Audiobook in mp3 of,
EARTH IN UPHEAVAL, of

Immanuel Velikovsky, published 1955.

Booktext to fellow the upreading by search on the net. Copy also on galactic 
servers.

(it is quite clear that Velikovsky must have had an outstanding 
intuition to see the underlying mechanisms in the development and 
happenings of our earth as he here presents it.
References and footnotes is not here recited, and for just that, then go 
to find the book to read on the net. Scanningmistakes here may also lead 
to similar mistakes in the audiofiles.)

 


PREFACE. 


EARTH IN UPHEAVAL is a book about the great tribulations to which the planet on 
which we travel was subjected in prehistorical and historical times. The pages 
of this book are transcripts of the testimony of mute witnesses, the rocks, in 
the court of celestial traffic. They testify by their own appearance and by the 
encased contents of dead bodies, fossilized skeletons. Myriads 
upon myriads of living creatures came to life on this ball of rock suspended in 
nothing and returned to dust. Many died a natural death, many were killed in 
wars between races and species, and many were entombed alive during great 
paroxysms of nature in which land and sea contested in destruction. Whole tribes 
of fish that had filled the oceans suddenly ceased to exist; of entire species 
and even genera of land animals not a single survivor was left. 

The earth and the water without which we cannot exist suddenly turned into 
enemies and engulfed the animal kingdom, the human race included, and there was 
no shelter and no refuge. In such cataclysms the land and the sea repeatedly 
changed places, laying dry the kingdom of the ocean and submerging the kingdoms 
of the land. 

In Worlds in Collision, I presented the chronicles of two —  the very last —  
series of such catastrophes, those that visited our earth in the second and 
first millennia before the present era. 

Since these upheavals occurred in historical times, when the art of writing had 
already been perfected in the centres of ancient civilization, I described them 
mainly from historical documents, relying on celestial charts, calendars, and 
sundials and water clocks discovered by archaeologists, and drawing also upon 
classical literature, the sacred literature of East and West, the epics of the 
northern races, and the oral traditions of primitive peoples from Lapland to the 
South Seas. Geological vestiges of the events narrated in documents and 
traditions were indicated only here and there, when I felt that the immediate 
testimony of the rocks must be presented along with the historical evidence. I 
closed that description of cataclysmic events with a promise to attempt, at a 
later date, the reconstruction of similar global catastrophes of earlier 
times, one of them being the Deluge. 

I had intended, after piecing together the history of these earlier global 
upheavals, to present geological and paleontologjcal material to support the 
testimony of man. But the reception of Worlds in Collision by certain scientific 
groups persuaded me, before reviving the pageant of earlier catastrophes, to 
present at least some of the evidence of the rocks, which is as insistent 
as that carried down to our times by written records and by word of mouth. This 
testimony is never given in metaphors; and as with the pages of the Old 
Testament or of the Iliad, nothing can be changed in it. Pebbles and rocks and 
mountains and the bottom of the sea will bear witness. Do they know of the days, 
recent and ancient, when the harmony of this world was interrupted by the forces 
of nature? Have they entombed innumerable creatures and encased them in rock? 
Have they seen the ocean moving on continents and continents sliding under
water? Was this earth and the expanse of its seas showered with stones and 
covered by ashes? 

Were its forests, uprooted by hurricanes and set afire, covered by tides 
carrying sand and debris from the bottom of the oceans? It takes millions of 
years for a log to be turned into coal but only a single hour when burning. Here 
lies the core of the problem! Did the earth change in a slow process, a year 
added to a year and a million years to a million, the peaceful ground of nature 
being the broad arena of the contest of throngs, in which the fittest survived? 
Or did it happen, too, that the very arena itself, infuriated, rose against the 
contestants and made an end of their battles? 

I present here some pages from the book of nature. I have excluded from them all 
references to ancient literature, traditions, and folklore; and this I have done 
with intent, so that careless critics cannot decry the entire work as "tales and 
legends." Stones and bones are the only witnesses. 
Mute as they are, they will testify clearly and unequivocally. Yet dull ears and 
dimmed eyes will deny this evidence, and the dimmer the vision, the louder and 
more insistent will be the voices of protestation. This book was not written for 
those who swear by the verba tyiogistvi —  the holiness of their school wisdom; 
and they may debate it without reading it, as well. 

  

In Alaska. 

IN ALASKA, to the north of Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in North 
America, the Tanana River joins the Yukon. From the Tanana Valley and the 
valleys of its tributaries gold is mined out of gravel and "muck." This muck is 
a frozen mass of animals and trees. 

F. Rainey of the University of Alaska described the scene: ,  "Wide cuts, often 
several miles in length and sometimes as much as 140 feet in depth, are now 
being sluiced out along stream valleys tributary to the Tanana in the Fairbanks 
District. In order to reach gold —  bearing gravel beds an overburden of frozen 
silt or 'muck' is removed with hydraulic giants. This 'muck,  
contains enormous numbers of frozen bones of extinct animals such as the 
mammoth, mastodon, super —  bison and horse." 

 

The Ivory Islands.

The arctic coast of Siberia is cold, bleak, inhospitable. The sea is passable 
for ships manoeuvring between floating ice for two months of the year; from 
September to the middle of July the ocean north of Siberia is fettered, an 
unbroken desert of ice. Polar winds sweep over the frozen tundras of Siberia, 
where no tree grows and the soil is never tilled. In his exploratory voyage on 
the ship Vega in 1878, Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskjold, the first to traverse this 
northern seaway from one end to the other, travelled for weeks along the coast 
from Novaya Zemlya to Cape Shelagskoi (170°30' East) on the eastern extremity of 
Siberia without seeing a single human being on the shore. 

CHAPTER II, 
REVOLUTION.

 
The Erratic Boulders. 

THE WATERS of the ocean in which our mountains had been formed still covered a 
part of these Alps when a violent paroxysm of the globe suddenly opened great 
cavities.  and ruptured many rocks. 

"The waters were carried toward these abysses with extreme violence, falling 
from the height they were before; they crossed deep valleys and dragged immense 
quantities of earth, sand, and debris of all kinds of rocks. This mass, shoved 
along by the onrush of great waters, was left spread up the slopes where we 
still see many scattered fragments." 

Thus did Horace Benedict de Saussure, foremost Swiss naturalist of the end of 
the eighteenth century, explain the presence of stones broken off from the Alps 
and carried to the Jura Mountains to the west; so also did he explain the marine 
remains found in alpine ridges, and the sand, gravel, and clay that fill the 
valleys of the Alps and the plains beyond them. 


The loose rocks lying on the Jura Mountains were torn from the Alps; in their 
mineral composition they differ from the rock formations of the Jura, showing 
their alpine origin. Rocks that differ from the formations on which they lie are 
called "erratic boulders." 

 
These stone blocks lie on the Jura Mountains at an elevation of 2000 feet above 
Lake Geneva. Some of them are thousands of cubic feet in size, and Pierre a 
Martin is over 10,000 cubic feet. They must have been carried across the space 
now occupied by the lake and lifted to the height where they are found. 

There are erratic boulders in many places of the world. In the British Isles, on 
the shore and in the highlands, are enormous quantities of them, transported 
there across the North Sea from the mountains of Norway. Some force wrested them 
from those massifs, bore them over the entire expanse that separates Scandinavia 
from the British Isles, and set them down on the coast and on the hills. From 
Scandinavia boulders were also carried to Germany and spread over that country, 
in some places so thickly that it seems as though they had been brought there by 
masons to build cities. Also, high in the Harz Mountains, in central Germany, 
lie stones that originated in Norway. 

From Finland blocks of stone were swept to the Baltic regions and over Poland 
and lifted onto the Carpathians. Another train of boulders was fanned out from 
Finland, over the Valdai Hills, over the site of Moscow, and as far as the Don. 

In North America erratic blocks, broken from the granite of Canada and Labrador, 
were spread over Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New 
York, New Jersey, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio; they perch on top of ridges and 
lie on slopes and deep in the valleys. They lie on the coastal plain and on the 
White Mountains and the Berkshires, sometimes in an unbroken chain; in the 
Pocono Mountains they balance precariously on the edge of crests. 
The attentive traveller through the woods wonders at the size of these rocks, 
brought there and abandoned sometime in the past, frighteningly piled up. 

Some erratics are enormous. The block near Conway, New Hampshire, is 90 by 40 by 
38 feet and weighs about 10,000 tons, the load of a large cargo ship. Equally 
large is Mohegan Rock, which towers over the town of Mont Ville, in Connecticut. 
The great flat erratic in Warren County, Ohio, weighs approximately 13,500 tons 
and covers three quarters of an acre; the Ototoks erratic, thirty miles south of 
Calgary, Alberta, consists of two pieces of quartzite "derived from at 
least 50 miles to the west, however, are small when compared with a mass of 
chalk stone near Malmψ in southern Sweden, which is "three miles long, one 
thousand feet wide and from one hundred to two hundred feet in 
thickness, and which has been transported an indefinite distance. 

”It is quarried for commercial purposes. A similar transported slab of chalk is 
found on the eastern coast of England, "upon which a village had unwittingly 
been built."

In innumerable places on the surface of the earth, as well as on isolated 
islands in the Atlantic and Pacific and in Antarctica, lie rocks of foreign 
origin, brought from afar by some great force. 
Broken off from their parent mountain ridges and coastal cliffs, they were 
carried down dale and up hill and over land and sea. 

 
The most renowned naturalist to come from the generation of the French 
Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars was Georges Cuvier. He was the founder of 
vertebrate palaeontology, or the science of fossil bones, and thus of the 
science of extinct animals. Studying the finds made in the gypsum formation of 
Montmartre in Paris and those elsewhere in France and the European 
continent in general, he came to the conclusion that in the midst of even the 
oldest strata of marine formations there are other strata replete with animal or 
plant remains of terrestrial or fresh — water forms; and that among the more 
recent strata, or those that are nearer the surface, there are also land animals 
buried under heaps of marine sediment. "It has frequently happened 
that lands which have been laid dry, have been again covered by the waters, in 
consequence either of their being engulfed in the abyss or of the sea having 
merely risen over them. 


These repeated irruptions and retreats of the sea have neither all been slow nor 
gradual; on the contrary, most of the catastrophes which have occasioned them 
have been sudden; and this is especially easy to be proven, with regard to the 
last of these catastrophes, that which, by a twofold motion, has inundated, and 
afterwards laid dry, our present continents, or at least a part 
of the land which forms them at the present day. 

The breaking to pieces, the raising up and overturning of the older strata [of 
the earth), leave no doubt upon the mind that they have been reduced to the 
state in which we now see them, by the action of sudden and violent causes; and 
even the force of the motions excited in the mass of waters, is still attested 
by the heaps of debris and rounded pebbles which are in many places 

interposed between the solid strata. Life, therefore, has often been disturbed 
on this earth by terrific events. Numberless living beings have been the victims 
of these catastrophes; some, which inhabited the dry land, have been swallowed 
up by inundations; others, which peopled the waters, have been laid dry, the 
bottom of the sea having been suddenly raised; their very races 
have been extinguished for ever, and have left no other memorial of their 
existence than some fragments which the naturalist can scarcely recognize. ,  

Cuvier was surprised to find that "life has not always existed upon the globe," 
for there are deep strata which contain no vestiges of living beings. The sea 
without inhabitants "would seem to have prepared materials for the mollusca and 
zoophytes," and when they appeared and populated the sea, they deposited their 
shells and built coral, at first in small numbers, and eventually in vast 
formations. 
Cuvier believed that changes have operated in nature not just since the 
appearance of life, for the land masses formed previous to that event also 
seemed to have experienced violent displacements. 

He found in the gypsum deposits in the suburbs of Paris marine limestone 
containing over eight hundred species of shells, all of them marine. Under this 
limestone there is another — fresh — water — deposit formed of clay. Among the 
shells, all of fresh — water (or land) origin, there are also bones — but what 
is remarkable, the bones are those of reptiles and not of mammals, of 
crocodiles and tortoises.

Much of France was once sea; then it was land, populated by land reptiles; then 
it became sea again and was populated by marine animals; then it was land again, 
inhabited by mammals; then it was once more sea, and again land. Each stratum 
contains the evidence of its age in the bones and shells of the animals that 
lived and propagated there at the time and were entombed in recurrent upheavals. 
And as it was on the site of Paris, so it was in other parts of France, and 
in other countries of Europe. 

The strata of the earth disclose that "The thread of operations is here broken; 
the march of Nature is changed; and none of the agents which she now employs, 
would have been sufficient for the production of her ancient works." 

"We have no evidence that the sea can now incrust those shells with a paste as 
compact as that of the marbles, the sandstones, or even the coarse limestone.

"In short, all [now active] causes united, would not change, in an appreciable 
degree, the level of the sea; nor raise a single stratum above its surface.   It 
has been asserted that the sea has undergone a general diminishing of level. 
Admitting that there has been a gradual diminution of the waters; that the sea 
has transported solid matter in all directions; that the temperature of 
the globe is either diminishing or increasing; none of these cases could have 
overturned our strata, enveloped in ice large animals, with their flesh and 
skin; laid dry marine animals and, lastly, destroyed numerous species, and even 
entire genera.  

Thus, we repeat, it is in vain that we search, among the powers which now act at 
the surface of the earth, for causes sufficient to produce the revolutions and 
catastrophes, the traces of which are exhibited by its crust."  

But what could have caused these catastrophes? Cuvier reviewed the theories of 
the origin of the world current in his time but found no answer to the question 
that preoccupied him. He did not know the cause of these vast cataclysms; he 
only knew that they had occurred. 

Many fruitless efforts" had been made, and he felt that his search for the 
causes of the cataclysms was fruitless too. These ideas have haunted; I may 
almost say have tormented me during my researches among fossil bones." 

 

The Caves of England 

In 1823, William Buckland, professor of geology at the University of Oxford, 
published his Relics of the Flood, with the subtitle, Observations on the 
organic remains contained in caves, fissures, and diluvial gravel, and on other 
geological phenomena, attesting the action of an universal deluge. Buckland was 
one of the great authorities on geology of the first half of the nineteenth 
century. In a cave in Kirkdale in Yorkshire, eighty feet above the valley, under 
a floor covering of stalagmites, he found teeth and bones of elephants, 
rhinoceroses, hippopotami, horses, deer, tigers, the teeth of which were larger 
than those of the largest Bengal tiger, bears, wolves, hyenas, foxes, hares, 
rabbits, as well as bones of ravens, pigeons, larks, snipe, and ducks. Many of 
the animals had died "before the first set, or milk teeth, 
had been shed." 

Certain scholars prior to Buckland had their own explanation for the provenience 
of elephant bones in the soil of England, and to them Buckland referred: "[The 
idea] which long prevailed, 

and was considered satisfactory by the antiquaries [archaeologists] of the last 
century, was, that they were the remains of elephants imported by the Roman 
armies. This idea is also refuted: 
First, by the anatomical facts of their belonging to an extinct species of this 
genus; second, by their being usually accompanied by the bones of rhinoceros and 
hippopotamus, animals which could never have been attached to Roman armies; 
thirdly, by their being found dispersed over Siberia and North America, in equal 
or even greater abundance than in those parts of Europe which were subjected to 
the Roman power."  

It appeared that hippopotamus and reindeer and bison lived side by side at 
Kirkdale; hippopotamus, reindeer, and mammoth pastured together at Brentford 
near London.2 Reindeer and grizzly bear lived with the hippopotamus at Cefn in 
Wales. Lemming and reindeer bones were found together with bones of the cave 
lion and hyena at Bleadon in Somerset. 
Hippopotamus, bison, and musk sheep were found together with worked flint in the 
gravels of the Thames Valley. The remains of reindeer lay with the bones of 
mammoth and rhinoceros in the cave of Breugue in France, in the same red clay, 
encased by the same stalagmites. 

Buckland was concerned "to establish two important facts, first, that there has 
been a recent and general inundation of the globe and, second, that the animals 
whose remains are found interred in the wreck of that inundation were natives of 
high north latitudes. The presence of tropical animals in northern Europe 
"cannot be solved by supposing them to migrate periodically, for 
in the case of crocodiles and tortoises extensive emigration is almost 
impossible, and not less so to such an unwieldy animal as the hippopotamus when 
out of the water." But how could they live in the cold of northern Europe? 
Buckland says: "It is equally difficult to imagine that they could 
have passed their winters in lakes or rivers frozen up with ice. If cold — 
blooded land animals are unable to hide themselves in the ground over the 
winter, in icy climates their blood would freeze solid: they lack the ability to 
regulate the temperature of their bodies. Like Cuvier, Buckland was "nearly 
certain that if any change of climate has taken place, it took place suddenly.  

Of the time the catastrophe occurred, which covered with mud and pebbles the 
bones in the Kirkdale cave, Buckland wrote: "From the limited quantity of 
postdiluvian stalactite, as well as from the undecayed condition of the bones," 
one must deduce that "the tune elapsed since the introduction of the diluvial 
mud has not been of excessive length., ' The bones were not yet fossilized; 
their organic matter was not yet replaced by minerals. Buckland thought that the 
time 
elapsed since a diluvial catastrophe could not have exceeded five or six 
thousand years, the figure adopted also by De Luc, Dolomieu, and Cuvier, each of 
whom presented his own reasons. 

Then the illustrious geologist added these words: "What [the] cause was, whether 
a change in the inclination in the earth's axis, or the near approach of a 
comet, or any other cause or combination of causes purely astronomical, is a 
question the discussion of which is foreign to the object of the present 
memoir.'

The Aquatic Graveyards 

The Old Red Sandstone is regarded as one of the oldest strata with signs of 
extinct life in it. No animal life higher than fish is found there. Whatever the 
age of this formation, it carries the testimony and "a wonderful record of 
violent death falling at once, not on a few individuals, but 
on whole tribes." 

 In the lute thirties of the last century Hugh Miller made the Old Red Sandstone 
in Scotland the special subject of his investigations. He observed: "The earth 
had already become a vast sepulchre, to a depth beneath the bed of the sea equal 
to at least twice the height of Ben Nevis over its surface."  Ben Nevis in the 
Grampian Mountains is the highest peak in Great Britain, 4406 feet, 1450 m, 
high. The stratum of the Old Red Sandstone is twice as thick. 

This formation presents the spectacle of an upheaval immobilized at a particular 
moment and petrified forever. Hugh tiller wrote: 

"The first scene in Shakespeare's  —   The Tempest  —   opens amid the confusion 
and turmoil of the hurricane —  amid thunders and lightnings, the roar of the 
wind, the shouts of the seamen, the rattling of cordage, and the wild dash of 
the billows. The history of the period represented by the Old Red Sandstone 
seems, in what now forms the northern half of Scotland, to have opened in a 
similar manner.
The vast space which now includes Orkney and Loch Ness, Dingwall and 
Gamrie, and many a thousand square miles besides, was the scene of a shallow 
ocean, perplexed by powerful currents, and agitated by waves. A vast stratum of 
water —  rolled pebbles, varying in depth from a hundred feet to a hundred 
yards, remains in a thousand different localities, to testify of the disturbing 
agencies of this time of commotion." Miller found that the 
hardest masses in the stratum —  "porphyries of vitreous fracture that cut glass 
as readily as flint, and masses of quartz that strike fire quite as profusely 
from steel, —  are yet polished and ground down into bullet —  like forms.

 And yet it is surely difficult to conceive how the bottom of any sea 
should have been so violently and so equally agitated for so greatly extended a 
space.

 and for a period so prolonged, that the entire area should have come to be 
covered with a stratum of rolled pebbles of almost every variety of ancient 
rock, fifteen stories' height in thickness."' 


In the red sandstone an abundant aquatic fauna is embedded. The animals are in 
disturbed positions. At the period of the past when these formations were 
composed, some terrible catastrophe involved in sudden destruction the fish of 
an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. 
The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which 
exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, 
contracted, curved; the tail in many instances is bent around to the head; the 
spines stick out; the fins arc spread to the full, as in fish that die in 
convulsions. The Pterichthys shows its arms extended at their stiffest angle, as 
if prepared for an enemy. The attitudes of all the ichthyolites, any fossil 
fish, on this platform are attitudes of fear, anger and pain. The 
remains, too, appear to have suffered nothing from the after —  attacks of 
predaceous fishes; none such seem to have survived. The record is one of 
destruction at once widely spread and total.  

What agency of destruction could have accounted for "innumerable existences of 
an area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent [being] annihilated at 
once"? "Conjecture lacks footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in 
uncertainty over all the known phenomena of death," wrote Miller. 

The ravages of no disease, however virulent, could explain some of the phenomena 
of this arena of death. Rarely does disease fall equally on many different 
genera at once, and never does it strike with instantaneous suddenness; yet in 
the ruins of this platform from ten to twelve distinct genera and many species 
were involved; and so suddenly did the agency perform its work that its victims 
were fixed in their first attitude of surprise and terror. 


The area of the Old Red Sandstone investigated by Miller comprises one half of 
Scotland, from Loch Ness to the land's northern extremity and beyond to the 
Orkney Islands in the north. "A thousand different localities" disclose the same 
scene of destruction. 

