson, in Southern Alabama, be found deposits of pebbles one hundred feet in thickness.[2]

If there are no drift-deposits except where the great ice-sheet ground them out of the rocks, then a shroud of death once wrapped the entire globe, and all life ceased.

But we know that all life,--vegetable, animal, and human,--is derived from pre-glacial sources; therefore animal, vegetable, and human life did not perish in the Drift age; therefore an ice-sheet did not wrap the world in its death-pall; therefore the drift-deposits of the tropics were not due to an ice-sheet; therefore the drift-deposits of the rest of the world were not due to ice-sheets: therefore we must look elsewhere for their origin.

[Lisa Wolfe]

There is no escaping these conclusions. Agassiz himself says, describing the Glacial age:

"All the springs were dried up; the rivers ceased to flow. To the movements of a numerous and animated creation succeeded the silence of death."

If the verdure was covered with ice a mile in thickness, all animals that lived on vegetation of any kind must have perished; consequently, all carnivores which lived on these must have ceased to exist; and man himself, without animal or vegetable food, must have disappeared for ever.

A writer, describing Greenland wrapped in such an ice-sheet, says

[1. "Travels in Africa," p. 188.

2. "Sketches of Creation," pp. 222, 223.]

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[Lisa Wolfe]

"The whole interior seems to be buried beneath a great depth of snow and ice, which loads up the valleys and wraps over the hills. The scene opening to view in the interior is desolate in the extreme--nothing but one dead, dreary expanse of white, so far as the eye can reach--no living creature frequents this wilderness--neither bird, beast, nor insect. The silence, deep as death, is broken only when the roaring storm arises to sweep before it the pitiless, blinding snow."[1]

And yet the glacialists would have us believe that Brazil and Africa, and the whole globe, were once wrapped in such a shroud of death!

Here, then, in conclusion, are the evidences that the deposits of the Drift are not due to continental ice-sheets:

I. The present ice-sheets of the remote north create no such deposits and make no such markings.

II. A vast continental elevation of land-surfaces at the north was necessary for the ice to slide down, and this did not exist.

III. The ice-sheet, if it made the Drift markings, must have scored the rocks going up-hill, while it did not score them going down-hill.

IV. If the cold formed the ice and the ice formed the Drift, why is there no Drift in the coldest regions of the earth, where there must have been ice?

V. Continental ice-belts, reaching to 40° of latitude, would have exterminated all tropical vegetation. It was not exterminated, therefore such ice-sheets could not have existed.

VI. The Drift is found in the equatorial regions of the world. If it was produced by an ice-sheet in those regions, all pre-glacial forms of life must have perished; but they did not perish; therefore the ice-sheet could not

[1. "Popular Science Monthly," April, 1874, p. 646.]

[Lisa Wolfe]

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have covered these regions, and could not have produced the drift-deposits there found.

In brief, the Drift is not found where ice must have been, and is found where ice could not have been; the conclusion, therefore, is irresistible that the Drift is not due to ice.

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[Lisa Wolfe]

CHAPTER VII.
THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE.

IN the first place, the Drift fell upon a fair and lovely world, a world far better adapted to give happiness to its inhabitants than this storm-tossed planet on which we now live, with its endless battle between heat and cold, between sun and ice.

The pre-glacial world was a garden, a paradise; not excessively warm at the equator, and yet with so mild and equable a climate that the plants we now call tropical flourished within the present Arctic Circle. If some future daring navigator reaches the north pole and finds solid land there, he will probably discover in the rocks at his feet the fossil remains of the oranges and bananas of the pre-glacial age.

That the reader may not think this an extravagant statement, let me cite a few authorities.

