The seeds and roots of trees and grasses, uncovered by the rushing torrents, and catching the increasing

{p. 111}

warmth, begin to put forth green leaves.  The sad and parti-colored earth, covered with white, red, or blue clays and gravels, once more, wears a fringe of green.

The light increases.  The warmth lifts up part of the water already cast down, and the outflow of the steaming ice-fields, and pours it down again in prodigious floods.  It is an age of storms.

The people who have escaped gather together. They know the sun is coming back.  They know this desolation is to pass away.  They build great fires and make human sacrifices to bring back the sun.  They point and guess where he will appear; for they have lost all knowledge of the cardinal points.  And all this is told in the legends.

At last the great, the godlike, the resplendent luminary breaks through the clouds and looks again upon the wrecked earth.

Oh, what joy, beyond all words, comes upon those who see him!  They fall upon their faces.  They worship him whom the dread events have taught to recognize as the great god of life and light.  They burn or cast down their animal gods of the pre-glacial time, and then begins that world-wide worship of the sun which has continued down to our own times.

And all this, too, we shall find told in the legends.

And from that day to this we live under the influence of the effects produced by the comet.  The mild, eternal summer of the Tertiary age is gone.  The battle between the sun and the ice-sheets continues.  Every north wind brings us the breath of the snow; every south wind is part of the sun’s contribution to undo the comet’s work.  A continual amelioration of climate has been going on since the Glacial age; and, if no new catastrophe falls on the earth, our remote posterity will yet see the last snow-bank

{p. 112}

of Greenland melted, and the climate of the Eocene reestablished in Spitzbergen.

“It has been suggested that the warmth of the Tertiary climate was simply the effect of the residual heat of a globe cooling from incandescence, but many facts disprove this.  For example, the fossil plants found in our Lower Cretaceous rocks in Central North America indicate a temperate climate in latitude 35° to 40° in the Cretaceous age.  The coal-flora, too, and the beds of coal, indicate a moist, equable, and warm but not hot climate in the Carboniferous age, millions of years before the Tertiary, and three thousand miles farther south than localities where magnolias, tulip-trees, and deciduous cypresses, grew in the latter age.  Some learned and cautious geologists even assert that there have been several Ice periods, one as far back as the Devonian."[1]