Chapter Ii. The Origin Of The Drift Not Known : CHAPTER II. THE ORIGIN OF THE DRIFT NOT KNOWN. WHILE several different origins have been assigned for the phenomena known as "the Drift," and while one or two of these have been widely accepted and taught in our schools as established truths, yet it is not too much to say that no one of them meets...
Chapter Ii. The Scene Of Man's Survival : CHAPTER II. THE SCENE OF MAN'S SURVIVAL LET us pass to another speculation: The reader is not constrained to accept my conclusions. They will, I trust, provoke further discussion, which may tend to prove or disprove them. But I think I can see that many of these legends point to an island, east...
Chapter V. Was It Caused : CHAPTER V. WAS IT CAUSED BY GLACIERS? WHAT is a glacier? It is a river of ice, crowded by the weight of mountain-ice down into some valley, along which it descends by a slow, almost imperceptible motion, due to a power of the ice, under the force of gravity, to rearrange its molecules. It is fed by...
Chapter V. The Conflagration Of Phaeton : CHAPTER V. THE CONFLAGRATION OF PHATON Now let us turn to the mythology of the Latins, as preserved in the pages of Ovid, one of the greatest of the poets of ancient Rome. Here we have the burning of the world involved in the myth of Phaton, son of Ph
Chapter Iii. The Bridge : CHAPTER III. THE BRIDGE. THE deep-sea soundings, made of late years in the Atlantic, reveal the fact that the Azores are the mountaintops of a colossal mass of sunken land; and that from this center one great ridge runs southward for some distance, and then, bifurcating, sends out one limb...
Title Page : RAGNAROK: THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL. BY IGNATIUS DONNELLY, AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD." "I am not inclined to conclude that man had no existence at all before the epoch of the great revolutions of the earth. He might have inhabited certain districts of no great extent, whence...
Chapter Viii. Great Heat A Prerequisite : CHAPTER VIII. GREAT HEAT A PREREQUISITE. Now, it will be observed that the principal theories assigned for the Drift go upon the hypothesis that it was produced by extraordinary masses of ice--ice as icebergs, ice as glaciers, or ice in continental sheets. The scientists admit that immediately...
Chapter V. Biela's Comet : CHAPTER V. BIELA'S COMET. HUMBOLDT Says: "It is probable that the vapor of the tails of comets mingled with our atmosphere in the years 1819 and 1823." There is reason to believe that the present generation has passed through the gaseous prolongation of a comet's tail, and that hundreds of hum...
Part Iii. The Legends. Chapter I. The Nature : PART III THE LEGENDS CHAPTER I. THE NATURE OF MYTHS. IN a primitive people the mind of one generation precisely repeats the minds of all former generations; the construction of the intellectual nature varies no more, from age to age, than the form of the body or the color of the skin;...
Part I. The Drift. Chapter I. The Characteristics : RAGNAROK: THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL. PART I. The Drift CHAPTER I. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DRIFT. READER,--Let us reason together:-- What do we dwell on? The earth. What part of the earth? The latest formations, of course. We live upon the top of a mighty series of stratified rocks, laid down...
Chapter Iii. Could A Comet Strike The Earth : CHAPTER III. COULD A COMET STRIKE THE EARTH? READER, the evidence I am about to present will satisfy you, not only that a comet might have struck the earth in the remote past, but, that the marvel is that the earth escapes collision for a single century, I had almost said for a single year. How...
List Of Illustrations : LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE DRIFT--Frontispiece. TILL OVERLAID WITH BOWLDER-CLAY 5 SCRATCHED STONE, FROM THE TILL 6 RIVER ISSUING FROM A SWISS GLACIER 19 TERMINAL MORAINE 20 GLACIER-FURROWS AND SCRATCHES AT STONY POINT, LAKE ERIE 26 DRIFT-DEPOSITS IN THE TROPICS 38...
Chapter Iv. Ragnarok : CHAPTER IV. RAGNAROK THERE is in the legends of the Scandinavians a marvelous record of the coming of the Comet. It has been repeated generation after generation, translated into all languages, commented on, criticised, but never understood. It has been regarded as a wild, unmeaning rhapsody...
Chapter X. The Fall Of The Clay And Gravel : CHAPTER X. THE FALL OF THE CLAY AND GRAVEL. I TRUST that the reader, who has followed me thus far in this argument, is satisfied that the legends of mankind point unmistakably to the fact that the earth, in some remote age--before the Polynesians, Red-men, Europeans, and Asiatics had separated...
Chapter Vii. The Earth Struck : CHAPTER VII. THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES. IF the reader is satisfied, from my reasoning and the facts I have adduced, that the so-called Glacial Age really represents a collision of the earth with one of these wandering luminaries of space, the question can not but occur to him, Was this...
Chapter Xii. The Book Of Job : CHAPTER XII. THE BOOK OF JOB. WE are told in the Bible (Job, i, 16)-- "While he [Job] was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, "The fire of God is fallen from heaven" and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and "consumed them", and I only am escaped alone to tell thee."...
Chapter Iv. Objections Considered : CHAPTER IV. OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. LET ME consider, briefly, those objections to my theory which have probably presented themsevles {"sic"} to some of my readers. First, it may be said: "We don't understand you. You argue that there could not have been such an ice-age as the glacialists affirm...
Chapter Iv. Was It Caused : CHAPTER IV. WAS IT CAUSED BY ICEBERGS? WE come now to a much more reasonable hypothesis, and one not without numerous advocates even to this day, to wit: that the drift-deposits were caused by icebergs floating down in deep water over the sunken land, loaded with "dbris" from the Arctic shores...