 An identical picture can be found in many other places all around the world, in 
similar and dissimilar formations. Of Monte Bolca, near Verona in northern 
Italy, Buckland wrote: "The circumstances under which the fossil fishes are 
found at Monte Bolca seem to indicate that they perished suddenly. The skeletons 
of these fish lie parallel to the laminae of the strata of the 
calcareous slate; they are always entire, and closely packed on one another.
 All these fishes must have died suddenly. and have been speedily buried in the 
calcareous sediment then in the course of deposition. From the fact that certain 
individuals have even preserved traces of colour upon their skin, we are certain 
that they were entombed before decomposition of their soft parts had taken 
place. 

The same author wrote about the fish deposits in the area of the Harz Mountains 
in Germany: 
"Another celebrated deposit of fossil fishes is that of the cupriferous slate 
surrounding the Harz. 

Many of the fishes of this slate at Mansfeld, Eisleben, etc., have a distorted 
attitude, which has often been assigned to writhing in the agonies of death.  As 
these fossil fishes maintain the attitude of the rigid stage immediately 
succeeding death, it follows that they were buried before putrefaction had 
commenced, and apparently in the same bituminous mud, the influx of which 
had caused their destruction."  

The story of sudden death and immediate encasing is told by the red sandstone of 
Scotland; the limestone of Monte Bolca in Lombardy; the bituminous slate of 
Mansfeld in Thuringia; and also by the coal formation of Saarbriicken on the 
Saar, "the most celebrated deposits of fossil fishes in Europe"; the calcareous 
slate of Solenhofen; the blue slate of Glarus; 
the marl —  stone of Oensingen in Switzerland and of Aix —  in —  Provence, to 
mention only a few of the better —  known sites in Europe. 

In North America similar strata, "packed full of splendidly preserved fishes," 
are found in the black limestone of Ohio and Michigan, in the Green River bed of 
Arizona, the diatom beds of Lompoc, California, and in many other formations. 
In cataclysms of early ages fishes died in agony; and the sand and the gravel of 
the upthrust sea bottom covered the aquatic graveyards. 

 






CHAPTER III, 
UNIFORMITY.


 The Doctrine of Uniformity. 

FOR OVER twenty — five years, from the beginning of the French Revolution in 
1789 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Europe was in turmoil. France beheaded 
her king and queen; many revolutionaries in their turn went to the scaffold too. 
Spam, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Russia became battlefields. 

the British isles were in danger of being invaded, and Britain's fleet fought 
at Trafalgar the tyrant who had sprung up from the revolutionary army. After 
1815 there was a universal desire for peace and tranquillity. The Holy Alliance 
was organized; Europe sank into reaction, England into a spirit of conservatism. 
The abortive revolutionary wave of 1830 did not reach the British Isles. 

No wonder that in the climate of reaction to the eruptions of revolution and the 
Napoleonic Wars the theory of uniformity became popular and soon dominant in the 
natural sciences. According to this theory, the development of the surface of 
the globe has been going on through all the ages without any disturbances; the 
process of very slow change that we observe at present has been 
the only process of importance from the beginning. 

This theory, first advanced by Hutton (1795) and Lamarck (1800), was elevated to 
its present position as a scientific law by Charles Lyell, a young attorney 
whose interest in geology was to make him the most influential person in that 
field, and by Lyell s disciple and friend, Charles Darwin. Darwin built his 
theory of evolution on Lyell s principle of uniformity. A modern exponent of the 
theory of evolution, H. F. Osborn, wrote: "Present continuity implies the 
improbability of past catastrophism and violence of change, either in the 
lifeless or in the living world; moreover, we seek to interpret the changes and 
laws of past time through those which we observe at the present time. This was 
Darwin's secret, learned from Lyell."  Lyell built his case with convincing 
dialectics. 

Wind and solar heat and rain little by little crumble the rock in the highlands. 
Rivers carry the detritus to the sea. The land is lowered by this process, which 
continues for ages, until it turns a vast region into detritus. Then the massive 
earth, as if in a slow breathing process, every phase 
of which requires eons, again slowly rises, the bottom of the sea subsides, and 
the crumbling of the rock begins all over again. The land comes up in an 
elevated plateau; the subsequent action of water and wind cuts furrows, and 
little by little the highland changes into a range of mountain 
peaks; more eons, and these heights crumble too, wind and rain carrying them 
grain by grain into the sea; the shallow sea encroaches on the land, then slowly 
retreats. No great catastrophes intervene to change the face of the earth. 
Although sporadic volcanic action occurs, Lyell did not consider it to have an 
effect in changing the face of the earth comparable in importance to that of 
rivers, wind, and waves of the sea. 

What causes the eon-long process of elevation and subsidence has not been 
determined. Naturalists of the eighteenth century claimed to have observed a 
minute gradual change in the level of the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea in 
relation to the coast line. Similar processes in past geological ages must have 
brought about all the changes on the earth: the majestic mountains that rose and 
others that were levelled, the seacoast that moved in a slow rhythm 
back and forth, and the earth mantle that was redistributed by rain and wind. 
According to the theory of uniformity, no process took place in the past that is 
not taking place at present; and not only the nature but also the intensity of 
physical phenomena of our age are the criteria of what could have happened in 
the past. 

Since the theory of uniformity is still taught in all places of learning, and to 
question it is heresy, it is pertinent to reproduce here some of Lyell's 
original statements, made in his Principles of Geology; they served as a 
manifesto or credo for all his followers, whether called uniformists or 
evolutionists. Lyell wrote; 

"It has been truly observed that when we arrange the known fossiliferous 
formations in chronological order, they constitute a broken and defective series 
—    we pass, without any intermediate gradations from systems of strata which 
are horizontal, to other systems which are highly inclined — from rocks of 
peculiar mineral composition to others which have a character wholly distinct — 
from one assemblage of organic remains to another, in which frequently nearly 
all the species, and a large part of the genera, are different. These violations 
of continuity are so common as to constitute in most regions the rule rather 
than the exception, and they have been considered by many geologists as 
conclusive in favour of sudden revolutions in the inanimate 
and animate world." 


Thus he acknowledged that the surface of the globe has the appearance of having 
been subjected to great and violent sudden changes, but he believed that the 
record is incomplete and that the major part of the evidence is lost. "In the 
solid framework of the globe we have a chronological chain of natural records, 
many links of which are wanting." 

The theory of uniformity, or of gradual changes in the past measured by the 
extent of changes observed in the present, has, as Lyell admitted, no positive 
evidence in the incomplete record of the earth's crust; consequently the theory, 
building on argumentum ex silentio, or argument by default, required further 
analogies. 

"Suppose we have discovered two buried cities at the foot of Vesuvius, 
immediately superimposed upon each other with a great mass of tuff and lava 
intervening.

 An antiquary 
[archaeologist] might possibly be entitled to infer, from the inscriptions on 
public edifices, that the inhabitants of the inferior and older city were 
Greeks, and those of the modern town Italians. But he would reason very hastily 
if he also concluded from these data, that there had been a sudden 
change from the Greek to the Italian language in Campania. But if he afterwards 
found three buried cities, one above the other, the intermediate one, being 
Roman. 


 he would then perceive the fallacy of his former opinion, and would begin to 
suspect that the catastrophes, by which the cities were inhumed, might have no 
relation whatever to the fluctuations in the language of the inhabitants; and 
that, as the Roman tongue had evidently intervened between 
the Greek and Italian, so many other dialects may have been spoken in 
succession, and the passage from the Greek to the Italian may have been very 
gradual.  

This often — reprinted passage is an unfortunate example, for, in order to prove 
that there had been no violent changes, Lyell chose to present a picture of 
violent catastrophes: the strata are separated by layers of lava. This is also 
the picture presented in so many geological surveys. To use this example as a 
proof of uniformity is a flight of dialectics. 

The comparison is followed by an accusation that is all the more vigorous 
because of the inadequacy of the example which is called on to substitute for 
geological evidence. Lyell said: 

"It appeared clear that the earlier geologists had not only a scanty 
acquaintance with existing changes [caused by wind, flowing water, etc.], but 
were singularly unconscious of the amount of 
their ignorance. With the presumption naturally inspired by this 
unconsciousness, they had no hesitation in deciding at once that time could 
never enable the existing powers of nature to work out changes of great 
magnitude, still less such important revolutions as those which are brought 
to light by geology. 

And he proceeded: 

"Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the 
edge of curiosity, than this assumption of the discordance between the ancient 
and existing causes of change. It produced a state of mind unfavourable in the 
highest degree to the candid reception of the 
evidence of those minute but incessant alterations which every part of the 
earth's surface is undergoing."  

At first the tone of this pleading for the then unorthodox theory of uniformity 
was defensive; the position was unsupported by sufficient evidence. Then, as 
though a few analogies to human situations were so strong that they could 
substitute for the defective record of nature, the tone 
changed and became uncompromising. 


"For this reason all theories are rejected which involve the assumption of 
sudden and violent catastrophes and revolutions of the whole earth, and its 
inhabitants — theories which are restrained by no reference to existing 
analogies, and in which a desire is manifested to cut, rather than patiently to 
untie, the Gordian knot."  

Notwithstanding the strong language employed, the scientific principle which 
insists that whatever does not occur at the present time has not occurred in the 
past is a self — imposed limitation. Rather than a principle in science, it is a 
statute of faith. And Lyell ended his famous chapter accordingly, with an appeal 
for faith and with a precept for believers.

"If he [the student] finally believes in the resemblance or identity of the 
ancient and present systems of terrestrial changes, he will regard every fact 
collected respecting the causes in diurnal action as affording him a key to the 
interpretation of some mystery in the past." 

The hippopotamus inhabits the larger rivers and marshes of Africa; it is not 
found in Europe or America save in zoological gardens where specimens of it 
wallow most of the time in pools, submerging their huge bodies in muddy water. 
Next to the elephant it is the largest of the land 
animals. Bones of hippopotami are found in the soil of Europe as far north as 
Yorkshire in England. 

Lyell gave the following explanation for the presence of the hippopotamus in 
Europe: 

"The geologist may freely speculate on the time when herds of hippopotami issued 
from North African rivers, such as the Nile, and swam northward in summer along 
the coasts of the Mediterranean, or even occasionally visited islands near the 
shore. Here and there they may have landed to graze or browse, tarrying awhile, 
and afterwards continuing their course northward. Others may have swum in a few 
summer days from rivers in the south of Spain or France to the Somme, Thames, or 
Severn [river in Wales and England], making timely retreat to 
the south before the snow and ice set in."  

An Argonaut expedition of hippopotami from the rivers of Africa to the isles of 
Albion sounds like an idyll. 

In the Victorian cave near Settle, in west Yorkshire, 1450 feet above sea level, 
under twelve feet of clay deposit containing some well —  scratched boulders, 
were found numerous remains of the mammoth, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, bison, 
hyena, and other animals. 

In northern Wales in the Vale of Clwyd, in numerous caves remains of the 
hippopotamus lay together with those of the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the 
cave lion. In the cave of Cae Gwyn in the Vale of Clwyd, "during the excavations 
it became clear that the bones had been greatly disturbed by water action." The 
floor of the cavern was "covered afterwards by clays and sand 
containing foreign pebbles. This seemed to prove that the caverns, now 400 feet 
[above sea level] must have been submerged subsequently to their occupation by 
the animals and by man. 

 The contents of the cavern must have been dispersed by marine action during the 
great submergence in mid — glacial times, and afterwards covered by marine 
sands. 

Hippopotami not only travelled during the summer nights to England and Wales, 
but also climbed hills to die peacefully among other animals in the caves, and 
the ice, approaching softly, tenderly spread little pebbles over the travellers 
resting in peace, and the land with its hills and caverns in a slow lullaby 
movement sank below the level of the sea and gentle streams caressed the dead 
bodies and covered them with rosy sand. 

Three assumptions were made by the exponents of uniformity: Sometime not long 
ago the climate of the British Isles was so warm that hippopotami used to visit 
there in summer; the British Isles subsided so much that caves in the hills 
became submerged; the land rose again to its present height — and all this 
without any action of a violent nature. 

Or was it, perchance, a mountain — high wave that crossed the land and poured 
into the caves and filled them with marine sand and gravel? Or did the ground 
submerge and then emerge again in some paroxysm of nature in which the climate 
also changed? Did the animals run away at the sign of the approaching 
catastrophe, and did the trespassing sea follow and suffocate 
them in the caves that were their last refuge and became the place of their 
burial? 

Or did the sea sweep them from Africa, throw them in heaps on the British Isles 
and in other places, and cover them with earth and marine debris? The entrances 
to some caves were too narrow and the caves themselves too "shrunk" (contracted) 
to have been places of refuge for such huge animals as hippopotami and 
rhinoceroses. Whichever of these answers or surmises is correct, and whether the 
hippopotami lived in England or were thrown there by the ocean, whether they 
sought refuge in caves or the caves are but their graves, their bones on the 
British Isles, as also on the bottom of the seas surrounding these islands, are 
signs of some great natural change. 

 



Icebergs. 

The theory that rejected the occurrence of catastrophic events in the past was 
incompatible with the then prevailing teaching, which ascribed the distribution 
of drift (the deposit of rock debris, clay, and organic material that covers 
continental areas) and of erratic boulders to the action of water in the form of 
great tidal waves breaking upon the continents. A slow — moving source, able 
to do the same work, but in a longer time, had to be found. Lyell assumed that 
icebergs transferred rocks over the expanse of the sea. Icebergs are broken — 
off parts of glaciers that descend from the mountainous coasts to the sea. 
Mariners in northern waters have observed icebergs with pieces of rock attached 
to them. And if we think of the enormity of past geological epochs and multiply 
the action of icebergs as carriers of earth and rocks by the time elapsed, we 
may explain, so argued Lyell, the presence of erratic boulders as well as of 
till and gravel on land. 

Erratic boulders are found far from the seashore: Lyell taught that the land was 
submerged and icebergs travelling over it dropped their load of stones; later 
the land emerged with the stones on it. Erratic boulders are found on the 
mountains; therefore, these mountains were under shallow water when icebergs 
carrying stones from other regions dropped them on the summits. In order 
to explain in this manner the provenience of erratic boulders, it was necessary 
to submerge large parts of continents in rather recent times. 

In some places erratic boulders are distributed in a long string — as in the 
Berkshires. Icebergs could not have acted as intelligent carriers, and Lyell 
must have felt the weakness of his theory on this point. The only alternative 
known at that time was that of a tidal wave. But Lyell abhorred 
catastrophes. He detested them alike in the political life of Europe and in 
nature. 
Characteristically, his autobiography begins with this description of the most 
vivid memory of his early childhood: 


"I was four and a half when an event happened which was not likely to be 
forgotten." His family travelled in two carriages a stage and a half from 
Edinburgh. "On a narrow road, with a steep brae above, and an equally 
precipitous one below, and no parapet on the roadside, a flock of 
sheep jumped down into the road, and frightened the horses [of the other 
carriage]. Away they ran, and with the chaise, man, horses and all, disappeared 
clean out of sight, over the brae in an instant." There was a rescue through the 
broken pane of glass, a little blood ran, and somebody fainted.1 It left the 
first and strongest impression of his childhood in the memory of the author of 
the theory of uniformity. 



Darwin in South America. 

Charles Darwin, who had previously dropped his medical studies at Edinburgh 
University, upon his graduation in theology from Christ College, Cambridge, went 
in December 1831 as a naturalist on the ship Beagle, which sailed around the 
world on a five —  year surveying expedition. 


Darwin had with him the newly published volume of Lyells Principles of Geology 
that became his bible. On this voyage he wrote his Journal, the second edition 
of which he dedicated to Lyell. 

This round — the — world voyage was Darwin's only field — work experience in 
geology and palaeontology, and he drew on it all his life long. He wrote later 
that these observations served as the "origin of all my views." His observations 
were made in the Southern Hemisphere and more particularly in South America, a 
continent that had attracted the attention of naturists since the exploration 
travels of Alexander von Humboldt (1799 —  1804). Darwin was impressed by the 
numerous assemblages of fossils of extinct animals, mostly of much greater size 
than species now living; these fossils spoke of a flourishing fauna that 
suddenly came to its end in a recent geological age. He wrote under January 9, 
1834, in the Journal of his voyage! 

"It is impossible to reflect on the changed state of the American continent 
without the deepest astonishment, Formerly it must have swarmed with great 
monsters: now we find mere pigmies, compared with the antecedent, allied races." 

He proceeded thus: "The greater number, if not all, of these extinct quadrupeds 
lived at a late period, and were the contemporaries of most of the existing sea 
— shells. Since they lived, no very great change in the form of the land can 
have taken place. What, then, has exterminated so many species and whole genera? 
The mind at first is irresistibly hurried into the belief of some 
great catastrophe; but thus to destroy animals, both large and small, in 
Southern Patagonia, in Brazil, on the Cordillera of Peru, in North America up to 
Behrings Straits,  we must shake the entire framework of the globe" 

No lesser physical event could have brought about this wholesale destruction, 
not only in the Americas but in the entire world. And such an event being beyond 
consideration, Darwin did not know the answer. "It could hardly have been a 
change of temperature, which at about the same time destroyed the inhabitants of 
tropical, temperate, and arctic latitudes on both sides of the globe." 

Certainly it could not have been man in the role of the destroyer; and were he 
to attack all large animals, would he also be the cause of extinction "of the 
many fossil mice and other small quadrupeds?" Darwin asked. 

"No one will imagine that a drought, could destroy every individual of every 
species from Southern Patagonia to Behring's Straits. What shall we say of the 
extinction of the horse? Did those plains fail of pasture, which have since been 
overrun by thousands and hundreds of thousands of the descendants of the stock 
introduced by the Spaniards?" Darwin concluded: 
"Certainly, no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide 
and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants."  Out of Darwin's embarrassment 
grew the idea of extinction of species as a prelude to natural selection. 

 



















CHAPTER IV, 
 ICE.

The Birth of the Ice Age Theory. 

IN 1836, Louis Agassiz, a young Swiss naturalist, went with Professor Jean 
Charpentier, another naturalist, to an alpine glacier to demonstrate to him the 
fallacy of the new idea that an ice sheet once covered a large part of Europe. 
Four years before, a teacher in a small — town forestry school, A. Bernardi, had 
written: "Once the polar ice reached as far as the southern limit of the 
district which is still marked by the erratics." 
A botanist, C. Schimper, had come upon the same idea, probably independently, 
and coined the term die Eiszeit; he had succeeded in winning Charpentier to the 
hypothesis. At the edge of the glacier, Agassiz, who came as a skeptic, was 
himself converted; he became the chief apostle of the new theory. He built a hut 
on the glacier and lived in it, so that he could observe the movements of the 
ice, and thereby attracted the attention of naturalists and curiosity seekers 
all over Europe. 


The study of the glaciers in the Alps revealed that glacial ice may move by its 
own weight a few feet daily; it actually transports stones by carrying and 
pushing them. 

Some loose rocks are shoved aside to form lateral moraines; some are pushed by 
the advancing front of the ice to form terminal moraines. When the glacier melts 
and retreats, the loose rocks remain where they were at the time of the greatest 
expansion of the glacier. Agassiz assumed that the erratic boulders on the Jura 
Mountains had been carried there by ice from the Alps and 
that the trains of boulders in northern Europe and America had been formed by 
the gigantic glaciers that, sometime in the past, covered large parts of these 
continents. He also concluded that the drift had been brought and left by the 
ice sheet. Ice scratched the underlying rock with 
the help of flint and other fragments of hard stone it retained in its grasp; 
and it polished the rocky floors of slopes and valleys, and excavated the beds 
of lakes. 

Agassiz made his conclusions with respect to other parts of the world on the 
basis of observations limited to Switzerland and its surroundings. He thought 
that if he could convert two of the leading geologists, Buckland, the author of 
Reliquiae diluvia, and Murchison, to the Ice Age theory and thus win their 
support, the task of gaining recognition for it would become much 
easier. Agassiz went to the British Isles. In later years, as his widow 
described it, "recalling the scientific isolation in which he then stood, 
opposed as he was to all the prominent geologists of the day, he said: 'Among 
the older naturalists, only one stood by me: Dr. Buckland, Dean of 
Westminster.

We went first to the Highlands of Scotland, and it is one of the delightful 
recollections of my life that as we approached the castle of the Duke of Argyll, 
standing in a valley not unlike some of the Swiss valleys, I said to Buckland: 
"Here we shall find our first traces of glaciers"; and, as the stage entered the 
valley, we actually drove over an ancient terminal moraine, which spanned the 
opening of the valley.' 


A few weeks later, on November 4, 1840, Agassiz read a paper before the 
Geological Society of London, summarizing the excursion in the light of the Ice 
Age theory, and Buckland, who was then president of the society, followed with a 
paper of his own on the same subject. Even before the meeting he had written to 
Agassiz of the success of his missionary work: "Lyell has adopted your theory in 
total.

