Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel eBook

Ignatius Donnelly
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 440 pages of information about Ragnarok .

Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel eBook

Ignatius Donnelly
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 440 pages of information about Ragnarok .

[1.  “Geology of Brazil,” p. 488.]

{p. 39}

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

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

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

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

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

“In the bottoms of the dry ravines, or wadys, which pierce the hills that bound the valley of the Nile, I have found numerous specimens of flint axes of the type of St. Acheul, which have been adjudged to be true 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.]

{p. 40}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.