Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES. 43;

as the fossils imbedded in this formation speak to us of tropical and sub-tropical climates having prevailed in Central Europe.” *

It was precisely during the age when a warm climate prevailed in Spitzbergen and North Greenland that these erratics were dropped down on the plains of Italy !

And, strange to say, just as we have found the Driftdeposits of Europe and America unfossiliferous,—that is to say, containing no traces of animal or vegetable life,—so these strange stone and clay deposits of other and more ancient ages were in like manner unfossiliferous.t

In the “flysch” of the Eocene of the Alps, few or no fossils have been found. In the conglomerates of Turin, belonging to the Upper Miocene period, not a single organic remain has been found.

What conclusion is forced upon us?

That, written in the rocky pages of the great volume of the planet, are the records of repeated visitations from the comets which then rushed through the heavens.

No trace is left of their destructive powers, save the huge, unstratified, unfossiliferous deposits of clay and stones and bowlders, locked away between great layers of the sedimentary rocks.

Can it be that there wanders through immeasurable space, upon an orbit of such size that millions of years are required to complete it, some monstrous luminary, so yast that when it returns to us it fills a large part of the orbit which the earth deseribes around the sun, and showers down upon us deluges of débris, while it fills the world with flame? And are these recurring strata of stones and clay and bowlders, written upon these widely separated pages of the geologic volume, the record of its oft and regularly recurring visitations ?

* “The Great Ice Age,” p. 480. + Ibid., p. 481.