 On my showing him a beautiful cluster of moraines, within two miles of his 
father's house, he instantly accepted it, as solving a host of difficulties that 
have all his life embarrassed him."
Lyell, too, agreed to read a paper less than three weeks after this episode, on 
the day following the Agassiz and Buck — land lectures. In this paper, hastily 
prepared, he explained the moraines in Great Britain in the light of Agassiz's 
teachings. 

At the November 4 meeting of the society, Murchison "attempted an opposition" 
but, in the words of Agassiz, "did not produce much effect." He added: "Dr. Buck 
— land was truly eloquent. 

That same year (1840) Agassiz published his theory in a work entitled Etudes SUT 
les glaciers. 

He wrote: 

"The surface of Europe previously adorned with tropical vegetation and populated 
by herds of huge elephants, enormous hippopotami, and gigantic carnivores, was 
suddenly buried under a vast mantle of ice, covering plains, lakes, seas, and 
plateaus. Upon the life and movement of a vigorous creation fell the silence of 
death. Springs vanished, rivers ceased flowing, the rays of the sun, rising upon 
this frozen shore (if, indeed, they reached it), encountered only the breath of 
winter from the north and the thunder of crevasses as they opened up across the 
surface of this icy sea."  

Agassiz regarded the inception and the termination of the Ice Age as 
catastrophic events. He believed that mammoths in Siberia were suddenly caught 
in the ice that spread swiftly over the larger part of the globe. He expressed 
the belief that repeated global catastrophes were 
accompanied by a fall in the temperature of the globe and its atmosphere, and 
that glacial ages, of which the earth experienced more than one, were terminated 
each time by renewed igneous activity in the interior of the earth (eruptions de 
Vinterieur). Thus he maintained that the western Alps had risen very recently, 
at the end of the last Ice Age, and were younger than the carcasses of mammoths 
in Siberia, the flesh of which is still edible, these animals, he thought, 
had been killed at the beginning of the Ice Age. With the renewal of igneous 
activity, the ice cover melted, great floods ensued, the mountains and lakes in 
Switzerland and in many other places were formed, and the relief map of the 
world was generally changed. 

It is often said that Agassiz added from half a million to a million years to 
the recent history of the world by inserting the Great Ice Age between the 
Tertiary, or the age of mammals, and the Recent (comprising the Late Stone Age 
and historical times). It should be borne in mind, however, that the million — 
year span for the Ice Age is Lyell s estimate, and he interpreted 
Agassiz s theory in the spirit of uniformity.

The theory of a continental ice cover was acceptable to Lyell. He agreed to it, 
satisfied to go no farther for his proof than two miles from his home. He 
realized that floating icebergs could not explain the phenomena of drift and 
erratic boulders in all places. The only alternative had been 
the waves of translation or tidal waves travelling on land, but this were 
outright catastrophic. Now, with the continental ice theory, he felt he had the 
correct solution if the catastrophic aspect of the theory, as originally 
suggested by Agassiz, a follower of Cuvier, was eliminated. It was not yet 
asked what produced such a cover. 

On the Russian Plains. 

Soon after the historic meeting at which the Ice Age theory was accepted by the 
majority of the members of the Geological Society, R. I. Murchison went to 
Russia, where he had been invited by Czar Nicholas I to make a geological survey 
of the empire. Out of this survey grew recognition of the Permian System; the 
Permian, Silurian, and the Devonian, also first recognized by Murchison  
constitute three of the great 
divisions in the modern concept of early geological ages. For many months 
Murchison crossed the latitudes and longitudes of Russia, carefully 


observing the erratic boulders strewn over the great Russian plains and 
rechecking the validity of Agassiz s theory. In Finland and the northern Russian 
provinces he found very large blocks; but they diminished in size the farther 
south one went, which pointed to the action of water, a tide that came down from 
the north or northwest, spreading rock fragments along its way. He 
also observed that erratic boulders in the Carpathian Mountains were not of 
local but of Scandinavian origin. 

Of the drift, or "the piles of stone, sand, clay and gravel which are spread out 
in such enormous masses over the low countries of Russia, Poland, and Germany," 
Murchison expressed the conviction that "a vast portion, by far the greater 
part, has been transported by aqueous action, consequent of powerful waves of 
translation and currents occasioned by relative and often paroxysmal changes of 
the level of sea and land." 
 Whatever may have been the cause of the irruption of the sea, such aqueous 
debacles, with the help of ice floes, produced the drift. 

"Seeing that there are no mountains whatever from which a glacier can ever have 
been propelled in southern Sweden, Finland, or north — eastern Russia, and yet 
that these regions are powerfully abraded, scored and polished," Murchison came 
to the conclusion that effects so extensively developed over such flat countries 
must have resulted from an irrupting sea that also left behind enormous masses 
of debris and rolled stone. 

Murchison "rejected the application of the terrestrial glacier theory of Sweden, 
Finland, north — eastern Russia, and the whole of northern Germany — in short to 
all the low countries of Europe." 
 He agreed that in mountainous northern Scandinavia and Lapland arctic glaciers 
formerly did exist. Ice floes descending from these glaciers carried angular 
broken stones over land covered by sea and dropped them on top of the drift 
created by the irruption of the sea. 


Murchison called attention to the fact that "Siberia is entirely free from 
erratic blocks, though environed on three sides by high mountains."  

He required the aid of icebergs detached from the glaciers to "account for 
certain superficial phenomena, but he confidently maintained that "aqueous 
detrital conditions will best account for the great diffusion of drift over the 
surface of the globe, and at the same time explain the very general striation 
and abrasion of the rocks, at low as well as high levels, in numerous parallels 
of latitude." 

In his later years, Murchison, without retracting any of his observations and 
conclusions made in Russia, admitted in a letter to Agassiz that he regretted 
his early opposition to the Ice Age theory. 
On the other hand, marine deposits of recent age were found in large areas of 
European and Asiatic Russia. In the Caspian Sea, which stretches between 
southern Russia and Persia, live seals related to the seals of the Arctic Ocean. 
It is concluded that the polar sea spread and established a connection with the 
Caspian Sea, and this in Recent time. 

"Since the ice withdrew, the Arctic Ocean has spread over large areas of 
northern Russia and in many places has left marine deposits on the glacial drift 
as well as on the firmer rocks. The Arctic water spread also over the Obi Basin 
far to the south and established connections with the Caspian Sea, at which time 
the progenitors of the present seals of the Caspian rocky islands 
migrated thither to become stranded when the waters withdrew." 


 

Ice Age in the Tropics.

In 1865, Agassiz went to equatorial Brazil, one of the hottest places in the 
world, where he found all the signs he ascribed to the action of ice. Now even 
those who had previously agreed with him became distressed. An ice covers in the 
tropics, on the very equator? There were drift accumulations, and scratched 
rocks, and erratic boulders, and fluted valleys, and the smooth 
surface of tillite, rock formed of consolidated till, so there must have been 
ice to carry and polish, and the region must have gone through an ice period. 
What could have caused a tropical region to be covered by ice several thousand 
feet thick? 

Abundant vestiges of an ice age were likewise found in British Guiana, another 
of the hottest places on earth. 
Soon the same word came from equatorial Africa; and what appeared even more 
strange, the marks there indicated not only that equatorial Africa and 
Madagascar had been under a sheet of ice but that the ice had moved, spreading 
from the equator toward the higher latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, or in 
the wrong direction. 

Then vestiges of an ice age were discovered in India, and there, too, the ice 
had moved from the equator, and not merely toward higher latitudes, but uphill, 
from the lowland up the foothills of the Himalayas. 

On reconsideration, the vestiges of ice in equatorial regions were ascribed to a 
different ice age that had taken place not thousands but many millions of years 
ago. Today the glacial phenomena in the tropics and in the Southern Hemisphere 
are ascribed, in the main, to the Permian Age, a much earlier period than the 
recent Ice Age. "The most remarkable feature of the Permian glaciation is its 
distribution," writes C O. Dunbar of Yale University. "South America 
bears evidence of glaciation in Argentina and south-eastern Brazil, even within 
10° of the equator. 
In the northern hemisphere, peninsular India, within 20° of the equator, was the 
chief scene of glaciation, with the ice flowing north [or from the tropics to 
higher latitudes]. 

Footnote. The icecap covered practically all of southern Africa up to at least 
latitude 22 °S and also spread to Madagascar.

Even if the phenomenon took place very long ago, an ice cover thousands of feet 
thick in the hottest places of the world is a challenging enigma. R. T. 
Chamberlin says: "Some of these huge ice sheets advanced even into the tropics, 
where their deposits of glacier — borne debris, hundreds of feet in thickness, 
amaze the geologists who see them. No satisfactory explanation has yet been 
offered for the extent and location of these extraordinary glaciers.  Glaciers, 
almost unbelievable because of their location and size, certainly did not form 
in deserts. 

Greenland. 
Greenland is the contemporary example of what, according to the Ice Age theory, 
happened to a large part of the world in times past. Greenland belongs to the 
great archipelago that crowns north-eastern Canada, though it is sometimes 
regarded as a part of Europe. It is the largest island in the world, if we 
consider Antarctica and Australia as continents. The island is 1660 
miles long, largely within the Arctic Circle, reaching the northern latitude of 
83. 

Of its 840,000 square miles of surface, over 700,000 are covered with an immense 
mountain of ice that leaves free only the coastal fringes. The thickness of the 
ice is measured by listening to the echo that comes from the bedrock when a 
detonation is set off on top of the ice. It is found to be over six thousand 
feet thick. 

"For a long time it was the belief of many that a large region in the interior 
of Greenland was free from ice, and was perhaps inhabited. It was in part to 
solve this problem that Baron Nordenskjold set out upon his expedition of 1883." 
1 He ascended the icecap from Disko Bay (latitude 69°) and went eastward for 
eighteen days across the ice field. "Rivers were flowing in channels upon the 
surface like those cut on land. only that the pure blue of the ice — walls were, 
by comparison, infinitely more beautiful. These rivers were not, however, 
perfectly continuous. 
After flowing for a distance in channels on the surface, they, one and all, 
plunged with deafening roar into some yawning crevasse, to find their way to the 
sea through sub —  glacial channels. 
Numerous lakes with shores of ice were also encountered." 


"On bending down the ear to the ice," wrote the explorer, "we could hear on 
every side a peculiar subterranean hum, proceeding from rivers flowing within 
the ice; and occasionally a loud single report like that of a cannon gave notice 
of the formation of a new glacier —  cleft.   In the afternoon we saw at some 
distance from us a well — defined pillar of mist which, when we 
approached it, appeared to rise from a bottomless abyss, into which a mighty 
glacier — river fell. 


The vast roaring water — mass had bored for itself a vertical hole, probably 
down to the rock, certainly more than 2000 feet beneath, on which the glacier 
rested." 

The Ice Age survived in Greenland. This arctic island reveals how vast 
continental areas looked in the past. However, it does not explain how ice could 
have covered British Guiana or Madagascar in the tropics. And what is no less 
surprising, the northern part of Greenland, 
according to the concerted opinion of glaciologists, was never glaciated. 
"Probably, then as now, an exception was the northernmost part of Greenland; for 
it seems a rule that the most northerly lands are not, and never were, 
glaciated, writes the polar explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. "The 
islands of the Arctic Archipelago," writes another scientist, "were never 
glaciated. Neither was the interior of Alaska." 

 "It is a remarkable fact that no ice mass covered the low lands of 
northern Siberia any more than those of Alaska," wrote James D. Dana, the 
leading American geologist of the last century.5 In northern Siberia and on 
polar islands in the Arctic Ocean spires of rock were observed that would 
certainly have been broken off if an ice cover had moved over 
those parts. 

Bones of Greenland reindeer have been found in southern New Jersey and southern 
France, and bones of Lapland reindeer in the Crimea. This was explained as due 
to the invasion of ice and the retreat of northern animals to the south. The 
hippopotamus was found in France and England and the lion in Alaska. To explain 
similar occurrences, an interglacial period was introduced into the scheme: the 
land was warmed up and the southern animals visited northern latitudes. And 
since the change from one fauna to another took place repeatedly, four glacial 
periods with three interglacial were generally counted, though the number of 
periods is not consistent with all lands or with all investigators. 


But why the polar lands were not glaciated during the 
ice Age was never explained. Greenland presents still another enigma in the 
preceding formations, those of the Tertiary Age. In the 1860s, O. Heer of Zurich 
published his classical work on the fossil plants of the Arctic; he identified 
the plant remains of the northern parts of Greenland as magnolia and fig trees, 
among other species. Forests of exotic trees and groves of juicy subtropical 
plants grew in the land that lies deep in the cold Arctic and is immersed yearly 
in a continuous polar night of six months' duration. 

 

 

Cordis of the Polar Regions. 

Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean is as far north from Oslo in Norway as Oslo is 
from Naples. 
Heer identified 136 species of fossil plants from Spitsbergen (78 north 
latitude), which he ascribed to the Tertiary Age. Among the plants were pines, 
firs, spruces, and cypresses, also elms, hazels, and water lilies. 

At the northernmost tip of Spitsbergen Archipelago, a bed of black and lustrous 
coal twenty —  five to thirty feet thick was found; it is covered with black 
shale and sandstone incrusted with fossilized land plants. "When we remember 
that this vegetation grew luxuriantly within 8° 15' of the North Pole, in a 
region which is in darkness for half of the year and is now almost continuously 
buried under snow and ice, we can realize the difficulty of the problem in the 
distribution of climate which these facts present to the geologist.  


There must have been great forests on Spitsbergen to produce a bed of coal 
thirty feet thick. 
And even if Spitsbergen, almost one thousand miles inside the Arctic Circle, for 
some unknown reason had the warm climate of the French Riviera on the 
Mediterranean, still these thick forests could not have grown there, because the 
place is six months in continuous night. The rest of the year the sun stands low 
over the horizon. 

 Not only fossil trees and coal but corals, too, were found there. Corals grow 
only in tropical water. In the Mediterranean, in the climate of Egypt or 
Morocco, it is too cold for them. But they grew in 
Spitsbergen. Today large formations of coral covered with snow can be seen. It 
does not solve the problem of their deposition, if they were formed in an older 
geological epoch. 

At some time in the remote past corals grew and are still found on the entire 
fringe of polar North America —   in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.2 In later 
times (Tertiary) fig palms bloomed within the Arctic Circle; forests of Sequoia 
gigantea, the giant tree of California, grew from Bering Strait 
to north of Labrador. "It is difficult to imagine any possible conditions of 
climate in which these plants could grow so near the pole, deprived of sunlight 
for many months of the year."

It is usually said that in ages past the climate all over the world was the 
same, or that a characteristic of the "warm periods which have formed the major 
part of geological tune was the small temperature difference between equatorial 
and polar regions. To this C. E. P. Brooks, in 
his book, Climate through the Ages, says: "So long as the axis of rotation 
remains in nearly its present position relative to the plane of the earth's 
orbit around the sun, the outer limit of the atmosphere in tropical regions must 
receive more of the sun's heat than [in] the middle latitudes, 
and [in] the middle latitudes more than [in] the polar regions; this is an 
invariable law.


 It is much more difficult to think of a cause which will raise the temperature 
of polar regions by some 30 F. or more, while leaving that of equatorial regions 
almost unchanged.  


The continent of Antarctica is larger than Europe, European Russia included. It 
has not a single tree, not a single bush, not a single blade of grass. Very few 
fungi have been found. Reports of polar explorers indicate that no land animals 
larger than insects have been seen, and these insects are exceedingly few and 
degenerate. Penguins and sea gulls come from the sea. Storms 
of great velocity circle the Antarctic most of the year. The greatest part of 
the continent is covered with ice that in some places descends into the ocean. 


E, H. Shackleton, during his expedition to Antarctica in 1907 — 9, found fossil 
wood in the sandstone of a moraine at latitude 85°5'. He also found erratic 
boulders of granite on the slopes of Mount Erebus, a volcano. Then he discovered 
seven seams of coal, also at about latitude 85°. 
The seams are each between three and seven feet thick. Associated with the coal 
is sandstone containing coniferous wood.

Antarctica, too, must have had great forests in the past. 

It often appears that the historian of climate has chosen a field as hard to 
master as it is to square the circle. It seems sometimes that the history of 
climate is a collection of unsolved, even unsolvable, questions. Without drastic 
changes in the position of the terrestrial axis or in the form 
of the orbit or both, conditions could not have existed in which tropical plants 
flourished in polar regions. If anyone is not convinced of this, he should try 
to cultivate coral at the North Pole. 

  

Whales In the Mountains. 

In bogs covering glacial deposits in Michigan, skeletons of two whales were 
discovered. Whales are marine animals. How did they come to Michigan in the 
postglacial epoch? Whales do not travel by land. Glaciers do not carry whales, 
and the ice sheet would not have brought them to the middle of a continent. 
Besides, the whale bones were found in postglacial deposits. Was 
there a sea in Michigan after the glacial epoch, only a few thousand years ago? 

In order to account for whales in Michigan, it was conjectured that in the post 
— glacial epoch the Great Lakes were part of an arm of the sea. At present the 
surface of Lake Michigan is 582 feet above sea level. 

Bones of whale have been found 440 feet above sea level, north of Lake Ontario; 
a skeleton of another whale was discovered in Vermont, more than 500 feet above 
sea level;1 and still another in the Montreal —  Quebec area, about 600 feet 
above sea level.

Although the Humphrey whale and beluga occasionally enter the mouth of the St. 
Lawrence, they do not climb hills. Xo account for the presence of whales in the 
hills of Vermont and Montreal, at elevations of 500 and 600 feet, requires the 
lowering of the land to that extent. 
Another solution would be for an ocean tide, carrying the whales, to have 
trespassed upon the land. In either case Herculean force would have been 
required to push mountains below sea level or to cause the sea to irrupt, but 
the latter explanation is clearly catastrophic. Therefore the 
accepted theory is that the land in the region of Montreal and Vermont was 
depressed more than 600 feet by the weight of ice and kept in this position for 
a while after the ice melted. 

But along the coast of Nova Scotia and New England stumps of trees stand in 
water, telling of once forested country that became submerged. And opposite the 
mouths of the St. Lawrence and the Hudson rivers are deep canyons stretching for 
hundreds of miles into the ocean. These indicate that the land became sea, being 
depressed in post — glacial times. Then did both processes go on simultaneously, 
in neighbouring areas, here up, there down? 

A species of Tertiary whale, Zeuglodon, left its bones in great numbers in 
Alabama and other Gulf States. The bones of these creatures covered the fields 
in such abundance and were "so much of a nuisance on the top of the ground that 
the farmers piled them up to make fences." 
There was no ice cover in the Gulf States; then what had caused the submergence 
and emergence of the land there? 


The ocean coast, not only of the area covered by ice, but all the way from Maine 
to Florida, was at one time submerged and then uplifted. Reginald A. Daly of 
Harvard wrote: "Not long ago in a geological sense, the flat plain from New 
Jersey to Florida was under the sea. At that time the ocean surf broke directly 
on the Old Appalachian Mountains.   The wedge — like mass of marine 
sediments was then uplifted and cut into by rivers, giving the Atlantic Coastal 
Plain of the United States. Why was it uplifted? To the westward are the 
Appalachians. The geologist tells us of the stressful times when a belt of 
rocks, extending from Alabama to Newfoundland, was jammed, 
crumpled, thrust together, to make this mountain system. Why? How was it done? 
In former times the sea flooded the region of the Great Plains from Mexico to 
Alaska, and then withdrew. Why this change?"  

In Georgia marine deposits occur at altitudes of 160 feet and in northern 
Florida at altitudes of "at least 240 feet." Walrus is found in Georgian 
deposits. "Pleistocene [Ice Age] marine features are present along the Gulf 
coast east of the Mississippi River, in some places at altitudes that 
may exceed 200 feet."  In Texas mammalian land animals of the Ice Age are found 
in marine deposits. These areas were not covered by the ice which, advancing 
from the north, reached only as far as Pennsylvania. 

A marine deposit overlies the seaboard of north-eastern states and the Arctic 
coast of Canada; in this deposit walrus, seals and at least five genera of 
whales are found. Marine deposits of land "identified with both glacial and 
interglacial ages," or containing animals of Arctic and of 
temperate latitudes, "exist along both Arctic and Pacific coasts in places 
extending more than 200 miles inland."  


The change in land elevation in the region previously covered by ice is ascribed 
to the removal of the ice cover that weighed down the earth's crust; but what 
changed the elevation of other areas outside the ice cover? If the land slowly 
rose when freed from ice and carried the bones of whales to the summits of 
hills, why did the neighbouring land subside miles deep, as the 
undersea canyons indicate? 

Daly concluded: "The Pleistocene history of North America holds ten major 
mysteries for every one that has already been solved."  

 



CHAPTER V,
TIDAL WAVE. 

 
Fissures in the Rocks. 

JOSEPH PRESTWICH, professor of geology at Oxford (1874 — 88) and acknowledged 
authority on the Quaternary (Glacial and Recent) Age in England, was struck by 
numerous phenomena, all of which led him to the belief that "the south of 
England had been submerged to the depth of not less than about 1000 feet between 
the Glacial — or Post — Glacial — and the recent or Neolithic [Late Stone 
periods."  In a spasmodic movement of the terrain, the coast and the land masses 
of southern England were submerged to such a depth that points 1000 feet high 
were below sea level.