Chapter Vi. Was It Caused : CHAPTER VI. WAS IT CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS? WE, come now to the theory which is at present most generally accepted: It being apparent that glaciers were not adequate to produce the results which we find, the glacialists have fallen back upon an extraordinary hypothesis--to wit, th...
Chapter Vi. The Universal Belief Of Mankind : CHAPTER VI. THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF OF MANKIND. THERE are some thoughts and opinions which we seem to take by inheritance; we imbibe them with our mothers' milk; they are in our blood; they are received insensibly in childhood. We have seen the folk-lore of the nations, passing through the endless...
Untitled : RAGNAROK: THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL. BY IGNATIUS DONNELLY, [1883] This companion book to Donnelly's Atlantis, the Antediluvian World, published one year later, is less well known today. Ragnarok is out of print except through specialty print-on-demand publishers, while Atlantis, the Antediluvi...
Part Ii. The Comet. Chapter I. A Comet Caused : PART II. THE COMET. CHAPTER I. A COMET CAUSED THE DRIFT. Now, good reader, we have reasoned together up to this point. To be sure, I have done most of the talking, while you have indulged in what the Rev. Sydney Smith called, speaking of Lord Macaulay, "brilliant flashes of silence." But I trust we...
Chapter Iv. The Consequences To The Earth : CHAPTER IV. THE CONSEQUENCES TO THE EARTH. IN this chapter I shall try to show what effect the contact of a comet must have had upon the earth and its inhabitants. I shall ask the reader to follow the argument closely first, that he may see whether any part of the theory is inconsistent with...
Chapter Ii. Did Man Exist Before The Drift : CHAPTER II. DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT? FIRST, let us ask ourselves this question, Did man exist before the Drift? If he did, he must have survived it; and he could hardly have passed through it without some remembrance of such a terrible event surviving in the traditions of the race. If he did...
Chapter Xiii. Genesis Read : CHAPTER XIII. GENESIS READ BY THE LIGHT OF THE COMET. AND now, gathering into our hands all the light afforded by the foregoing facts and legends, let us address ourselves to this question: How far can the opening chapters of the book of Genesis be interpreted to conform to the theory...
Chapter Vii. Legends Of The Cave Life : CHAPTER VII. LEGENDS OF THE CAVE-LIFE. I HAVE shown that man could only have escaped the fire, the poisonous gases, and the falling stones and clay-dust, by taking refuge in the water or in the deep caves of the earth. And hence everywhere in the ancient legends we find the races claiming that they...
Chapter Xi. The Arabian Myths : CHAPTER XI. THE ARABIAN MYTHS. AND when we turn to the Arabian tales, we not only see, by their identity with the Hindoo and Slavonic legends, that they are of great antiquity, dating back to the time when these widely diverse races, Aryan and Semitic, were one, but we find in them many allusions...
Chapter Iii. Legends Of The Coming Of The Comet : CHAPTER III. LEGENDS OF THE COMING OF THE COMET. WE turn now to the legends of mankind. I shall try to divide them, so as to represent, in their order, the several stages of the great event. This, of course, will be difficult to do, for the same legend may detail several different parts of the same...
Chapter Viii. Legends Of The Age Of Darkness : CHAPTER VIII. LEGENDS OF THE AGE OF DARKNESS. ALL the cosmogonies begin with an Age of Darkness; a damp, cold, rainy, dismal time. Hesiod tells us, speaking of the beginning of things "In truth, then, "foremost sprung Chaos".... But from Chaos were born "Erebus and black Night;" and from Night...
Chapter Vi. Other Legends Of The Conflagration : CHAPTER VI. OTHER LEGENDS OF THE CONFLAGRATION. THE first of these, and the most remarkable of all, is the legend of one of the Central American nations, preserved not by tradition alone, but committed to writing at some time in the remote past. In the "Codex Chimalpopoca," one of the sacred books...
Chapter Ix. The Triumph Of The Sun : CHAPTER IX. THE TRIUMPH OF THE SUN. A GREAT solar-myth underlies all the ancient mythologies. It commemorates the death and resurrection of the sun. It signifies the destruction of the light by the clouds, the darkness, and the eventual return of the great luminary of the world. The Syrian Adonis...
Chapter Viii. The After Word : CHAPTER VIII. THE AFTER-WORD. WHEN that magnificent genius, Francis Bacon, sent forth one of his great works to the world, he wrote this prayer: "Thou, O Father, who gavest the visible light as the first-born of thy creatures, and didst pour into man the intellectual light as the top...
Chapter Vii. The Drift A Gigantic Catastrophe : CHAPTER VII. THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE. IN the first place, the Drift fell upon a fair and lovely world, a world far better adapted to give happiness to its inhabitants than this storm-tossed planet on which we now live, with its endless battle between heat and cold, between sun and ice...
Chapter Iii. The Action Of Waves : CHAPTER III. THE ACTION OF WAVES. WHEN men began, for the first time, to study the drift deposits, they believed that they found in them the results of the Noachic Deluge; and hence the Drift was called the Diluvium, and the period of time in which it was laid down was entitled the Diluvial age. It...
Part Iv. Conclusions. Chapter I. Was Pre : PART IV. (CONCLUSIONS) CHAPTER I. WAS PRE-GLACIAL MAN CIVILIZED? WE come now to another and very interesting question: In what stage of development was mankind when the Drift fell upon the earth? It is, of course, difficult to attain to certainties in the consideration of an age so remote as this...
Chapter Ii. What Is A Comet : CHAPTER II. WHAT IS A COMET? IN the first place, are comets composed of solid, liquid, or gaseous substances? Are they something, or the next thing to nothing? It has been supposed by some that they are made of the most attenuated gases, so imponderable that if the earth were to pass through one...
