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 Drift-deposits 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.[2]

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 vast that when it returns to us it fills a large part of the orbit which the earth describes 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?

[1.  “The Great Ice Age,” p. 480.

2.  Ibid., p. 481.]

{p. 436}

Who shall say?  Science will yet compare minutely the composition of these different conglomerates.  No secret can escape discovery when the light of a world’s intelligence is brought to bear upon it.

And even here we stumble over a still more tremendous fact: 

It has been supposed that the primeval granite was the molten crust of the original glowing ball of the earth, when it first hardened as it cooled.

But, lo! the microscope, (so Professor Whichell tells us,) reveals that this very granite, this foundation of all our rocks, this ancient globe-crust, is itself made up of sedimentary rocks, which were melted, fused, and run together in some awful conflagration which wiped out all life on the planet.

Beyond the granite, then, there were seas and shores, winds and rains, rivers and sediment carried into the waters to form the rocks melted up in this granite; there were countless ages; possibly there were animals and man; but all melted and consumed together.  Was this, too, the result of a comet visitation?

Who shall tell the age of this old earth?  Who shall count the ebbs and flows of eternity?  Who shall say how often this planet has been developed up to the highest forms of life, and how often all this has been obliterated in universal fire?