A most striking phenomenon among those observed by Prestwich was in the fissures 
in the rocks. In the neighbourhood of Plymouth on the Channel, clefts of various 
widths in limestone formations are filled with rock fragments, angular and 
sharp, and with bones of animals —   mammoth, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, 
horse, polar bear, bison. The bones are "broken into innumerable fragments. No 
skeleton is found entire. The separate bones, in fact, have been dispersed in 
the most irregular manner, and without any bearing to their relative position in 
the skeleton. Neither do they show wear, nor have they been gnawed by beasts of 
prey, though they occur with the bones of hyena, wolf, bear and Hon." In other 
places in Devonshire and also in Pembrokeshire in Wales, vociferous 
breccias or conglomerates of broken bones and stones in fissures in limestone 
consist of angular rock fragments and "broken and splintered" bones with sharp 
fractured edges in a "fresh state," and in "splendid condition, showing no 
traces of gnawing.

If the crevices were pitfalls into which the animals fell alive, then some of 
the skeletons would have been preserved entire. But this is "never the case." 
"Again, if left for a time exposed in the fissures, the bones would be variously 
weathered, which they are not. Nor would the mere fall have been sufficient to 
have caused the extensive breakage the bones have undergone: these, I 
consider, are fatal objections to this explanation, and none other has since 
been offered," wrote Prestwich. 

Fissures in the rocks, not only in England and Wales, but all over western 
Europe, are choked with bones of animals, some of extinct races, others, though 
of the same age, of races still surviving. Osseous breccia in the valleys around 
Paris have been described, as well as fissures in the rocks on the tops of 
isolated hills in central France. They contain remnants of mammoth, 
woolly rhinoceros, and other animals. These hills are often of considerable 
height. "One very striking example" is found near Semur in Burgundy: a hill —  
Mont Genay —   1430 feet high is capped by a breccia containing remains of 
mammoth, reindeer, horse, and other animals. 

In the rock on the summit of Mont de Sautenay — a flat — topped hill near 
Chalon— sur— Sadne between Dijon and Lyons — there is a fissure filled, with 
animal bones. "Why should so many wolves, bears, horses, and oxen have ascended 
a hill isolated on all sides?" asked Albert Gaudry, professor at the Jardin des 
Plantes. According to him, the bones in this cleft are mostly broken and 
splintered into innumerable sharp fragments and are "evidently not those of 
animals devoured by beasts of prey; nor have they been broken by man. 
Nevertheless, the remains of wolf were particularly abundant, together with 
those of cave lion, bear, rhinoceros, horse, ox, and deer. It is not 
possible to suppose that animals of such different natures, and of such 
different habitats, would in life ever have been together."

 Yet the state of preservation of the bones indicates that the 
animals — all of them —   perished in the same period of time. Prestwich thought 
that the animal bones, "now associated in the fissure on the summit of the 
hill," were found in common heaps 
because, "we may suppose, all these animals had fled [there] to escape the 
rising waters."

On the Mediterranean coast of France there are numerous clefts in the rocks 
crammed to overflowing with animal bones. Marcel de Serres wrote in his survey 
of the Montagne de Pedemar in the Department of Gard: "It is within this limited 
area that the strange phenomenon has happened of the accumulation of a large 
quantity of bones of diverse animals in hollows or fissures."   De Serres found 
the bones all broken into fragments, but neither gnawed nor rolled. 
No coprolites (hardened animal faces) were found, indicating that the dead 
beasts had not lived in these hollows or fissures. 


The Rock of Gibraltar is intersected by numerous crevices filled with bones. The 
bones are broken and splintered. The remains of panther, lynx, caffir —  cat, 
hyena, wolf, bear, rhinoceros, horse, wild boar, red deer, fallow deer, ibex, 
ox, hare, rabbit, have been found in these ossiferous fissures. The bones are 
most likely broken into thousands of fragments —   — none are 
worn or rolled, nor any of them gnawed, though so many carnivores then lived on 
the rock," says Prestwich, adding: "A great and common danger, such as a great 
flood, alone could have driven together the animals of the plains and of the 
crags and caves."  

The Rock is extensively faulted and fissured. Beaches high on Gibraltar show 
that the expression that makes of this rock the symbol of immovability is 
unfounded. These beaches indicate that at some time the waters of the sea lapped 
the Rock at the 600 — foot mark', the Rock now rises over 1370 feet above the 
sea. It was therefore, in Quaternary times [or the age of man], an island not 
more than about 800 feet, or less high, which rose by successive stages to 
its present height. It is more than probable, however, that at some time before 
it settled at that level, the whole of the area was up heaved to such an extent 
that a land passage was formed to the African coast.
 
A human molar and some flints worked by Paleolithic (old stone) man, as well as 
broken pieces of pottery of Neolithic (recent or polished stone) man, were 
discovered among the annual bones in some of the crevices of the Rock. 

On Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily, as on the continent of Europe and the British 
Isles, the broken bones of animals choke the fissures in the rocks. The hills 
around Palermo in Sicily disclosed an "extraordinary quantity of bones of 
hippopotami — in complete hecatombs." 
"Twenty tons of these bones were shipped from around the one cave of San Ciro, 
near Palermo, within the first six months of exploiting them, and they were so 
fresh that they were sent to Marseilles to furnish animal charcoal for use in 
the sugar factories. How could this bone breccia have been accumulated? No 
predaceous animals could have brought together and left such a collection of 
bones." 

 No teeth marks of hyena or of any other animal are found in this osseous mass. 
Did the animals come there to die as old age approached? "The bones are those of 
animals of all ages down to the foetus, nor do they show traces of weathering or 
exposure. 

"The extremely fresh condition of the bones, proved by the retention of so large 
a proportion of animal matter," shows that "the event was, geologically, 
comparatively recent"; and the "fact that animals of all ages were involved in 
the catastrophe" shows it "to have been sudden." Prestwich was of the opinion 
that, together with central Europe and England, the Mediterranean islands, 
Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily, had been submerged. "The animals in the plain of 
Palermo naturally retreated, as the waters advanced, deeper into the 
amphitheatre of hills until they found themselves embayed.  the animals must 
have thronged together in vast multitudes, crushing into the more accessible 
caves, and swarming over the ground at their entrance, until overtaken by the 
waters and destroyed. 
 Rocky debris and large blocks from the sides of the hills were 
hurled down by the current of water, crushing and smashing the bones."  


Prestwich, who subscribed to the Ice Age theory and is regarded as the foremost 
authority on the geology of the Ice Age in England, was compelled to construct a 
theory of submergence of Western Europe and of' the Mediterranean coasts at the 
close of the Glacial or so — called Post — Glacial Period, and immediately 
preceding the Neolithic or Recent Period," which quotation was 
the title of a paper read by him before the Royal Society of London. It was 
published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions. It became clear to 
Prestwich that it was "impossible to account for the specific geological 
phenomena, by any agency of which our time has offered us experience." 

 "The agency, whatever it was, must have acted with sufficient violence to 
smash the bones."  "Nor could this have been the work of a long time, for the 
entombed bones, though much broken, are singularly fresh."  "Certain communities 
of early man must have suffered in the general catastrophe."  

 
The Rock of Gibraltar rose to close the strait, then sank down part way; the 
coast of England and even hills 1000 feet high were submerged; the island of 
Sicily was inundated, as were elevations in the interior of France. Everywhere 
the evidence betokens a catastrophe that occurred in not too remote times and 
engulfed an area of at least continental dimensions. Great avalanches of water 
loaded with stones were hurled on the land, shattering massifs, and 
searching out the fissures among the rocks, rushed through them, breaking and 
smashing every animal in their way. 

In Prestwich's opinion the cause of the catastrophe was the sinking of the 
continent and its subsequent elevation, which was sudden, and during which water 
from the heights broke upon lower levels, bringing chaos and destruction. 
Prestwich suspected that the area involved must 
have been much larger than that discussed in his works. He gave no reason for 
such submergence and emergence. The catastrophe occurred when England was 
entering the age of polished stone, or, possibly, when the centres of ancient 
civilization were in the Bronze Age. 

In a later section of this book are presented archaeological evidences of vast 
catastrophes that more than once shattered every city and settlement of the 
ancient world! Crete, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Iran, Syria, 
Palestine, Cyprus, and Egypt were simultaneously and repeatedly laid waste. 
These catastrophes occurred when Egypt was in the Bronze Age and 
when Europe was entering the Neolithic Age. 

 

 

The Norfolk Forest Bed.

As an area is investigated, more problems are raised than are solved. Britain is 
the land of great geologists, the founders and leaders of that science, and the 
soil of Britain has been explored more than any other soil on the five 
continents or in the seven seas. Examination of Britain's 

record of the Ice Age levels discloses a "complex interbedding of drift sheets 
derived from different sources." "When we add the additional complications 
imposed by thin drifts, scanty interglacial deposits, and the frequent presence 
in fossil — bearing beds of secondary [displaced] fossils derived from the 
reworking of older horizons, we get a truly difficult over — all problem  
All in all, British glacial stratigraphic research has encountered exceptional 
difficulties, writes R. 

In Cromer, Norfolk, close to the North Sea coast, and in other places on the 
British Isles, "forest —  beds'' have been found. The name derives from the 
presence of a great number of stumps of 
trees once supposed to have rooted and grown where they are now found. Many of 
the stumps are in upright positions, and their roots are often interlocked. 
Today these forests are recognized as having drifted; the roots do not end in 
small fibers, but are broken off, in most cases one to three feet from the 
trunk. 

Bones of sixty species of mammals, besides birds, frogs, and snakes, were found 
in the forest — bed of Norfolk. Among the mammals were the sabre —  toothed 
tiger, huge bear (Ursus horribilis), mammoth, straight —  tusked elephant, 
hippopotamus, rhinoceros, bison, and modern horse (Equus caballus). Two 
exclusively northern species — glutton and musk — ox — were found among animals 
from temperate and tropical latitudes. Of the thirty species of large land 
animals of the 
forest — bed, only six still exist in any part of the world — all the others are 
extinct — and only three are presently native to the British Isles. 

The abundance of animals of so many different species on an island the size of 
Great Britain caused speculation that at one time it must have been part of a 
continent and that the Strait of Dover was not then opened. It was furl Flint, 
Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch, 

Remains of sixty — eight species of plants were obtained from the Norfolk forest 
— bed; they indicate "a climate and geographical conditions very similar to 
those of Norfolk at the present day." 

In view of the sensitivity of plants to thermal conditions, the conclusion might 
well be drawn that the climate at the time the forest — bed was deposited was 
not different from the present, which conclusion the fauna, comprising southern 
as well as northern animals, contradicts. 

the conjectured that the Rhine flowed on to the north across the area at present 
occupied by the sea — the Thames being one of its tributaries and that the 
estuary of the Rhine was for some time at Cromer; that the trees were carried 
there by the Rhine; that they grew on the banks of the river, and the water 
washed out their roots and the falling trunks were carried away and 
deposited as the forest — bed. 

"It is necessary to point out, however, that the opening of the Straits 
of Dover is a geological revolution of considerable magnitude, such as one might 
well hesitate to ascribe to the comparatively short period embraced by glacial 
and post — glacial time." 

Immediately above the forest — bed there is a fresh — water deposit with arctic 
plants — arctic willow and dwarf birch — and land shells. It is "a remarkable 
change from the climatic conditions of the Forest — bed below.
 It is such as to indicate a lowering of temperature of about 20°."  

On top of the arctic fresh — water plants and shells is a marine bed. Astarte 
bovealis and other mollusk shells are found "in the position of life, with both 
valves united." These species "are arctic, but, as the bed seems in other places 
to contain Ostrea edulis [a mollusk], which requires a temperate sea, the 
evidence is conflicting as to the climate." 

What could have brought, together or in quick succession, all these animals and 
plants, from the tundra of the Arctic Circle and from the jungle of the tropics, 
from lush oak forest and from desert, from lands of many latitudes and 
altitudes, from fresh —  water lakes and rivers, and from the salt 
seas of the north and the south? The shells with closed valves furnish evidence 
that the mollusks did not die a natural death but were buried alive. 

It would appear that this agglomeration was brought together by a moving force 
that rushed overland, left in its wake marine sand and deep — water creatures, 
swept animals and trees from the south to the north, and then, turning from the 
polar regions back toward the warm regions, mixed its burden of arctic plants 
and animals in the same sediment where it had left those from 
the south. Animals and plants of land and sea from various parts of the world 
were thrown together, one group upon another, by some elemental force that could 
not have been an overflowing river. Also bones of animals already extinct in 
earlier epochs were carried out of their beds and thrown into the jumble. 

The finding of warm —  climate animals and plants in polar regions, coral and 
palms in the Arctic Circle, presents these alternatives; either these animals 
and plants lived there at some time in the past or they were brought there by 
tidal waves. In some cases the first is true, as where 
stumps of trees (palms) are found in situ. In other cases the second is true, as 
where, in one and the same deposit, animals and plants from sea and land, from 
south and north, are found in a medley. But in both cases one thing is apparent: 
such changes could not have occurred unless the terrestrial globe veered from 
its path, either because of a disturbance in the speed of rotation or because of 
a shift in the astronomical or geographical position of the terrestrial axis. 

In many cases it can be shown that southern plants grew in the north; either the 
geographical position of the pole and the latitudes or the inclination of the 
axis must have changed since then. 
In many other cases it can be shown that a marine irruption threw into one 
deposit living creatures from the tropics and from the Arctic; the change must 
have been sudden, instantaneous. We have both kinds of cases. Consequently there 
must have been changes in the position of the axis, and they must have been 
sudden. 

 


Cumberland Cavern. 

In 1912 near Cumberland, Maryland, workmen cutting the way for a railroad with 
dynamite and steam shovel came upon a cavern or a closed fissure with "a 
peculiar assemblage of animals. 
Many of the species are comparable to forms now living in the vicinity of the 
cave; but others are distinctly northern or Boreal in their affinities, and some 
are related to species peculiar to the southern, or Lower Austral, region." Thus 
wrote J. W. Gidley and C. L. Gazin of the United States National Museum. 

A crocodile and a tapir are representative of southern climate; a wolverine and 
a lemming "are distinctly northern. It seems "highly improbable" that they 
coexisted in one place; the usual assumption was made that the cave received the 
animal remains in a glacial and an interglacial period. However, the scientist 
who explored the cavern for the Smithsonian Institution as soon as it was 
discovered and who returned there in the following years for closer 
investigation, J. W. Gidley, contended that the animals were contemporaneous: 
the position of the bones excluded any other explanation. "This strange 
assemblage of fossil remains occurs hopelessly intermingled. 

The bones of the Cumberland cavern were "for the most part much broken, yet show 
no sign of being water worn." 3 This would signify that the bones were not 
carried for any length of time by a stream; however, it is quite possible that 
the animals were dashed against the rocks by an avalanche of water that carried 
them from far off, broke their bones inside their bodies —  thus the 
bones are not water — worn — and there smashed together all kinds of animals; 
then gravel and rocks enclosed them. 


So also it happened that animals of northern regions —   —   —  wolverine and 
lemming, the long —  tailed shrew, mink, red squirrel, muskrat, porcupine, hare, 
and elk —  were heaped together with animals "suggesting warmer climatic 
conditions" —  peccary, crocodile, and tapir. Animals that now live on the 
western coast of America — coyote, badger, and puma like cat — are in this 
assemblage. Animals that live in areas of plentiful water supply — beaver and 
musk — rat and 
mink — are found in the Cumberland cavern jumbled together with animals of arid 
regions —   coyote and badger —   and those of wooded regions together with 
animals of open terrain, like the horse and the hare. This is truly "a peculiar 
assemblage of animals." Extinct animals are found there intermingled with extant 
forms. Death came to all of them at the same time. Any theory that 
attempts to explain the presence of animal bones from various climates in one 
and the same locality by a sequence of glacial and inter glacial periods must 
stumble on the bones of the Cumberland cavern. 

 

 
In Northern China.

In the village of Choukoutien, near Peiping (Peking) in northern China, in 
caverns and in fissures in rocks, a great mass of animal bones was found. "The 
most astonishing fact was the discovery of this unimaginable wealth of bones of 
fossil animals" (Weidenreich). These rich ossiferous deposits occur in 
association with human skeletal remains. 

"As Weidenreich began his studies, other amazing, nearly unexplainable features 
appeared." 
The fractured bones of seven human individuals were found there. "A European, a 
Melanesian, and an Eskimo type lying dead in one close—knit group in a cave, on 
a Chinese hillside! 
Weidenreich marvelled.' It was assumed that the seven inhabitants of the narrow 
fissure were murdered because their skulls and bones are fractured. It is 
possible that these several types of man came together in Choukoutien, since the 
migrations of ancient man were on a greater scale than is generally thought. 


But the finders of the conglomerates of bones were perplexed also by the animal 
remains: the bones belonged to animals of the tundras, or a cold — wet climate, 
of steppes and prairies, or dry climate; and of jungles, or warm — moist 
climate, "in a strange mixture. Mammoths and buffaloes and ostriches and arctic 
animals left their teeth, horns, claws, and bones in one great melange, and 
though we have met very similar situations in various places in other parts of 
the world, the geologists of China regarded their find as enigmatic. 

"No conclusive evidence can be derived from this faunal assemblage as regards 
the prevailing temperature at the time when it lived," says J. S. Lee in his 
Geology of China. Some animals point "to a rather severe climate," other animals 
to "a warm climate." 
"It is almost inconceivable" that animals of such various habitats should live 
together. "And yet their remains are found side by side." 

It is asserted that since before the age of man — since late Tertiary times and 
through the time of the Great Ice Age in Europe and America — northern China 
experienced "progressive desiccation interrupted by pluvial intervals." 

 Arid conditions prevailed over northern China and "the general absence of ice — 
sculptured features" led the naturalist to the conclusion that in northern 
China, as in northern Siberia, there were no glacial conditions and no formation 
of ice cover. "On the other hand, certain obscure facts not in agreement with 
the foregoing interpretation are accumulating throughout the country.  Erratic 
blocks and striated boulders are found in the valleys and on the hills.

But if there was no ice cover in northern China or in Siberia to the north, what 
was it that carried the bones of animals into fissures in the rocks? And what 
striated the rocks and transported boulders far from the source of their origin 
and high onto hills? 

At the same time convincing evidence was brought forth that "the mountain ranges 
in western China have been elevated since the Glacial Age."


At Tientsin marine sands and clays with the shells of sea molluscs have been 
found exposed on the surface of the ground. Borings made in the same location 
"showed the presence of sand and clays with fresh — water shells down to a depth 
of more than 507 feet below the marine layer which is exposed on the surface."  
Thus signs of both recent elevation and submergence are present. Was not the 
irrupted sea the agent that threw together the animals of various latitudes 
and carried rocks of foreign origin to the tops of hills? Did not the mountains 
that sprang up in the age of man rise in the upheaval that also moved the seas 
out of their borders? 

Were not animals of various habitats swept into fissures — human beings with 
them — when mountains rose, seas irrupted, rock debris was carried toward 
summits, and climate changed? 

The fossils of Choukoutien are found imbedded in a reddish loam, a mixture of 
clay and sand, the deposition of which belongs to the same stage as the fossils; 
this reddish loam occurs extensively all over northern China. Teilhard and Young 
concluded that the observed coloration 
"can neither be a quality inherited from the original material of which the 
loams are composed, nor a condition brought about by slow chemical processes 
long after their formation." The coloration of this widespread formation being 
of some extraneous and unexplained origin, the only definite statement 
concerning it is that some violent change of climate, in itself not the 
cause of the change of color, occurred "immediately before the deposition of red 
loams — or soon after the deposition." 

Similar observations were made in other parts of the world. Drift, the 
displacement of which is attributed to the ice cover, is often found tinted a 
reddish color. R. T. Chamberlin, looking for the origin of this hue, offered the 
hypothesis that 'granite pebbles were decomposed, the liberated iron staining 
the drift reddish." 


H. Pettersson, of the Oceanographic Institute at Gutenberg, Sweden, on examining 
red clay from the bottom of the Pacific, found that the abysmal clay contains 
layers of ash and a high content of nickel, almost completely absent in the 
water. Peterson, whose work will be described on a later page, attributed the 
origin of nickel and iron in the clay to prodigious showers of meteorites; 
the lavas of the oceanic bedrock he recognized as "of recent origin."  

 
All this points to a great shower of ferruginous dust at a recent geological 
date, when the red clays of the Pacific, the drift of the Western Hemisphere, 
and the loam of China were deposited, and when the climate also changed. 

 
 

The Asphalt Pit of La Brea.

At Rancho La Brea, once on the western outskirts of Los Angeles, and at present 
in the immediate neighbourhood of the luxurious shopping center of that city, 
bones of extinct animals and of still living species are found in abundance in 
asphalt mixed with clay and sand. In 1875 some fossil remains of this bituminous 
deposit were described for the first time. By then thousands of tons of asphalt 
had already been removed and shipped to San Francisco for roofing and paving. 

