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 north was filled with thick, heavy ice and rime,’ (snow,) ’and everywhere within were drizzling gusts and rain.  But the south part of Ginungagap was lighted up by the glowing sparks that 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