Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES. 433

It was accompanied or followed, as in the Drift Age, by tremendous floods of water; the evaporated seas returned to the earth in wasting storms :

“The waters commenced the work of denudation, which has been continued to the present time.” *

Is not all this a striking confirmation of my theory ?

Here we find that, long before the age of man, a fearful catastrophe happened to the earth. Its rocks were melted —not merely decomposed, as in the Drift Age,—but actually melted and metamorphosed ; the heat, as in the Drift Age, sucked up the waters of the seas, to cast them down again in great floods ; if wiped out nearly all the life of the planet, even as the Drift Age exterminated the great mammals ; whatever drift then fell probably melted with the burning rocks.

Here are phenomena which no ice-sheet, though it were a thousand miles thick, can explain ; here is heat, not ice; combustion, not cold; and yet all these phenomena are but the results which we have seen would naturally follow the contact of the earth with a comet.

But while, in this particular case, the size of the comet, or its more fiery nature, melted the surface of the globe, and changed the very texture of the solid rocks, we find in the geological record the evidences of repeated visitations when Drift was thrown upon the earth in great quantities ; but the heat, as in the last Drift Age, was not great enough to consume all things.

In the Cambrian formation, conglomerates are found, combinations of stones and hardened clay, very much like the true “ till.”

In the Lower Silurian of the south of Scotland, large blocks and bowlders (from one foot to five feet in diam-

* Dana’s “ Text-Book,” p. 156.