Beds of petroleum shale (rock of laminated structure formed by the consolidation 
of clay), ascribed to the Tertiary Age, having in many places a thickness of 
about two thousand feet, extend from Cape Mendocino in northern California to 
Los Angeles and beyond, a distance of over four hundred and fifty miles. The 
asphalt beds of Rancho La Brea are an outcrop of this large bituminous 
formation. 

Since 1906 the University of California has been collecting the fossils of 
Rancho La Brea, "a most remarkable mass of skeletal material." When found, these 
fossils were regarded as representing the fauna of the late Tertiary, Pliocene 
or early Pleistocene, Ice Age. The Pleistocene strata, fifty to one hundred feet 
thick, overlie the Tertiary formations in which the main oil-bearing beds are 
found. The deposit containing the fossils consists of alluvium, clay, 
coarse sand, gravel, and asphalt. 
Most spectacular among the animals found at Rancho La Brea is the sabre — 
toothed tiger, previously unknown elsewhere in the New or Old World, but found 
since then in other places too. The canine teeth of this animal, over ten inches 
long, projected from his mouth like two curved knives. With this weapon the 
tiger tore the flesh of his prey. 
The animal remains are crowded together in the asphalt pit in an unbelievable 
agglomeration. In the first excavation carried on by the University of 
California "a bed of bones was encountered in which the number of sabre—tooth 
and wolf skulls together averaged twenty per cubic yard."  No fewer than seven 
hundred skulls of the sabre —toothed tiger have been recovered. 

Among other animals unearthed in this pit were bison, horses, camels, sloths, 
mammoths, mastodons, and also birds, including peacocks. 
In the time following the discovery of America this region of the coast was 
rather sparsely populated with animals; early immigrants found only "semi —  
starved coyotes and rattlesnakes."
But when Rancho La Brea received its skeletons "there lived an amazing 
assemblage of animals in Western America."  

To explain the presence of these bones in the asphalt, the theory was offered 
that the animals became entrapped in the tar, sank in it, and were embedded in 
asphalt when the tar hardened. 
However, the large number of animals that filled this asphalt bed to overflowing 
is baffling. 
Moreover, the fact that the vast majority of them are carnivorous, whereas in 
any fauna the majority of animals would be herbivorous — otherwise the 
carnivores would have no victims for their daily food — requires explanation. So 
it was assumed that some animal, caught in the tar, cried out, thus attracting 
more of its kind, and these were trapped, too, and at their cries carnivorous 
animals came, followed by more and more. 

This explanation might be valid if the state of the bones did not testify that 
the ensnarement of 
the animals by the tar happened under violent circumstances. Oil from which the 
volatile 
elements have evaporated leaves asphalt, tar, and other bitumens. "As the 
greater number of 
the animals in the Rancho La Brea beds have been entrapped in the tar, it is to 
be presumed that in a large percentage of cases the major portion of 
the skeleton has been preserved. Contrary to expectations, connected skeletons 
are not 
common."

 The bones are "splendidly" preserved in the asphalt, but they are "broken, 
mashed, contorted, and mixed in a most heterogeneous mass, such as could never 
have resulted from the chance trapping and burial of a few stragglers."  

Were not the herds of frightened animals found at La Brea engulfed in a 
catastrophe? Could it be that at this particular spot large herds of wild 
beasts, mostly carnivorous, were overwhelmed by falling gravel, tempests, tides, 
and raining bitumen?  Similar finds in asphalt have been unearthed in two other 
places in California, at Carpinteria and McKittrick; the depositions were 
made under comparable circumstances. The plants of the Carpintena tar pits were 
found, with one exception, to have been "members of the Recent flora," or of the 
flora now living 200 miles to the north.

Separate bones of a human skeleton were also discovered in the asphalt of La 
Brea. The skull belonged to an Indian of the Ice Age, it is assumed. However, it 
does not show any deviation from the normal skulls of Indians. 

The human bones were found in the asphalt under the bones of a vulture of an 
extinct species. 
These finds suggest that the time when the human body was buried preceded the 
extinction of that species of vulture or at least coincided with it; in a 
turmoil of elements the vulture met its death, as did possibly the rest of its 
kind, with the saber toothed tiger and many other species and genera. 
Agate Spring Quarry.

In Sioux County, Nebraska, on the south side of the Niobrara River, in Agate 
Spring Quarry, is a fossil bearing deposit up to twenty inches thick. The state 
of the bones indicates a long and violent transportation before they reached 
their final resting place. "The fossils are in such remarkable profusion in 
places as to form a veritable pavement of interlacing bones, very few of 
which are in their natural articulation with one another," says R. S. Lull, 
director of the Peabody Museum at Yale, in his book on fossils.

The profusion of bones in Agate Spring Quarry may be judged by a single block 
now in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This block contains 
about 100 bones to the square foot. There is no way of explaining such an 
aggregation of fossils as a natural death retreat of animals of various genera. 

The animals found there were mammals. The most numerous was the small twin —  
horned rhinoceros. There was another extinct animal with a head not unlike that 
of a horse but with heavy legs and claws like those of a carnivorous animal; and 
bones of a giant swine that stood six feet high were also unearthed. 

The Carnegie Museum, which likewise excavated in Agate Spring Quarry, in a space 
of 1350 square feet found 164,000 bones or about 820 skeletons. A mammal 
skeleton averages 200 bones. This area represents only one twentieth of the 
fossil bed in the quarry, suggesting to Lull that the entire area would yield 
about 16,400 skeletons of the twin —  horned rhinoceros, 500 skeletons of the 
clawed horse, and 100 skeletons of the giant swine. 

A few miles to the east, in another quarry, were found skeletons of an animal 
which, because of its similarity to two extant species, is called a gazelle 
camel. A herd of these animals was destroyed in a disaster. As in Agate Spring 
Quarry, the fossil bones were deposited in sand transported by water. The 
transportation was in a violent cataract of water, sand, and 
gravel, that left marks on the bones. 

Tens of thousands of animals were carried over an unknown distance, then smashed 
into a common grave. The catastrophe was most probably ubiquitous, for these 
animals —  the small twin —  horned rhinoceros, clawed horse, giant swine, and 
gazelle camel —  did not survive, but became extinct. There is nothing in their 
skeletons to warrant regarding them as degenerate and doomed to extinction. And 
the very circumstances in which they are found bespeak a violent death at the 
hands of the elements, not slow extinction in a process of evolution. 

In many other places of the world similar finds have been made, and in one of 
the sections to follow we shall discuss the famous bone quarry of Siwalik. In 
the United States, Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, twenty miles south of Cincinnati, 
contained the bones of one hundred mastodons, besides many other extinct 
animals. President Jefferson gathered there his famous collection of 
fossils. In San Pedro Valley, California, skeletons of the mastodon are found 
standing upright, in the posture in which they died, mired in gravel, ash, and 
sand. Fossils found in john Day Basin, Oregon, and the glacial Lake Florissant, 
Colorado, are embedded in volcanic ash. In the Southern states fossil bones are 
quarried for the commercial exploitation of phosphates. 

In Switzerland a conglomerate of bones of animals that belong to different 
climates and habitats was found in Kesslerloch near Thayngen: Alpine types are 
there in one "Tiergemisch" with animals of the steppe and of the forest fauna.2 
In Germany a gravel pit at Neukoin, a suburb of Berlin, disclosed two faunas: 
mammoth, musk ox, reindeer, and arctic fox "suggest a boreal climate"; lion, 
hyena, bison, ox, and two species of elephant suggest varying degrees of warmer 
climate." The faunas were interpreted as belonging to two periods — glacial and 
interglacial — but the bones were found all together. "It seems probable that 
the relations are more complicated than has been realized. There has not yet 
been found "a satisfactory climatic interpretation. 


Great multitudes of animals that filled prairies and forests, water and air, 
forms, fragile or sturdy, with an urge to live and multiply, were more than once 
suddenly called upon to write their names in the register of extinction. 

 



CHAPTER VI,
MOUNTAINS AND RIFTS. 

Mountain Thrusts in the Alps and Elsewhere. 

THE AGE of a rock formation is ascertained with the help of the fossils it 
contains. To the surprise of many scientists, it was found that mountains have 
travelled, since older formations have been pushed over on top of younger ones. 

Chief Mountain in Montana is a massif standing several thousand feet above the 
Great Plains. It "has been thrust bodily upon the much younger strata of the 
Great Plains, and then driven over them eastward, for a distance of at least 
eight miles. Indeed, the thrust may have been several times eight miles," writes 
Daly.

"By similar thrusting, the whole Rocky Mountain Front, for hundreds of miles, 
has been pushed up and then out, many miles over the plains."  

Such titanic displacements of mountains have been found in many places on the 
earth. The displacement of the Alps is especially extensive. 

"During the building of the Alps gigantic slabs of rock, thousands of feet 
thick, hundreds of miles long, and tens of miles wide, were thrust up and then 
over, relatively to the rocks beneath. The direction of the relative over — 
thrusting movement was from Africa toward the main mass of Europe on the north. 
The visible rocks of the northern Alps of Switzerland have thus been shoved 
northward distances of the order of 100 miles. In a sense the Alps used to be on 
the present site of northern Italy. Mont Blanc was moved from its place and the 
Matterhorn was overturned. 

Those portions of the Alps that surround the valley of the Linth, in the canton 
of Glarus in Switzerland, have lower parts of Tertiary formations or of the age 
of mammals; their upper parts are Permian (preceding the age of reptiles) and 
Jurassic (of the age of reptiles). This impels to one of two conclusions! either 
the division of rocks into sequences based on the fossils they contain is 
fallacious, or the old mountains were moved bodily and set on the shoulders of 
more recent formations. The latter conclusion is chosen; and if De Saussure's 
notion of the sea sweeping over the Alps appeared fantastic, the idea of 
mountains travelling considerable distances must sound even more fantastic, 
unless we know of a physical cause that could have brought it about. But even 
the very, here word not to interpret, of mountain building itself is obscure. 

The problem of mountain— making is a vexing one: Many of them [mountains! are 
composed of tangentially compressed and over thrust rocks that indicate scores 
of miles of circumferential shortening in the Earth's crust. Radial shrinkage is 
woefully inadequate to cause the observed amount of horizontal compression. 
Therein lies the real perplexity of the problem of mountain —  
making. Geologists have not yet found a satisfactory escape from this dilemma," 
says F. K. 
The origin of the mountains is not explained; and still less is their thrust or 
shift across valleys and over other mountains. The Alps were shoved a hundred 
miles to the north. Chief Mountain in Montana travelled across the plains and 
climbed the slope of another mountain and  
settled on top of it. 

All of the Glacier National Park in Montana and all the Rocky Mountain 
area up to the Yellowhead Pass in Alberta" moved for many miles. The mountains 
of western Scotland shifted from their places. The entire length of the 
Norwegian mountains showed a similar over thrust. What could have caused these 
mountains to travel across valley and uphill with their masses of granite 
weighing billions of tons? No force acting from inside the earth, 
pulling inward or pushing outward, could have created these overthrusts. Only 
twisting could have produced them. It could hardly have occurred if the rotation 
and revolution of our planet had never been disturbed. 

In the Alps, caverns with human artefacts of stone and bone dating from the 
Pleistocene (Ice Age) have been found at remarkably high altitudes. During the 
Ice Age the slopes and valleys of the Alps, more than other parts of the 
continent, must have been covered by glaciers; today in central Europe there are 
great glaciers only in the Alps. The presence of men at high altitudes 
during the Pleistocene or Paleolithic (rude stone) Age seems baffling. 

The cavern of Wildkirch, near the top of Ebenalp, is 4900 feet above sea level. 
It was occupied by man sometime during the Pleistocene. "Even more remarkable, 
in respect to altitude, is the cavern of Drachenloch at a height of 2445 meters 
[8028 feet)," near the top of Drachenberg, south of Ragaz. This is a steep, snow 
covered massif. "Both of these stations are in the very 
heart of the Alpine field of glaciation.  

A continental ice sheet thousands of feet thick filled the entire valley between 
the Alps and the Jura, where now Take Geneva lies, to the height of the erratic 
boulders torn from the Alps and placed on the Jura Mountains. In the same 
geological epoch, between two advances of the ice cover, during an interglacial 
intermission, human beings must have occupied caverns 8000 feet above sea level. 
No satisfactory explanation for such location of Stone Age man has ever been 
offered. 

Could it be that the mountains rose as late as in the age of man and carried up 
with them the caverns of early man? In recent years evidence has grown rapidly 
to show, in contrast to previous opinions, that the Alps and other mountains 
rose and attained their present heights, and also travelled long distances, in 
the age of man. 

"Mountain uplifts amounting to many thousands of feet have occurred within the 
Pleistocene epoch [Ice Age] itself." This occurred with "the Cordilleran 
mountain system in North and South America, the Alps — Caucasus — Central Asian 
system, and many others.

The fact of the late up thrust of the major ridges of the world created, when 
recognized, great perplexity among geologists who, under the weight of much 
evidence, were forced to this view. 
The revision of the concepts is not always radical enough. Not only in the age 
of man, but in the age of historical man, mountains were thrust up, valleys were 
torn out, lakes were dragged uphill and emptied. Helmut Gams and Rolf Nordhagen 
brought together very extensive material concerning the Bavarian Alps and the 
Tyrol, or Eastern Alps. We shall deal with this material in Chapter XI, 
Klimasturz. 

"The great mountain chains challenge credulity by their extreme youth," wrote 
the explorer Bailey Willis about Asian mountains. 
The Himalayas. 

The Himalayas, highest mountains in the world, rise like a thousand — mile — 
long wall north of India. 
This mountain wall stretches from Kashmir in the west to and beyond Bhutan in 
the east, with many of its peaks towering over 20,000 feet, and Mount Everest 
reaching 29,000 feet, or over five miles. The summits of these lofty massifs are 
capped by eternal snow in those regions of the heavens where eagles do not fly 
nor any other bird of the sky. 

Scientists of the nineteenth century were dismayed to find that, as high as they 
climbed, the rocks of the massifs yielded skeletons of marine animals, fish that 
swim in the ocean, and shells of molluscs. This was evidence that the Himalayas 
had risen from beneath the sea. At some tune in the past azure waters of the 
ocean streamed over Mount Everest, carrying fish, crabs, and molluscs, and 
marine animals looked down to where now we look up and where man, after many 
unsuccessful efforts, has until now succeeded only once in putting his feet. 
Until recently it was assumed that the Himalayas rose from the bottom of the sea 
to their present height tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of years ago. Such 
a long period of time, so long ago, was enough even for the Himalayas to have 
risen to their present height. Do we not, when we tell young listeners a story 
about giants and monsters, begin with: Once upon a time, long, long ago. 
 And the giants are no longer threatening and the monsters are no longer real. 

According to the general geological scheme, five hundred million years ago the 
first forms of life appeared on earth; two hundred million years ago life 
developed into reptilian forms that dominated the scene, achieving gigantic 
size. The huge reptiles died out seventy million years ago, and mammals occupied 
the earth — they belonged to the Tertiary. According to this scheme, the last 
mountain uplifts took place at the end of the Tertiary, during the Pliocene; 
this period lasted until a million years ago, when the Quaternary period, the 
age of man, began. 

The Quaternary is also the time of the Ice Age or the Pleistocene — the 
Paleolithic or Old Stone Age; and the very end of the Quaternary, since the end 
of the Ice Age, is called Recent time: the Neolithic (Late, or polished, Stone), 
Bronze, and Iron cultures. Since the appearance of man on earth, or since the 
beginning of the Ice Age, there have been no uplifts on any substantial scale. 
In other words, we have been told, the profile of the earth with its mountains 
and oceans was already established when man first appeared. 

In the last few decades, however, numerous facts have emerged from mountains and 
valleys that tell a different story. In Kashmir, Helmut de Terra discovered 
sedimentary deposits of an ancient sea bottom that was elevated at places to an 
altitude of 5000 feet or more and tilted at an angle of as much as 40°; the 
basin was dragged up by the rise of the mountain. But this was 
entirely unexpected. These deposits contain Palaeolithic fossils." And this, 
according to Arnold Heim, Swiss geologist, would make it plausible that the 
mountain passes in the Himalayas may have risen, in the age of man, three 
thousand feet or more, "however fantastic changes so 
extensive may seem to a modern geologist. 

Studies on the Ice Age in Indict and Associated Human Cultures, published in 
1939 by De Terra, working for the Carnegie Institution, with the assistance of 
Professor T. T. Paterson of Harvard University, is one long argument and 
demonstration that the Himalayas were arising during the 
Glacial Age and reached their present heights only after the end of the Glacial 
Age, and actually in historical times. From other mountain ridges came similar 
reports. 
De Terra divided the Ice Age of the Kashmir slopes of the Himalayas into Lower 
Pleistocene (embracing the first glacial and interglacial stages). Middle 
Pleistocene (the second, major glaciation and the following interglacial), and 
Upper Pleistocene (comprising the last two glaciations and an interglacial 
stage). 

"The scenery which this region presented at the beginning of the Pleistocene 
must have differed greatly from that of our time.  The Kashmir valley was less 
elevated, and its southern rampart, the Pir Panjal, lacked that Alpine grandeur 
that enchants the traveller today.

 Then various formation groups moved "both horizontally and vertically, 
resulting in a southward displacement of older rocks upon foreland sediments, 
accompanied by uplift of the mobile belt. 


"The main Himalayas suffered sharp uplift in consequence of which the Kashmir 
lake beds were compressed and dragged upward on the slope of the most mobile 
range. 
 Uplift was accompanied by a southward shifting of the Pir Panjal block toward 
the foreland of north-western India." The Pir Panjal massif that was pushed 
toward India is at present 15,000 feet high. 

In the beginning of this period the fauna was greatly impoverished, but 
thereafter, judging from remains, large cats, elephants, true horses, pigs, and 
hippopotami occupied the area. 

In the Middle Pleistocene, or Ice Age, there was a "continued uplift." "The 
archaeological records prove that early paleolithic man inhabited the adjoining 
plains." De Terra refers to "abundance of paleolithic sites." Man used stone 
implements of "flake" form, like those found in the Cromer forest — bed in 
England. 


Then once more the Himalayas were pushed upward. Tilting of terraces and 
lacustrine beds, indicates a "continued uplift of the entire Himalayan tract" 
during the last phases of the Ice Age.

In the last stages of the Ice Age, when man worked stone in the mountains, he 
might have been living in the bronze stage down in the valleys. It has been 
repeatedly admitted by various authorities —  quoted subsequently in this book —  
that the end of the glacial epoch may have been almost contemporaneous with the 
time of the rise of the great cultures of antiquity, of Egypt and Sumeria and, 
it follows, also of India and China. The Stone Age in some regions could have 
been contemporaneous with the Bronze Age in others. Even now there are numerous 
tribes in Africa, Australia, and Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of the 
Americas, still living in the Stone Age, and many other regions of the modern 
world would have remained in the Stone Age had it not been for the importation 
of iron from more advanced regions. The aborigines of Tasmania never got so far 
as to produce a polished —  neolithic —  stone implement, and in fact barely 
entered the crudest stone age. This large island south of Australia was 
discovered in 1642 by Abel Tasman, the last Tasmanian died in exile in 1876, and 
the race became extinct. 

The more recent uplifts in the Himalayas took place also in the age of modern 
man. "The postglacial terrace record suggests that there was at least one 
prominent postglacial advance [of ice]," and this, in the eyes of De Terra and 
Paterson, is indicative of a diastrophic movement of the mountains. "We must be 
emphatic on one particular feature — namely, the dependence of Pleistocene 
glaciation on the diastrophic character of a mobile mountain belt. This 
relationship, we feel, has not been sufficiently recognized in other glaciated 
regions, such as Central Asia and the Alps, where similar if not identical 
conditions are found." 
It had been generally assumed that loess — thin windblown dust that is built 
into clays — is a product of a glacial age. However, in the Himalayas De Terra 
reported finding neolithic, or polished stone, implements in loess and 
commented; "Of importance for us is the fact that loess formation was not 
restricted to the glacial age but that it continued, into postglacial times." 

In China and in Europe, too, the presence of polished stone artefacts in loess 
prompted a similar revision. The Neolithic stage that began, according to the 
accepted scheme, at the end of the Ice Age, still persisted in Europe and in 
many other places at the time when, in the centres of civilization, the Bronze 
Age was already flourishing. 

R. Finsterwalder, exploring the Nanga Parbat massif in the western Himalayas 
(26,660 feet high), dated the Himalayan glaciation as post —  glacial; in other 
words, the expansion of the glaciers in the Himalayas took place much closer to 
our time than had been previously assumed. Great uplifts of the Himalayas took 
place in part after the time designated as the Ice Age, or only a few 
thousand years ago.

Heim, investigating the mountain ranges of western China, adjacent to Tibet and 
east to the Himalayas, came to the conclusion (1930) that they had been elevated 
since the glacial age. 

The great massif of the Himalayas rose to its present height in the age of 
modem, actually historical, man. "The highest mountains in the world are also 
the youngest."  With their topmost peaks the mountains have shattered the entire 
scheme of the geology of the "long, long ago. 