A recent writer says:

"This was, indeed, for America, the golden age of animals and plants, and in all respects but one--the absence of man--the country was more interesting and picturesque than now. We must imagine, therefore, that the hills and valleys about the present site of New York were covered with noble trees, and a dense undergrowth of species, for the most part different from those now living there; and that these were the homes and feeding-grounds of many kinds of quadrupeds and birds, which have long since become extinct. The broad plain which sloped gently seaward from the highlands must have been

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covered with a sub-tropical forest of-giant trees and tangled vines teeming with animal life. This state of things doubtless continued through many thousands of years, but ultimately a change came over the fair face of Nature more complete and terrible than we have language to describe."[1]

[Lisa Wolfe]

Another says:

"At the close of the Tertiary age, which ends the long series of geological epochs previous to the Quaternary, the landscape of Europe had, in the main, assumed its modern appearance. The middle era of this age--the Miocene--was characterized by tropical plants, a varied and imposing fauna, and a genial climate, so extended as to nourish forests of beeches, maples, walnuts, poplars, and magnolias in Greenland and Spitzbergen, while an exotic vegetation hid the exuberant valleys of England."[2]

Dr. Dawson says:

"This delightful climate was not confined to the present temperate or tropical regions. It extended to the very shores of the Arctic Sea. In North Greenland, at Atane-Kerdluk, in latitude 70° north, at an elevation of more than a thousand feet above the sea, were found the remains of beeches, oaks, pines, poplars, maples, walnuts, magnolias, limes, and vines. The remains of similar plants were found in Spitzbergen, in latitude 78° 56'."[3]

Dr. Dawson continues:

"Was the Miocene period on the whole a better age of the world than that in which we live? In some respects it was. Obviously, there was in the northern hemisphere a vast surface of land under a mild and equable climate, and clothed with a rich and varied vegetation. Had we lived in the Miocene we might have sat under our own vine and fig-tree equally in Greenland and Spitzbergen and in those more southern climes to which this

[1. "Popular Science Monthly," October, 1878, p. 648.

2. L. P. Gratacap, in "American Antiquarian," July, 1881, p. 280.

3. Dawson, "Earth and Man," p. 261.]

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[Lisa Wolfe]

privilege is now restricted. . . . Some reasons have been adduced for the belief that in the Miocene and Eocene there were intervals of cold climate; but the evidence of this may be merely local and exceptional, and does not interfere with the broad characteristics of the age."[1]

Sir Edward Belcher brought away from the dreary shores of Wellington Channel (latitude 75° 32' north) portions of a tree which there can be no doubt whatever had actually grown where be found it. The roots were in place, in a frozen mass of earth, the stump standing upright where it was probably overtaken by the great winter.[2] Trees have been found, in situ, on Prince Patrick's Island, in latitude 76° 12' north, four feet in circumference. They were so old that the wood had lost its combustible quality, and refused to burn. Mr. Geikie thinks that it is possible these trees were pre-glacial, and belonged to the Miocene age. They may have been the remnants of the great forests which clothed that far northern region when the so-called glacial age came on and brought the Drift.

We shall see hereafter that man, possibly civilized man, dwelt in this fair and glorious world--this world that knew no frost, no cold, no ice, no snow; that he had dwelt in it for thousands of years; that he witnessed the appalling and sudden calamity which fell upon it; and that he has preserved the memory of this catastrophe to the present day, in a multitude of myths and legends scattered all over the face of the habitable earth.

But was it sudden? Was it a catastrophe?

Again I call the witnesses to the stand, for I ask you, good reader, to accept nothing that is not proved.

In the first place, was it sudden?

[1. "Earth and Man," p. 264.

2. "The Last of the Arctic Voyages," vol. i, p. 380.]

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[Lisa Wolfe]

One writer says:

"The glacial action, in the opinion of the land-glacialists, was limited to a definite period, and operated simultaneously over a vast area."[1]

And again:

"The drift was accumulated where it is by some violent action."[2]

Louis Figuier says:

"The two cataclysms of which we have spoken surprised Europe at the moment of the development of an important creation. The whole scope of animated nature, the evolution of animals, was suddenly arrested in that part of our hemisphere over which these gigantic convulsions spread, followed by the brief but sudden submersion of entire continents. Organic life had scarcely recovered from the violent shock, when a second, and perhaps severer blow assailed it. The northern and central parts of Europe, the vast countries which extend from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and the Danube, were visited by a period of sudden and severe cold; the temperature of the polar regions seized them. The plains of Europe, but now ornamented by the luxurious vegetation developed by the heat of a burning climate, the boundless pastures on which herds of great elephants, the active horse, the robust hippopotamus, and great carnivorous animals grazed and roamed, became covered with a mantle of ice and snow."[3]