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fell upon Asia, races may have survived there; the negro may have dwelt in India at that time; some of the strange Hill-tribes of China and India may have had no connection with Lif and Lifthraser.

But if we will suppose that the scene of man’s survival was in that Atlantic island, Atlantis, then this would follow: 

The remnant of mankind, whether they were a single couple, like Lif and Lifthraser; or a group of men and women, like Job and his companions; or a numerous party, like that referred to in the Navajo and Aztec legends, in any event, they would not and could not stay long in the cave.  The distribution of the Drift shows that it fell within twelve hours; but there were probably several days thereafter during which the face of the earth was swept by horrible cyclones, born of the dreadful heat.  As soon, however, as they could safely do so, the remnant of the people must have left the cave; the limited nature of their food-supplies would probably drive them out.  Once outside, their condition was pitiable indeed.  First, they encountered the great heat; the cooling of the atmosphere had not yet begun; water was a pressing want.  Hence we read in the legends of Mimer’s well, where Odin pawned his eye for a drink.  And we are told, in an American legend, of a party who traveled far to find the life-giving well, and found the possessor sitting over it to hide it.  It was during this period that the legends originated which refer to the capture of the cows and their recovery by demi-gods, Hercules or Rama.

Then the race began to wander.  The world was a place of stones.  Hunger drove them on.  Then came the clouds, the rains, the floods, the snows, the darkness; and still the people wandered.  The receded ocean laid bare the great ridges, if they had sunk in the catastrophe,

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and the race gradually spread to Europe, Africa, and America.

“But,” says one, “how long did all this take?

Who shall say?  It may have been days, weeks, months, years, centuries.  The Toltec legends say that their ancestors wandered for more than a hundred years in the darkness.

The torrent-torn face of the earth; the vast rearrangement of the Drift materials by rivers, compared with which our own rivers are rills; the vast continental regions which were evidently flooded, all testify to an extraordinary amount of moisture first raised up from the seas and then cast down on the lands.  Given heat enough to raise this mass, given the cold caused by its evaporation, given the time necessary for the great battle between this heat and this condensation, given the time to restore this body of water to the ocean, not once but many times,—­for, along the southern border of the floods, where Muspelheim. and Niflheim met, the heat must have sucked up the water as fast almost as it fell, to fall again, and again to be lifted up, until the heat-area was driven back and water fell, at last, everywhere on the earth’s face, and the extraordinary evaporation ceased,—­this was a gigantic, long-continued battle.