 

The Siwalik Hills.

The Siwalik Hills are in the foothills of the Himalayas, north of Delhi; they 
extend for several hundred miles and are 2000 to 3000 feet high. In the 
nineteenth century their unusually rich fossil beds drew the attention of 
scientists. Animal bones of species and genera, living and extinct, were found 
there in most amazing profusion. Some of the animals looked as though 
nature had conducted an abortive experiment with them and had discarded the 
species as not fit for life. The carapace of a tortoise twenty feet long was 
found there; how could such an animal have moved on hilly terrain? The Elephas 
ganesa, an elephant species found in the Siwalik Hills, had tusks about fourteen 
feet long and over three feet in circumference. One author says of them; "It is 
a mystery how these animals ever carried them, owing to their enormous size and 
leverage."

The Siwalik fossil beds are stocked with animals of so many and such varied 
species that the animal world of today seems impoverished by comparison. It 
looks as though all these animals invaded the world at one time! "This sudden 
bursting on the stage of such a varied population of herbivores, carnivores, 
rodents and of primates, the highest order of the mammals, must be 
regarded as a most remarkable instance of rapid evolution of species," writes D. 
N. Wadia in his Geology of India.

Many of the genera that comprised a wealth of species were extinguished to the 
last one; some are still represented, but by only a few species. Of nearly 
thirty species of elephants found in the Siwalik beds, only one species has 
survived in India. "The sudden and widespread reduction by 
extinction of the Siwalik mammals is a most startling event for the geologist as 
well as the biologist. The great carnivores, the varied races of elephants 
belonging to no less than 25 to 30 species, the numerous tribes of large and 
highly specialized ungulates or hoofed animals, which found such suitable 
habitats in the Siwalik jungles of the Pliocene epoch, are to be seen 
no more in an immediately succeeding age."  It used to be assumed that the 
advent of the Ice Age killed them, but subsequently it has been recognized that 
great destructions took place in the age of man, much closer to our day. 

The older geologists thought that the Siwalik deposits were alluvial in their 
nature, that they were debris carried down by the torrential Himalayan streams. 
But it was realized that this explanation, does not appear to be tenable on the 
ground of the remarkable homogeneity that the deposits possess and a uniformity 
of lithologic composition" in a multitude of isolated basins, at considerable 
distances from one another. There must have been some agent that carried these 
animals and deposited them at the feet of the Himalayas, and, after the passage 
of a geological age, repeated the performance —  for in the Siwalik Hills there 
are animals of more than one age, and signs of more than one destruction. There 
was also a movement of the ground: 
"The disrupted part of the fold has slipped bodily over for long distances, thus 
thrusting the older pre — Siwalik rock of the inner ranges of the mountains over 
the younger rocks of the outer ranges."  


If the cause of these paroxysms and destruction was not local, it must have 
produced similar effects at the other end of the Himalayas and beyond that 
range. Thirteen hundred miles from the Siwalik Hills, in central Burma, the 
deposits cut by the Irrawaddy River "may reach 10,000 feet." "Two fossiliferous 
horizons occur in this series separated by about 4000 feet of sands." 
The upper horizon (bed), characterized by mastodon, hippopotamus, and ox, is 
similar to one of the beds in the Siwaliks. "The sedimerits are remarkable for 
the large quantities of fossil — wood associated with them. 

 Hundreds and thousands of entire trunks of silicified trees and huge logs lying 
in the sandstones" suggest the denudation of "thickly forested" areas. Animals 
met death and extinction by the elementary forces of nature, which also uprooted 
forests and from Kashmir to Indo — China threw sand over species and genera in 
mountains thousands of feet high. 

 

 Tiahuanacu In the Andes. 

In the Andes, at 16° 22' south latitude, a megalithic city was found at an 
elevation of 12,500 feet, in a region where com will not ripen. The term 
"megalithic" fits the dead city only in regard to the great size of the stones 
in its walls, some of which are flattened and joined with precision. It is 
situated on the Altiplano, the elevated plain between the Western and Eastern 
Cordilleras, not far from Lake Titicaca, the largest lake in South America and 
the highest navigable lake in the world, on the border of Bolivia and Peru. 

"There is a mystery still unsolved on the plateau of Lake Titicaca, which, if 
stones could speak, would reveal a story of deepest interest. Much of the 
difficulty in the solution of this mystery is caused by the nature of the 
region, in the present day, where the enigma still defies explanation." So wrote 
Sir Clemens Markham in 1910.1 Such a region is only capable of sustaining a 
scanty population of hardy mountaineers and laborers. The mystery consists in 
the existence of ruins of a great city at the southern side of the lake, the 
builders being entirely unknown. The city covered a large area, built by highly 
skilled masons, and with the use of enormous stones."  

When the author of the quoted passages posed his question to the scholarly 
world, Leonard Darwin, then president of the Royal Geographical Society, offered 
the surmise that the mountain had risen considerably after the city had been 
built. 

"Is such an idea beyond the bonds of possibility?" asked Sir Clemens. Under the 
assumption that the Andes were once some two or three thousand feet lower than 
they are now, "maize would then ripen in the basin of Lake Titicaca, and the 
site of the ruins of Tiahuanacu could support the necessary population. If the 
megalithic builders were living under these conditions, the problem 
is solved. If this is geologically impossible, the mystery remains unexplained. 

Several years ago another authority, A. Posnansky, wrote in similar vein: "At 
the present time, the plateau of the Andes is inhospitable and almost sterile. 
With the present climate, it would not have been suitable in any period as the 
asylum for great human masses" of the "most important 
prehistoric center of the world." 

 "Endless agricultural terraces" of the people who lived in this region in pre — 
Inca days can still be recognized. Today this region is at a very great height 
above sea level. In remote periods it was lower."  

The terraces rise to a height of 15,000 feet, twenty — five hundred feet above 
Tiahuanacu, and still higher, up to 18,400 feet above sea level, or to the 
present line of eternal snow on Illimani. 

The conservative view among evolutionists and geologists is that mountain making 
is a slow process, observable in minute changes, and that because it is a 
continuous process there never could have been spontaneous upliftings on a large 
scale. In the case of Tiahuanacu, however, the change in altitude apparently 
occurred after the city was built, and this could not have been the result of a 
slow process that required hundreds of thousands of years to produce a visible 
alteration. 



Once Tiahuanacu was at the waters edge; then Lake Titicaca was ninety feet 
higher, as its old strand line discloses. But this strand line is tilted and in 
other places it is more than 360 feet above the present level of the lake. There 
are numerous raised beaches; and stress was put on 'the freshness of many of the 
strandlines and the modern character of such fossils as occur." 

Further investigation into the topography of the Andes and the fauna of Lake 
Titicaca, together with a chemical analysis of this lake and others on the same 
plateau, established that he plateau was at one time at sea level, or 12,500 
feet lower than it is today. "Titicaca and Poopo, lake and salt bed of Coipaga, 
salt beds of Uyuni — several of these lakes and salt beds have chemical 
compositions similar to those of the ocean." As long ago as 1875 Alexander 
Agassiz demonstrated the existence of a marine crustaceous fauna in Lake 
Titicaca.

 At a higher elevation the sediment of an enormous dried —  up lake, whose 
waters were almost potable, "is full of characteristic mollusks, such as 
Paludestrina and Ancylus, which shows that it is, geologically speaking, of 
relatively modern origin. 

Sometime in the remote past the entire Altiplano with its lakes rose from the 
bottom of the ocean. At some other time point a city was built there and 
terraces were laid out on the elevation around it; then in another disturbance 
the mountains were thrust up and the area became uninhabitable. 
The barrier of the Cordilleras that separates the Altiplano from the valley to 
the east was torn apart and gigantic blocks were thrown into the chasm. Lyell, 
combating the idea of a universal flood, offered the theory that the bursting of 
the Sierra barrier opened the way for a large lake on the Altiplano, which 
cascaded down into the valley and caused the aborigines to create the myth 
of a universal flood. 

Not so long ago an explanation of the mystery of Lake Titicaca and of the 
fortress Tiahuanacu on its shore was put forward in the light of Horbiger's 
theory: A moon circled very close to the earth, pulling the waters of the oceans 
toward the equator; by its gravitational pull, the moon held, day and night, the 
water of the ocean at the altitude of Tiahuanacu: "The level of the ocean 
must have been at least 13,000 feet higher." 11 Then the moon crashed into the 
earth, and the oceans receded to the poles, leaving the island with its 
megalithic city as a mountain above the sea bottom, now the continent of the 
tropical and subtropical Americas. All this happened 
millions of years before our moon was caught by the earth, and thus the ruins of 
the megalithic city Tiahuanacu are millions of years old, that is, the city must 
have been built long "before the Flood." 

This theory is bizarre. The geological record indicates a late elevation of the 
Andes, and the time of its origin is brought ever closer to our time. 
Archaeological and radiocarbon analyses indicate that the age of the Andean 
culture and of the city is not much older than four thousand years.  
Not only the "built before the Flood" theory collapses; so does the belief that 
the last elevation of the Andes was in the Tertiary, or more than a million 
years ago. 

Sometime in the remote past the Altiplano was at or below sea level, so that 
originally its lakes were part of a sea gulf. The last upheaval, however, took 
place in an early historical period, after the city of Tiahuanacu had been 
built; the lakes were dragged up, and the Altiplano and the entire chain of the 
Andes rose to their present height. 

The ancient stronghold of Ollantaytambo in Peru is built on top of an elevation; 
it is constructed of blocks of stone twelve to eighteen feet high. "These 
Cyclopean stones were hewn from the quarry seven miles away. 

 How the stones were earned down to the river in the valley, shipped on rafts, 
and carried up to the site of the fortress remains a mystery archaeologists 
cannot solve."  


Another fortress or monastery, Uantayparubo, in the Urubamba Valley in Peru, 
northwest of Lake Titicaca, "perches upon a tiny plateau some 13,000 feet above 
sea — level, in an uninhabitable region of precipices, chasms, and gorges." It 
is built of red porphyry blocks. The blocks must have been brought "from a 
considerable distance, down steep slopes, across swift and turbulent rivers, and 
up precipitous rock — faces which hardly allow a foothold." 

 It has been suggested that the transportation of the building blocks 
was feasible only if the topography of these localities was different at the 
time of the construction. However, definite proof in this connection is lacking, 
and changes in topography must be deduced from abandoned terraces, from mollusks 
of the dried — up lakes, from tilted shorelines, and from other similar 
indications. 

Charles Darwin, on his travels in South America in 1834, was impressed by the 
raised beaches at Valparaiso, Chile, at the foot of the Andes. He found that the 
former surf fine was at an altitude of 1300 feet. He was impressed even more by 
the fact that the sea shells found at this altitude were still undecayed, to him 
a clear indication that the land had risen 1300 feet from the Pacific Ocean in a 
very recent period, "within the period during which upraised shells remained 
undecayed on the surface. And since only a few intermediary surf lines can be 
detected, the elevation could not have proceeded little by little. 

Darwin also observed that "the excessively disturbed condition of the strata in 
the Cordillera, so far from indicating single periods of extreme violence, 
presents insuperable difficulties, except on the admission that the masses of 
once liquefied rocks of the axes were repeatedly injected with intervals 
sufficiently long for their successive cooling and consolidation." 

At present it is the common view that the Andes were created, not so much by 
compression of the strata, as by magma, or molten rock, invading the strata and 
lifting them. The Andes also abound in volcanoes, some exceedingly high and 
enormously large. 

The foothills of the Andes hide numerous deserted towns and abandoned terraces, 
monuments to a vanished civilization. The terraces that go up the slopes of the 
Andes, and reach the eternal snow fine and continue under the snow to some 
unidentified altitude prove that it was not a conqueror, nor a plague that put 
the seal of death on gardens and towns. In Peru "aerial surveys 
in the dry belt west of the Andes have shown an unexpected number of old ruins, 
and an almost incredible number of terraces for cultivation. 

When Darwin mounted the Uspallata Range, 7000 feet high in the Andes, and looked 
down on the plain of Argentina from a little forest of petrified trees broken 
off a few feet above the ground, he wrote in his Journal.' 

It required little geological practice to interpret the marvellous story which 
this scene at once unfolded, though I confess I was at first so much astonished 
that I could scarcely believe the plainest evidence. I saw the spot where a 
cluster of fine trees once waved their branches on the shores of the Atlantic, 
when that ocean —  now driven back 700 miles —  came to the foot of the 
Andes. I saw that they had sprung from a volcanic soil which had been raised 
above the level of the sea, and that subsequently this dry land, with its 
upright trees, had been let down into the depths of the ocean. In these depths, 
the formerly dry land was covered by sedimentary beds, and these again by 
enormous streams of submarine lava —  one such mass attaining the thickness of a 
thousand feet; and these deluges of molten stone and aqueous deposits five 
times alternately had been spread out. The ocean which received such thick 
masses must have been profoundly deep; but again the subterranean forces exerted 
themselves, and now I beheld the bed of that ocean, forming a chain of mountains 
more than seven thousand feet in height.  
Vast, and scarcely comprehensible as such changes must ever appear, yet they 
have all occurred within a period, recent when compared with the history of the 
Cordillera; and the Cordillera itself is absolutely modern as compared with many 
of the fossiliferous strata of Europe and America." 

But how extremely young the Cordillera of the Andes is, only the research of 
recent years has brought out. 

 

The Columbia Plateau.

Great quantities of lava "flowed out in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, where some 
two hundred thousand square miles were covered to depths of hundreds and even 
several thousands of feet. 
The Snake River has cut the Seven Devils Canyon more than three thousand feet 
deep without reaching the bottom of the lavas." 

This enormous area, embracing all the Northern states between the Rocky 
Mountains and the Pacific coast, was flooded with molten rock and metal pouring 
out of fissures torn in the ground. 
Certainly it does not look like a volcanic eruption of our days, and for this 
reason alone, if not for a multitude of others, the principle of uniformity is 
definitely misleading. 

The depth of the lava of this vast Columbia Plateau is "as great as 5000 feet or 
more."  Even on the supposition that it was ejected in paroxysms, each time 
spreading a sheet only seventy —  five feet thick, it is still enormous, and 
then such an ejection must have been repeated as much as seventy times in the 
Cenozoic Age —  the age of mammals and man. 

And here is a striking thing, striking because we are too readily disposed to 
consider that we have solved a problem when we remove it to the remote past. 
"All competent observers have remarked the freshness of lava deposits in the 
Snake River valley in Idaho." 

Only a few thousand years ago lava flowed there over an area larger than France, 
Switzerland, and Belgium combined; it flowed not as a creek, not as a river, not 
even as an overflowing stream, but as a flood, deluging horizon alter horizon, 
filling all the valleys, devouring ail the forests and habitations, steaming 
large lakes out of existence as though they were little potholes filled with 
water, swelling ever higher and overtopping mountains and burying them deep 
beneath molten stone, boiling and bubbling, thousands of feet thick, billions of 
tons heavy. 

In 1889, on the occasion of the boring of an artesian well at Nampa, Idaho, on 
the Columbia Plateau near the Snake River, a small figurine of baked clay was 
extracted from a depth of 320 feet, penetrated after piercing a sheet of basalt 
lava fifteen feet thick. G. F. Wright described the find and wrote: "The well 
was tubed with heavy iron tubing six inches in diameter, so that there 
could be no mistake about the occurrence of the image at the depth stated." He 
also added: "No one has come forward to challenge the evidence except on purely 
a priori grounds arising from preconceived opinions of the extreme antiquity of 
the deposits." 

Before the last lava sheets spread over the Columbia Plateau there were human 
abodes in the area. 

 

 
A Continent Torn Apart. 

"Africa was in tension and torn by north and south fractures [which] along with 
the sinking of a strip of the crust formed the longest meridional land valley on 
earth.  From Lebanon in Syria, then, almost to the Cape there runs a deep and 
comparatively narrow valley, margined by almost vertical sides, and occupied by 
the sea, by salt steppes and old lake basins, and by a series of over twenty 
lakes, of which only one has an outlet to the sea. This is a condition of 
things absolutely unlike anything else on the surface of the earth. The author 
of these lines, J.W. Gregory, the famous explorer of the Great African Rift, 
adopted the view that a general common cause created the entire Rift from its 
north to its south end. 

The Rift begins in the valley of the Orontes River in Syria —   at Baalbek it 
goes over to the Litani River Valley, then to Lake Huleh in Palestine; along the 
Jordan River to the Sea of Galilee, called also Gennesaret or the Sea of 
Tiberias, which lies in a depression below the level of the Mediterranean from 
there to the Dead Sea, the deepest depression on earth, between the Judean and 
Moabite mountainous plateaus that were torn apart; then along the Araba Valley 
to the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea and across the channel of this sea into 
Africa; thence for an enormous distance to the Sabie River in the Transvaal, 
branching, on the way, eastward to the Gulf of Aden and westward to Tanganyika 
and the Upper Nile, and the rift valleys of Lakes Morris and Upemba in the 
central Congo —  all the way from about 36° north latitude in Syria to about 28° 
south latitude in East Africa, in a sinuous line along a meridian for more than 
a third of the way from one pole to another. 

It was recognized that a horizontal force of one kind or another had been the 
cause of this rift valley. "The simplest and earliest thought was that Africa 
had been pulled apart." However, another school of geologists questioned whether 
the Rift could not have been produced under horizontal pressure, which forced 
the margins of the rift valley up and the valley strip down. After a long debate 
the consensus restated the view expressed by Eduard Suess, a prominent 
geologist at the turn of the century: "The opening of fissures of such magnitude 
can be explained only by the action of a tension, directed perpendicularly to 
the trend of the split, the tension being relieved in the instant of bursting, 
that is, of opening of the fissure."  

He observed also that immense floods of lava gushed out of the earth along the 
Rift and a most vigorous volcanic action took place. Suess brought to geology 
the now generally accepted concept of Gondwanaland, a continental mass that 
occupied the larger portion of the Indian Ocean, and that in a relatively recent 
subsidence was torn apart and drowned. The subsidence at the Gondwana continent 
could have caused a strain on western Asia and Africa, and under this tension 
the land must have been rent and the Great Rift formed. Krenkel, a German 
authority, wiote in Die Bruch —  zonen Ostafrikas (1922): "The 
tectonic setting of the Fast African fault zones, whether considered in detail 
or as a whole, 
admits of only one explanation: they are zones of tearing apart of the ciust, 
produced by a direct tension. The action of compressive forces is nowhere 
recognizable.

Gregory wrote: "The nearest approach in size, to the Rift, can probably be found 
on the moon, whose clefts or hills no doubt represent long, steeply walled 
valleys and present to us much the same aspects as this East African valley 
would do to any inhabitants of our satellite. Not the least interesting of the 
points raised by the African — Red Sea — Jordan depression is the possibility 
that it may explain the nature of those lunar clefts which have so long been a 
puzzle to astronomers." 

The Rift was produced by tension; hence the rifts on the moon were also caused 
by tension. Gregory followed Suess in linking the Great Rift Valley with "the 
mountain chains due to the last great uplift of fold mountains" in Europe, Asia, 
and the Americas. Thus the time of the last uplift, if established, would also 
clarify the time when Africa suffered the Great Rift. It is probable, too, 
that the Rift began in one great tension and increased in the next. 

Gregory concluded: "This wide — spread valley system is obviously not the result 
of some local fracture. Its length is about one — sixth of the circumference of 
the Earth. It must have some worldwide cause, the first promising clue to which 
is the date of its formation." 

Although Gregory thought that the Rift first came into being at an early epoch — 
because of marine fossils found in it — he also saw signs of great earth 
movements along the Rift "at a recent date. "Some of the fault— scarps are so 
bare and sharp that they must be of very recent date. This continuation of earth 
—movements into the human period is one of the most striking features of the 
district." Gregory found also that human memory retained recollection of the 
upheaval. "All along the line the natives have traditions of great changes in 
the structure of the country. 


The globe was in tension and its crust cracked along a meridian for most of the 
length of the African continent. The cause may have been the subsidence of the 
Indian Ocean, or both tension in Africa and subsidence in the Indian Ocean could 
have a common cause. The mountain ridge on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean may 
have been produced by the same cause; and the time of the rupture and faulting 
must have been coincident with one of the periods of mountain formation in 
Europe and Asia. Those mountains attained their present height in the 
age of man; the Rift, it is assumed today, was also created largely in the age 
of man at the end of the Ice Age.

What kind of force is necessary to tear apart a continent? Whence came the 
tension that was relieved by the bursting of the African land mass? Ice did not 
do it, nor the wind that erodes mountain heights, nor the rivulets that carry 
eroded detritus down to the sea. 

 



CHAPTER VII,
DESERTS AND OCEANS. 

The Sahara. 

