“The thing that’s heavy in itself
     Upon enforcement flies with greatest speed.”

And it would seem as if in time this trailing material of the comet falls so far behind that it loses its grip, and is lost; hence the showers of meteoroids.

Another says: 

“I can not accept your theory as to the glacial clays they were certainly deposited in water, formed like silt, washed down from the adjacent continents.”

I answer they were not, because:—­

1.  If laid down in water, they would be stratified; but they are not.

2.  If laid down in water, they would be full of the fossils of the water, fresh-water shells, sea-shells, bones of fish, reptiles, whales, seals, etc.; but they are non-fossiliferous.

3.  If laid down in water, they would not be made exclusively from granite.  Where are the continents to be found which are composed of granite and nothing but granite?

4.  Where were the continents, of any kind, from which these washings came?  They must have reached from pole to pole, and filled the whole Atlantic Ocean.  And how could the washings of rivers have made this uniform sheet, reaching over the whole length and half the breadth of this continent?

5.  If these clays were made from land-washings, how comes it that in some places they are red, in others blue, in others yellow?  In Western Minnesota you penetrate

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through twenty feet of yellow clay until you reach a thin layer of gravel, about an inch thick, and then pass at once, without any gradual transition, into a bed of blue clay fifty feet thick; and under this, again, you reach gravel.  What separated these various deposits?  The glacialists answer us that the yellow clay was deposited in fresh water, and the blue clay in salt water, and hence the difference in the color.  But how did the water change instantly from salt to fresh?  Why was there no interval of brackish water, during which the blue and yellow clays would have gradually shaded into each other?  The transition from the yellow clay to the blue is as immediate and marked as if you were to lay a piece of yellow cloth across a piece of blue cloth.  You can not take the salt out of a vast ocean, big enough to cover half a continent, in a day, a month, a year, or a century.  And where were the bowl-like ridges of land that inclosed the continent, and kept out the salt water during the ages that elapsed while the yellow clay was being laid down in fresh water?  And, above all, why are no such clays, blue, yellow, or red, now being formed anywhere on earth, under sheet-ice, glaciers, icebergs, or anything else?  And how about the people who built cisterns, and used coins and iron implements before this silt was accumulated in the seas, a million years ago, for it must have taken that long to create these vast deposits if they were deposited as silt in the bottom of seas and lakes.