THE SAHARA DESERT, which stretches from the Nile to the Atlantic Ocean across 
the continent of Africa and covers 3,500,000 square miles, about the area of all 
of Europe, is the greatest desert on earth. What is now the desert of Sahara was 
an open grassland or steppe in earlier days. Drawings on rock of herds of 
cattle, made by early dwellers in this region, were discovered by Barth in 1850. 
Since then many more drawings have been found. The animals depicted no longer 
inhabit these regions, and many are generally extinct. It is asserted that the 
Sahara once had a large human population that lived in vast green forests and on 
fat pasture lands. Neolithic implements, vessels and weapons made of polished 
stone, were found close to the drawings. Such drawings and implements were 
discovered in the eastern as well as the western Sahara. Men lived in these 
densely populated Flint regions and cattle pastured, where today enormous 
expanses of sand stretch for thousands of miles. 

Several theories have been offered to explain the prodigious quantity of sand in 
the Sahara. The theory of marine origin is now no longer tenable. "The sand, it 
was found, is of recent origin. It is assumed that when a large part of Europe 
was under ice the Sahara was in a warm and moist temperate zone; later the soil 
lost its moisture and the rock crumbled to sand when left to the mercy of the 
sun and the wind. 

Mow long ago was it that conditions in the Sahara were suitable for human 
occupation? Movers, the noted Orientalist of the last century, author of a large 
work on the Phoenicians, decided that the drawings in the Sahara were the work 
of the Phoenicians. It was likewise observed that on the drawings discovered by 
Barth the cattle wore discs between their horns, just as in Egyptian 
drawings. Also, the Egyptian god Set was found pictured on the rocks. And there 
are rock paintings of war chariots drawn by horses "in an area where these 
animals could not survive two days without extraordinary precautions." 

The extinct animals in the drawings suggest that these pictures were made 
sometime during the Ice Age; but the Egyptian motifs in the very same drawings 
suggest that they were made in historical times. 

The conflict between the historical and the pale ontological evidence, and of 
both of them with the geological evidence, is resolved if one or more 
catastrophes intervened. It appears that a large part of the region was occupied 
by an inland lake, or vast marsh, known to the ancients as Lake Triton. In a 
stupendous catastrophe the lake emptied itself into the Atlantic, and the sand 
on its bottom and shores was left behind, forming a desert when tectonic 
movements sealed off the springs that fed the lake. The "land of pastures and 
forests" became a desert of sand; hippopotami that live in water and elephants 
disappeared, and with them also the hunter and the farmer. 


The French savant A. Berthelot says: "It is possible that Stone Age man 
witnessed in Africa three notable events: the sinking of the Spanish — Atlas 
chain that opened the Strait of Gibraltar and created a junction between the 
Mediterranean Sea and the Ocean; the collapse that cut off 
the Canary Islands from the African continent; the opening of the Strait of Bab—
el— Mandeb, separating Arabia from Ethiopia." Berthelot, however, ascribed these 
great tectonic changes to the time of prehistoric man and Abbe Breuil actually 
showed that prehistoric man already occupied these regions as the eolithic or 
very crudely chipped stone artifacts indicate. But at a later date people of 
advanced culture, contemporary with pharaonic Egypt, lived in communities, 
pastured their cattle, and left their tools and drawings there. Then in an 
upheaval, of which many 

traditions persist in classical literature, the Atlas Mountains were torn apart, 
the great lake was emptied, and the watery region became the great and awesome 
desert — the Sahara. 

 



Arabia.


There is a "certainty beyond challenge that when the icecap of the last Glacial 
period covered a large part of the northern hemisphere, at least three great 
rivers flowed from west to east across the whole width of the [Arabian] 
Peninsula." So wrote Philby in his book Arabia} —   There was also a large lake 
in Arabia that disappeared in some geological or climatic change. 

At present, from Palmyra to Mecca and beyond, the Arabian Peninsula is a 
waterless desert, interspersed with volcanoes active not so long ago, but now 
extinct, the last eruption having taken place in 1253. There were also, sometime 
in the past, numerous geysers all likewise extinct now. 

Twenty — eight fields of burned and broken stones, called harras, are found in 
Arabia, mostly in the western half of the great desert. Some single fields are 
one hundred miles in diameter and occupy an area of six or seven thousand square 
miles, stone lying close to stone, so densely packed that passage through the 
field is almost impossible.4 The stones are sharp —  edged and scorched 
black. No volcanic eruption could have cast scorched stones over fields as large 
as the harras; neither would the stones from volcanoes have been so evenly 
spread. The absence, in most cases, of lava — the stones lie free, also speaks 
against a volcanic origin of the stones. 

It appears that the blackened and broken stones of the harras are trains of 
meteorites, scorched in their passage through the atmosphere that broke during 
their fall, as bolides do or on reaching the ground. Billions of stones in a 
single harra indicate that the trains of meteorites were very large and can be 
classed as comets. Despite alternate exposure to the thermal action 
of the hot desert sun and the cool desert night, the sharp edges of the stones 
have been preserved, which shows that they fell in a not too distant period of 
time. Following the procedure adopted in this book, literary references to the 
harras of Arabia in ancient Hebrew and Arabic literatures will not be dealt with 
here. 

Meteorites that fall on the earth are of two kinds. One consists of iron with an 
admixture of nickel", by means of this admixture and the characteristic pattern 
seen in the cut surface of such stones, their meteoric origin can be easily 
established. The other group, probably larger than the first, does not differ in 
its composition from the rocks of the earth and cannot be distinguished 
unless the fall has been observed, or, as in the case of the stones of the 
harras, their scorched and broken condition, together with their occurrence in 
large fields, speak for their extraterrestrial origin. 

Larger bodies than the stones of the harras fell on Arabia, too. In Wobar in the 
desert there is a meteoric crater with meteoric iron and silica glass spread 
around it.

Large rivers that disappeared, numerous volcanoes that burned and were 
extinguished, blackened stones that fell in areas each of them a hundred times 
larger than any volcanic eruption could have covered, and meteoric iron spread 
around a large crater — all of these bespeak great upheavals in nature in recent 
as well as earlier ages, to which the vast peninsula of Arabia was more than 
once subjected. 

In the southern part of the great Arabian desert, ancient ruins, almost entirely 
obliterated by time and the elements, and vestiges of cultivation are silent 
witnesses of the time when the land there was hospitable and fruitful; it was as 
copiously watered and luxuriously forested as India on the same latitude. 
Orchards covered Hadhramaut and Aden. It was a land of plenty, paradise on 
earth, but following a sudden catastrophe, Arabia Felix turned to a barren land. 
Arabia Petraea, the western part of the desert, is a dusty rock of lava that is 
broken by the Great Rift, with the Dead Sea, an inner lake, on its bottom. 
Sulphurous springs flow into it, and asphalt rises from its floor and floats on 
it. 

Like the Sahara and Arabian deserts, other great deserts of the world disclose 
the fact that they were inhabited and cultivated sometime in the past. On the 
Tibetan plateau and in the Gobi Desert remains of early prosperous civilizations 
were found with occasional ruins surviving from those times when the great 
barren tracts were cultivated. In the Gobi Desert, as in the Arabian 
and Sahara deserts, the impression is gained that in a tectonic disturbance the 
subterranean water dropped to a great depth, the sources became sealed, and the 
rivers dried up completely. Some changes in ground structure or in ground 
currents also affect the clouds, which pass over such lands without unburdening 
themselves. 

 
The Carolina Bays.

Peculiar elliptical depressions, or "oval craters," locally called "bays," are 
thickly scattered over the Carolina coast of the United States and more sparsely 
over the entire Atlantic coastal plain from southern New Jersey to north-eastern 
Florida. These marshy depressions are numbered in the tens of thousands and, 
according to the latest estimate; their number may reach half a million.

Measurements made on more prominent ones, seaward from Darlington, show that the 
larger bays average 2200 feet in length, and in single cases exceed 8000 feet. A 
remarkable feature of these depressions is their parallelism: the long axis of 
each of them extends from northwest to southeast, and the precision of the 
parallelism is "striking." Around the bays are rims of earth, invariably 
elevated at the south-eastern end. These oval depressions may be seen especially 
well in aerial photographs. Any theory as to their origin must explain their 
form, the ellipticity of which increases with the size of the bays; their 
parallel alignment; and the elevated runs at their south-eastern ends. 

In 1933 a theory was presented by Melton and Schriever of the University of 
Oklahoma, according to which the bays are scars left by a "meteoric shower or 
colliding comet."  Since then the majority of the authors who have dealt with 
the problem have accepted this view, and it has found its way into textbooks as 
the usual interpretation.8 The authors of the theory stress the fact that, 
"Since the origin of the bays apparently cannot be explained by the well — known 
types of geological activity, an extraordinary process must be found. Such a 
process is suggested by the elliptical shape, the parallel alignment, and the 
systematic arrangement of elevated rims." 

The comet must have struck from the northwest. "If the cosmic masses approached 
this region from the northwest, the major axes would have the desired 
alignment." The tune when the catastrophe took place was estimated as sometime 
during the Ice Age. The bays are "filled to a considerable extent by the 
deposition of sand and silt, a process which doubtless occurred while 
the region was covered by the sea during the terrace — forming marine invasion 
of the Pleistocene, [glacial] period." But the possibility was also envisaged 
that "the collision took place" through "the shallow ocean water during the 
marine invasion." The swarm of meteorites must have been large enough to hit an 
area from Florida to New Jersey. 

Some critics disagree with the idea that the bays originated in the Ice Age or 
"are relatively ancient," and place their origin in a more recent time.',  The 
craters were produced by meteoric impact, either by direct hits or by explosion 
in the air close to the ground, thus causing the formation of vast numbers of 
depressions. Some of the bays, it is assumed, are on the bottom of 
the ocean. It was also stressed that "a very large number of meteorites have 
been discovered in the southern Appalachian region, in Virginia, North and South 
Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee. 

 

 
The Bottom of the Atlantic. 

In the fall of 1949, Professor M. Ewing of Columbia University published a 
report on an expedition to the Atlantic Ocean. Explorations were carried on 
especially in the region about the Mid — Atlantic Ridge, the mountainous chain 
that runs from north to south, following the general outlines of the ocean. The 
Ridge, as well as the ocean bottom to the west and to the east, disclosed to the 
expedition a series of facts that amounts to "new scientific puzzles. 

"One was the discovery of prehistoric beach sand, brought up in one case from a 
depth of two and the other nearly three and one half miles, far from any place 
where beaches exist today." One of these sand deposits was found twelve hundred 
miles from land. 

Sand is produced from rocks by the eroding action of sea waves pounding the 
coast, and by the action of rain and wind and the alternation of heat and cold. 
On the bottom of the ocean the temperature is constant; there are no currents; 
it is a region of motionless stillness. Mid — ocean bottoms are covered with 
ooze made up of silt so fine that its particles can be carried suspended 
in ocean water for a long time before they sink to the bottom, there to build 
sediment. The ooze contains skeletons of the minute animals, foraminifera that 
live in the upper waters of the ocean in vast numbers. But there should be no 
coarse sand on the mid — ocean floor, because sand is native to land areas and 
to the continental shelf, the coastal rim of the ocean and its seas. 

These considerations presented Professor Ewing with a dilemma: "Either the land 
must have sunk two to three miles, or the sea once must have been two or three 
miles lower than now. Either conclusion is startling. If the sea was once two 
miles lower, where could all the extra water have gone?" 

It is regarded as an accepted truth in geology that the seas have not changed 
their beds with the exception of encroachment by shallow water on depressed 
continental areas. Thus it was difficult to accept the startling conclusion that 
the bottom of the ocean was at some time in the past dry land. 

But there was another surprise in store for the expedition. The thickness of the 
sediment on the ocean bottom was measured by the well — developed method of 
sound echoes. An explosion is set off and the time it takes for the echo to 
return from the sediment on the floor of the ocean is compared with the time 
required for a second echo to return from the bottom of the sediment, or from 
the bedrock, basalt or granite. "These measurements clearly indicate thousands 
of feet of sediments on the foothills of the Ridge. Surprisingly, however, we 
have found that in the great flat basins on either side of the Ridge, this 
sediment appears to be less than 100 feet thick, a fact so startling  " 
Actually, the echoes arrived almost simultaneously, and the most that could be 
attributed in such circumstances to the sediment was less than one hundred feet 
of thickness, or the margin of error. 



"Always it had been thought the sediment must be extremely thick, since it had 
been accumulating for countless ages.   But on the level basins that flank the 
Mid —  Atlantic Ridge our signals reflected from the bottom mud and from bedrock 
came back too close together to measure the time between them. They show the 
sediment in the basins is less than 100 feet thick." 

The absence of thick sediment on the level floor presents "another of many 
scientific riddles our expedition propounded." It indicates that the bottom of 
the Atlantic Ocean on both sides of the Ridge was only very recently formed. At 
the same time, on the flanks of the Ridge the layers of sediment in some places 
are "thousands of feet thick, as was expected. 

"These ocean —  bottom sediments we measured are formed from the shells and 
skeletons of countless small sea creatures" and "from volcanic dust and wind —  
blown soil drifting out over the sea; and from the ashes of burned out 
meteorites and cosmic dust from outer space sifting constantly down upon the 
earth." 

Burned — out meteorites and cosmic dust elicited the question! If the meteoric 
dust in our age is so sparse that it is hardly detectable on the snow of high 
mountains, how could ashes of burned — out meteorites and cosmic dust make up a 
substantial part of the oceanic sediment? And how could it be that all other 
sources, including detritus earned by rivers, have created in all ages since the 
beginning a sediment of only very moderate thickness? 

We dredged up rocks of igneous, or 'fire —  made,,  type from the sides and tops 
of peaks on the Mid —  Atlantic Ridge, which indicated that submarine volcanoes 
and lava flows have been active there. Probably the whole Ridge is highly 
volcanic, with perhaps thousands of lava outpourings and active and extinct 
cones scattered along its entire length." 

And not only the submarine Ridge is volcanic. "There are many peaks of volcanic 
origin scattered over the Atlantic Basin.' In the direction of the Azores the 
expedition found an uncharted submarine mountain, 8000 feet high, with "many 
layers of volcanic ash," and farther on, a great hole dropping down 1809 fathoms 
(10,854 feet), "as if a volcano had caved in there at some time in the past. 

Lava flowed under the water of the ocean, and the water must have boiled; 
meteorites, ashes, and cosmic dust fell from the sky; land was submerged 
thousands of fathoms deep, and beaches sank over three miles into the depths. 

From the abyss of the ocean, rocks marked with deep scratches were raised by the 
expedition. "In a depth of 3600 feet (600 fathoms) we found rocks that tell an 
interesting story about the past history of the Atlantic Ocean, granite and 
sedimentary rocks of types which originally must have been part of a continent. 

Most of the rocks that we dredged here were rounded and marked with deep 
scratches, or striations." Such marks on rocks are regularly ascribed to the 
action of glaciers that held rocks in a firm grip and moved them over the 
surface of other rocks. 


"But we also found some loosely consolidated mud stones, so soft and weak they 
would not have held together in the iron grasp of a glacier. How they got out 
here is another riddle to be solved by further research." 

Finally, the very entrance to New York Harbor, the Hudson River, was found to 
have a canyon running into the ocean, not only for the width of the continental 
shelf, a hundred and twenty miles offshore, as has been known for some time, but 
also for another hundred miles in deeper water. 
"If all this valley was originally carved out by the river on dry land, as seems 
probable, it means either that the ocean floor of the Eastern seaboard of North 
America once must have stood about two miles above its present level and has 
since subsided, or else that the level of the sea was once about two miles lower 
than now." Each one of these possibilities indicates an upheaval. 

All in all, the results of the expedition of the summer of 1949 strongly 
indicate that, at some time not so long ago, in numerous places where the 
Atlantic Ocean is today there were land and beaches, and that in revolutions on 
a great scale land became sea thousands of fathoms deep. 

The leader of the Atlantis expedition, whom we have quoted here, did not use the 
term "revolution," but it is unavoidable in the face of the expedition's finds. 
In order not to be regarded as the proponent of a heresy, Ewing made only a 
negative statement: "There is no reason to believe that this mighty underwater 
mass of mountains is connected in any way with the legendary lost Atlantis which 
Plato described as having sunk beneath the waves.' 

 

The Floor of the Seas. 

In July 1947 a Swedish deep —  sea expedition left Goteborg on the Albatross for 
a fifteen —  month journey around the world to investigate the bottom of the 
seas on the seventeen thousand miles of the ship's course with the help of a 
newly constructed vacuum core sampler. In the sediment that covers the rocky 
bottom of the oceans the expedition found, in the words of its leader, H. 
Petterson, director of the Oceanographic Institute at Gψteborg, "evidence of 
great catastrophes that have altered the face of the earth."  

"Climatic catastrophes, which piled thousands of feet of ice on the higher 
latitudes of the continents, also covered the oceans with icebergs and ice 
fields at lower latitudes and chilled the surface waters even down to the 
Equator. Volcanic catastrophes cast rains of ash over the sea." 
This ash is preserved in the sedimentary bottom of the oceans. "Tectonic 
catastrophes raised or lowered the ocean bottom hundreds and even thousands of 
feet, spreading huge 'tidal' waves which destroyed plant and animal life on the 
coastal plains." 

At many places, such as the coast of Sweden, the bottom of the sea proved to 
consist of "a lava bed of geologically recent origin, covered only by a thin 
veneer of sediment.  The sediments of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which often 
bore particles of volcanic material, also testified to the importance of 
vulcanism in submarine geology. Some of our cores from the Mediterranean 
were marked with coarse — grained layers consisting largely of volcanic ash that 
had settled on the bottom after great volcanic explosions. These layers are an 
unrivalled record of the irregular volcanic activity of the past." 

The oceanic floor all around the globe bears witness that the oceans of the 
earth were the scenes of repeated violent catastrophes when flows of lava and 
volcanic ash covered the precipitously rising or falling bedrock and tidal waves 
raced against continents. 

The bottom of the seas and oceans also contains evidence that the earth was 
showered with meteorites on a very large scale. In many places the bottom 
consists of red clay. Samples of the red clay from the central Pacific showed a 
"surprisingly high content of nickel," and also a high content of radium, though 
the water of the ocean, is almost completely free of these elements. 
The red clay is red because it contains ferruginous (iron) compounds. 

Meteoric iron differs from iron of terrestrial origin in its admixture of 
nickel, and it is this characteristic that makes it possible to differentiate 
iron tools of early ages, for instance of the pyramid age in Egypt, and to 
decide whether iron pieces were smelted from ore or were worked 

meteorites. "Nickel is a very rare element in most terrestrial rocks and 
continental sediments, and it is almost absent from the ocean waters. On the 
other hand, it is one of the main components of meteorites." 

Thus it is assumed that the origin of the abysmal nickel was in meteoric dust or 
"the very heavy showers of meteors in the remote past. The principal difficulty 
of this explanation is that it requires a rate of accretion of meteoric dust 
several hundred times greater than that which astronomers, who base their 
estimates on visual and telescopic counts of meteors, are presently 
prepared to admit." 

In a later publication, a popularized account of the Albatross expedition, 
Pettersson writes: 
"Assuming the average nickel content of meteoric dust to be two per cent, an 
approximate value for the rate of accretion of cosmic dust to the whole Earth 
can be worked out from these data. 
The result is very high — about 10,000 tons per day, or over a thousand times 
higher than the value computed from counting the shooting stars and estimating 
their mass." 

In other words at some time or times there was such a fall of meteoric dust 
that, apportioned throughout the entire age of the ocean, it would increase a 
thousand fold the daily accumulation of meteoric dust since the birth of the 
ocean. 

The ash and lava on the bottom of the oceans indicate catastrophic occurrences 
in the past. Iron and nickel point to celestial showers of meteorites, and thus 
possibly also to the cause of the tectonic ruptures, of the collapse of the 
ocean floor and of the outbursts of lava under the surface of great oceanic 
spaces. 

Evidence of great upheavals has been brought forth from the islands of the 
Arctic Ocean and the tundras of Siberia; from the soil of Alaska; from 
Spitsbergen and Greenland; from the caves of England, the forest — bed of 
Norfolk, and the rock fissures of Wales and Cornwall; from the rocks of France, 
the Alps and Juras, and from Gibraltar and Sicily; from the Sahara and the Rift 
of Africa; from Arabia and its harras, the Kashmir slopes of the 
Himalayas, and the Siwalik Hills; from the Irrawaddy in Burma and from the 
Tientsin and Choukoutien deposits in China; from the Andes and the Altiplano; 
from the asphalt pits of California; from the Rocky Mountains and the Columbia 
Plateau; from the Cumberland cave in Maryland and Agate Spring Quarry in 
Nebraska; from the hills of Michigan and Vermont with skeletons of whales on 
them; from the Carolina coast; from the submerged coasts and the bottom of the 
Atlantic with its Ridge, and the lava bottom of the Pacific. 

With many other places in various parts of the world we shall deal in some 
detail in the pages that follow; but we shall not exhaust the list, for there is 
not a meridian of longitude or a degree of latitude that does not show scars of 
repeated upheavals. 


 



CHAPTER VIII,
POLES DISPLACED.

The Cause of the Ice Ages. 

ONE AFTER THE OTHER, scenes of upheaval and devastation have presented 
themselves to explorers, and almost every new cave opened, mountain thrust 
explored, undersea canyon investigated, has consistently disclosed the same 
picture of violence and desolation. Under the weight of this evidence two great 
theories of the nineteenth century have become more and more strained: the 
theory of uniformity and the theory of evolution built upon it. The other 
fundamental teaching originating in the nineteenth century —  the theory of ice 
ages —  has been loaded more and more heavily with the responsibility for the 
geological facts revealed; however, the cause of the ice ages remained a much —  
discussed and never —  agreed —  upon subject. 

The origin of the glacial periods was sought "on the earth below and in the 
heaven above." The theories that endeavoured to explain what caused them fall 
under the following headings: 
astronomical, geological, and atmospherical. 

In the first group, some theories seek the cause of the ice ages in space, some 
in the sun, some in the relative positions of the sun and the earth. One idea 
was that the space through which the solar system travelled was not always of 
equally low temperature, the variations being due to gases or dust present in 
some areas. This idea has been abandoned. Another theory was that the sun is a 
variable star emitting more heat at some periods and less at others. This theory 
also failed to be substantiated and was generally rejected; yet sporadically it 
finds new proponents. 

Still another theory would have the ice ages arrive when a hemisphere, the 
Northern or the Southern, happens to have its winter while the globe is at the 
farthest end of its ellipse, as the Southern Hemisphere is at present. The 
winter would be a little longer and colder; 
however, the summer, though a bit shorter, would be hotter, and if the earth 
always travelled on its present orbit, the described variations would not bring 
about an ice age. It was also claimed that the terrestrial orbit becomes 
alternately more and less stretched. 

Of the geological group of theories, one supposed a change in the activity of 
warm springs; another, a change in the direction of the Gulf Stream, which 
carries water warmed in the Caribbean Sea to the northern Atlantic; if there 
were no Isthmus of Panama, and North and South America were separated, a part of 
the stream from the Caribbean would flow into the Pacific. Both these theories 
were shown to be inadequate, and the paleontological survey of sea fauna on both 
sides of the isthmus suggests that the dividing strip of land existed long 
before the advent of the Ice Age. Another geological theory, which still has 
some adherents, sees the origin of the glacial periods in the changing altitude 
of the continents, which would also influence the direction of winds and 
precipitation. But it is definitely opposed by such an authority 
on glacial geology as A. P. Coleman, professor emeritus of geology at Toronto 
University: 

"When one considers the distribution of ice sheets in the Pleistocene, covering 
4,000,000 square miles of North America and half as much of Europe, and the ice 
in Greenland, Iceland, Spitsbergen, the southern island of New Zealand and 
Patagonia in South America, it becomes evident that all parts of the world could 
not have been elevated at once. The theory breaks down of its own weight."

 Therefore "elevation above snow line would cause local glaciation, but there is 
no evidence that large scale ice sheets can be formed in this way, and 
that a universal refrigeration, like that of the Pleistocene, could be produced 
thus is manifestly impossible. 

Of the atmospheric conditions that could effect a rise or drop in temperature, 
the varying quantity of carbon dioxide in the air and also of dust particles was 
called on to explain the changes in temperature in the past. With the diminution 
of the carbon dioxide content in the air there would be a fall in the 
temperature, but it was demonstrated by calculation that this could not have 
been sufficient to cause the Ice Age. If the earth were enveloped in clouds of 
dust that kept the rays of the sun from penetrating to the ground, there would 
be a fall in temperature. However, one would have to explain where such 
extensive and thick clouds of dust in the atmosphere could come from. 

"Scores of methods of accounting for ice ages have been proposed, and probably 
no other geological problem has been so earnestly discussed, not only by 
geologists but by meteorologists and biologists; and yet no theory is generally 
accepted. 

A true theory of the origin of ice ages, whether resorting to astronomical, 
geological, or atmospheric causes, must also explain why ice ages did not occur 
in north-eastern Siberia, the coldest place on earth, but did occur in temperate 
latitudes, and in a much more remote past in India, Madagascar, and equatorial 
Brazil. None of the theories mentioned explains these strange facts. Hypotheses 
concerning warmer and colder areas in space, or the variability of the sun as 
a source of energy, are especially inadequate to account for the geographical 
distribution of the ice cover. Thus the concept of ice ages, which is 
established in science as one of its most definite facts, serving also as a 
foundation for the theory of evolution, has no explanation itself. 

 






 Shifting Poles.

All other theories of the origin of the Ice Age having failed, there remained an 
avenue of approach which already early in the discussion was chosen by several 
geologists: a shift of the terrestrial poles. If for some reason the poles had 
moved from their original positions, old polar ice would have moved out of the 
Arctic and Antarctic circles and into new regions. The glacial cover of the Ice 
Age could have been the polar icecap of an earlier epoch. Thus would be 
explained not only the origin of the ice cover but also the fact that its 
geographical position did not coincide with the present Polar Circles. 

"The simplest and most obvious explanation of great secular changes in climate, 
and of former prevalence of higher temperatures in northern circumpolar regions, 
would be found in the assumption that the earth's axis of rotation has not 
always had the same position, but that it may have changed its position as a 
result of geological processes, such as extended rearrangement 
of land and water." 

For decades in the second half of the nineteenth century many scientists 
participated in the debate centering around this theme. Astronomers and 
mathematicians asked the geologists what, in their opinion, could have caused 
such a shifting of the terrestrial poles. The best the geologists could offer 
was the re-disposition of the weight on the surface of the earth. Sir George 
B. Airy, astronomer royal, analyzed the question by assuming that the earth, a 
perfectly rigid spheroid (a flattened globe), was disturbed in its rotation by a 
sudden elevation of a mountainous mass in latitudes "most favourable for 
production of a large effect." The axis of rotation would no longer coincide 
with the axis of figure, and there would be wobbling. "Under these 
circumstances, the axis of rotation would wander in the solid earth. But it 
would not wander indefinitely." 

However, the smallness of the effect would be disappointing. If a mountain mass 
should be produced equal to one, one —thousandth part of the mass of the 
equatorial bulge —”which I apprehend is very far above the fact, the shift of 
the earth's pole would be only two or three miles, and this, though it would 
greatly surprise astronomers, would produce no such changes of climate as those 
which it is desired to explain."

Sir George Darwin, mathematician and cosmologist, the renowned son of an 
illustrious father, made more thorough calculations on this point. If an ocean 
bed 15,000 feet deep rose to become a continent the size of Africa 1100 feet 
above sea level, and on the other side of the globe an equal area became 
depressed, the effect would be a shift of the poles by about two degrees. 
However, were the earth plastic, the poles would wander to a greater extent. 


"There probably never was an upheaval of such magnitude in the history of our 
earth. And to produce a deflection of – here scanner mistake —   a deflection 
that would hardly sensibly affect climate — no less than one— tenth of the 
entire surface of the earth would require to be elevated to the height of 10,000 
feet. A continent ten times the size of Europe elevated two miles would do 
little more than bring London to the latitude of Edinburgh, or Edinburgh to the 
latitude of London. He must be a sanguine geologist indeed who can expect to 
account for the glaciation of this country, or for the former absence of ice 
around the poles, by this means. We know perfectly well that since the Glacial 
epoch there have been no changes in the physical geography of the earth 
sufficient to deflect the pole half a dozen miles, far less half a dozen 
degrees." 

J. Evans, a geologist, suggested that the astronomers reconsider their 
conclusion, on the supposition that the earth is a shell filled with molten 
matter. He envisaged the possibility that, under a change of load in the crust, 
the crust would be forced to alter its position in relation to 
the axis by as much as twenty degrees. 


Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), the physicist, took up the issue and retorted 
that "the earth cannot, as many geologists suppose, be a liquid mass enclosed in 
only a thin shell of solidified matter." 

 "At the surface and for many miles below the surface, the rigidity [of the 
earth! is certainly very much less than that of iron; and therefore at great 
depths the rigidity must be enormously greater than at the surface. 

 Whatever be its age, we may be quite sure the earth is solid in its interior, 
and we must utterly reject any geological hypothesis which, assumes the solid 
earth to be a shell of 30 or 100, or 500 or 1000 kilometers thickness, resting 
on an interior liquid mass. 

Lord Kelvin showed that, if the earth were a liquid mass covered with a solid 
crust, "the solid crust would yield so freely to the deforming influence of sun 
and moon, that it would simply carry the waters of the oceans up and down with 
it, and there would be no sensible tidal rise and fall of water relatively to 
it. The state of the case is shortly this: The hypothesis of a perfectly rigid 
crust containing liquid, violates physics by assuming preternaturally matter, 
and violates dynamical astronomy. 
Lord Kelvin admitted, however, that a larger shifting of the poles would be 
possible if the earth had a solid nucleus in the interior separated by a liquid 
layer from the outer crust. This he regarded as improbable and directed his 
argument against an earth with a molten interior. 

George Darwin supported the views of Lord Kelvin, presenting figures to show 
that the earth could not have a fluid nucleus; its rigidity must be at least as 
great as that of steel. Thus the efforts of the geologists to explain the origin 
of the ice cover by the shifting of the poles foundered on the calculations of 
the mathematicians. A mathematician made the point clear: 

"Mathematicians may seem to geologists almost churlish in their unwillingness to 
admit a change in the earth's axis. Geologists scarcely know how much is 
involved in what they ask. 
They do not seem to realize the vastness of the earth's size, or the enormous 
quantity of her motion. When a mass of matter is in rotation about an axis, it 
cannot be made to rotate about a new one except by external force. Internal 
changes cannot alter the axis, only the distribution of the matter and motion 
about it. If the mass began to revolve about a new axis, every particle 
would begin to move in a different direction. What is to cause this? Where is 
the force that could deflect every portion of it, and every particle of the 
earth into a new direction of motion?" 

Searching for causes in the earth itself, the geologists offered a theory 
concerning changes on the surface of the globe which, as the astronomers 
calculated, could have displaced the poles —   but only to an extent entirely 
inadequate to account for the ice cover in the Ice Age. the explanation that 
appeared best to the geologists was rejected by the physicists and astronomers, 
who for their part could not propose any other satisfactory solution. 

Further developments showed that tides in the terrestrial crust under the 
influence of moon and sun, unknown to Lord Kelvin, do exist, though they are 
minute; this means that the earth is not perfectly rigid. It was also found that 
the earth makes a real wobbling motion. S. C. Chandler, an American astronomer 
(1846 — 1913), explained the wobbling of the earth as an indication of its 
being removed from a balanced position. Simon Newcomb, foremost American 
mathematical astronomer, in his paper, "On the Periodic Variation of Latitude," 
wrote! 

"Chandler's remarkable discovery that the apparent variation in terrestrial 
latitudes may be accounted for by supposing a revolution of the axis of rotation 
of the earth around that of figure. 
is in such disaccord with the received theory of the earth, s rotation, that, at 
first, I was disposed to doubt its possibility." However, on reconsideration, he 
found a theoretical justification: "Theory then shows that the axis of rotation 
will revolve around that of figure, in a period of 306 days and in a direction 
from west toward east." 

G. V. Schiaparelli, the Italian astronomer, in his research, pointed out that in 
the case of displacement the pole of inertia (or of figure) and the new pole of 
rotation would describe circles around each other, and the earth would be in a 
state of strain. "the earth is at present in this condition and as a 
result the pole of rotation describes a small circle in 304 days, known as the 
Eulerian circle."
This phenomenon of wobbling points to a displacement of the terrestrial poles 
sometime in the past. The question centres, then, on the forces that could have 
caused such a shift. 

Schiaparelli wrote: "The permanence of the geographical poles in the very same 
regions of the earth cannot yet be considered as incontestably established by 
astronomical or mechanical arguments. Such permanence may be a fact today, but 
it remains a matter still to be proven for the preceding ages of the history of 
the globe. 11 He thought that a series of geological changes could, by their 
cumulative effect, step by step, destroy the equilibrium of the earth, on 
condition that the earth is not an absolutely rigid body. "The possibility of 
great shifting of the pole is an important element in the discussion of 
prehistoric climates and the distribution, geographic and chronologic, of 
ancient organisms. If this possibility is admitted, it will open new horizons 
for the study of great mechanical revolutions that the crust of the earth 
underwent in the past. We cannot imagine, for instance, that the terrestrial 
equator could take the place of a meridian, without great horizontal tension in 
some regions, that would open great rifts; and in other regions, 
horizontal compressions would have taken place, such as are imagined today in 
order to explain the folding of the strata and formation of mountains. 

The resistance of the spheroid or the terrestrial globe, flattened at the poles, 
to a change in position must, in Schiaparelli's opinion, show itself also in the 
leveling of great areas and the extension of shallow seas, like that of the 
Baltic and North seas. He finished by saying: Our problem, so important from the 
astronomical and mathematical standpoint, touches the foundations of geology and 
paleontology: its solution is tied to the most grandiose events in the 
history of the Earth." 
 Later observations put the Eulerian, or Chandler's, period at 428 to 429 days. 

Thus, finally, an eminent astronomer, after a thorough examination of the 
problem, went over to the side of the geologist. However, he reasoned in a 
circle: the geological changes would cause the terrestrial poles to move from 
their places, and the motion of the poles from their places would cause 
geological and climatic changes. 

A gradual and slow displacement of the poles or a tilting of the axis would 
explain the geographical position of the ice in the past, but it would not 
account for other phenomena observed, such as the extent of the glacial cover 
and the suddenness with which it enveloped the earth. Agassiz realized this, and 
in support of the idea that the ice ages came suddenly, he quoted Cuvier. Cuvier 
died before the Ice Age theory was promulgated, but he understood that the 
climate must have altered suddenly in order to encase the large quadrupeds of 
Siberia in ice as soon as they were killed, and to preserve their bodies from 
decay since then. 
"Therefore," wrote Cuvier in prophetic anticipation of the debate that has been 
renewed for over a hundred years, down to our times, "all hypotheses of a 
gradual cooling of the earth, or a slow variation of the inclination or position 
of the terrestrial axis, are inadequate." 

 

The Sliding Continents. 

The geological changes in the distribution of land and water being inadequate to 
explain the shifting of the poles, the problem is thrown back once more into the 
domain of astronomy. But before we ask, "What forces in the solar system could 
have displaced the terrestrial axis?" we shall discuss a theory that has for 
over three decades occupied the minds of geologists, climatologists, and 
evolutionists — the theory of the shifting continents. Instead of the poles 
shifting, according to Wegener's theory the continents drift and pass one after 
the other through the southern and northern polar regions. 


In August 1950 the British Association for the Advancement of Science devoted 
the sessions of its annual convention to debate on the question: Is the — theory 
of the continental drift (slide) right or wrong? There were many defenders of 
the theory and as many opponents. The theory was then put to a vote. The result 
was an even division between "yea" and "nay." The chairman was entitled to cast 
the deciding vote but abstained. Only through the fortuitous circumstance that 
the presiding officer was a conscientious — or undecided — person was the 
sanctification of continental drift averted. 

The theory of drifting continents, debated since the 1920s, has its starting 
point in the similarity of the shapes of the coastlines of Brazil and Africa.
This similarity (or, better, complementation) plus some early faunal and floral 
affinities suggested to Professor Alfred Wegener of Graz in Styria, that in an 
early geological age these two continents, South America and Africa, were one 
land mass. But since animal and vegetable affinities could also be found in 
other parts of the world, Wegener conjectured that all continents and islands 
were once a single land mass that in various epochs divided and drifted apart. 
Those who do not subscribe to the theory of continental drift continue to 
explain the affinity of plants and animals by "land bridges" or former 
land connections between continents and also between continents and islands. 

In order that continents might move, it is claimed that there must be a basic 
difference between the composition of the earth's crust that is exposed in land 
masses and that which exists on the bottom of the ocean. The theory of drifting 
continents is grounded on the increasingly well — proven doctrine of isostasy or 
the flotation of the crust of the earth" on plastic magma. A new nomenclature 
was introduced. The land masses or the outer crust are called sicil, an 
abbreviation of silicon and aluminium, two of the elements predominant in the 
composition of terrestrial rocks. The substratum is called sima, an abbreviation 
of silicon and magnesium, there being a "good reason for believing that the 
rocks forming the substratum [bottom] of the ocean bed are more basic in 
composition and contain a large proportion of magnesia [magnesium 
oxide]."

 It is also assumed that the sima underlies the sial of the continents and, 
possessing the plastic properties of sealing wax, permits the continents to 
drift. 

Besides accounting for the correspondence between the coastal features of 
eastern South America and western Africa and between those of other continents, 
and certain affinities in the animal and plant kingdoms, the theory of drift 
tries to account for several geological phenomena, all in need of explanation: 
1, the cause of the ice ages; 2, the distribution of coal beds; and 3, the 
formation of mountains. 

According to Vegener, mountainous crests rose, in the movement 
of the land, on the forward side of the floating continents; meeting some 
resistance in its motion on elastic sima, the sial formed elevations. Thus, when 
South America moved away from Africa, an elevation was raised on the side turned 
to the Pacific Ocean, the Andes. 

If, from the beginning, there was but one land mass, there could have been only 
one ocean, too, and, according to Wegener, the only ocean was the Pacific. The 
Atlantic is a later formation, and its bottom cannot be of sima, like that of 
the Pacific, but is built of stretched sial. Sufficient proof of the difference 
in composition of the substrata of the Atlantic and the Pacific has not yet been 
adduced. 

The occurrence in an early glacial period of ice cover in lands now in tropical 
and subtropical regions is explained by the supposition that these lands were 
once in the Antarctic. However, their extent is so great that if all of them 
were joined around the South Pole, many parts that have signs of the Ice Age 
would still be too remote from the pole. The theory assumes, therefore, 
that these lands occupied in succession the position of the Antarctic continent 
today, each in its turn passing through a glacial period; the signs of 
glaciation in Africa, India, Australia, and South America are accounted for by 
the successive sliding of these continents through the southern polar region. A 
similar explanation is offered for the origin of the Ice Age in the Northern 
Hemisphere, at a much more recent date, when the land masses of North America 
and Europe wandered close to the North Pole. The North Pole is charted on 
various points on the globe —  in the Pacific, in the Canadian arctic 
archipelago, in Greenland, in Spitsbergen —  all in succession during the 
Pleistocene, or recent Ice Age. 

The coal beds in northern countries, among them Alaska and Spitsbergen, are 
dated by Wegener from the time when these lands occupied tropical or subtropical 
belts, on their passage from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern. 

If a theory can explain the origin of mountains, the cause of the ice ages, the 
coal beds in higher latitudes, and certain common characteristics of the fauna 
and flora of continents separated by oceans, then the correspondence in the 
contours of the Brazilian and West African coasts truly served as a clue to the 
solution of major problems in geology and climatology. However, there 
are facts that strongly challenge this hypothesis. 

The minute difference between the gravitational pulls to which the crust is 
subjected in higher latitudes and closer to the equator was offered by Wegener 
as the motive force in the drift of continents. But Harold Jeffreys, a British 
cosmologist, computed that this force is one hundred billion tunes too weak to 
produce the effect. "There is therefore not the slightest reason to 
believe that bodily displacements of continents through the lithosphere, the 
crust, are possible." 
Even assuming that this motive force was sufficient, why did the lands of 
Europe, Siberia, and North America first move away from the original common land 
mass toward the equator and then retreat from the equator? 

In search of another moving force, du Toit, a South African scientist, offered a 
variation of Wegener's theory, namely, a "concept of an earth in which the 
periodic, though variable, softening of the sub —  crust through radioactive 
heating enables the skin to creep differentially over the core with consequent 
wrinkling."  

As for the mountains, not all of them are situated as long ridges parallel to 
the seacoast. And no compelling evidence has been brought to support the 
contention that ice ages were consecutive in various parts of the Southern 
Hemisphere and, in much more recent times, in various parts of the Northern 
Hemisphere. Furthermore, how explain signs of the recent Ice Age in the Southern 
Hemisphere? In Patagonia, New Zealand, and other places in the Southern 
Hemisphere, signs of recent glaciation are found. It is also certain that the 
chilling of the Ice Age was simultaneous all over the world. 


Coal is found not only in arctic lands but also in Antarctic’s. Old, then, this 
continent travel there from the tropics? And what was the motive force? 

If the theory is correct, the motion of the continents should be observable at 
present; yet, though Wegener claimed, on the basis of certain reports, that 
Greenland and an island near its western coast still move, repeated observations 
and triangulations do not support this claim. Wegener perished on an expedition 
to Greenland in 1930. 

The assumption that ocean floors and continents are eternally different in 
structure is in contradiction to a great number of observations, though the land 
surface has been better explored than the bottom of the sea. The idea of a basic 
difference between the rocks of the ocean bottom and those of the continents is 
disproved wherever the fossiliferous contents of the land and of the ocean bed 
are examined. Marine expeditions have failed to find at various places 
on the ocean bottom the thick layers of sediment that should have been present 
if the sea had been covering the areas for untold centuries. On the other hand, 
sediments thousands and even tens of thousands of feet thick have been found on 
continents. Not only were large stretches of land in North America and Europe 
and Asia covered by the sea at various tunes in the past  —   and some well  —  
investigated localities, like the gypsum beds of Pans, show repeated returns of 
the waters — but even the largest and highest mountain chains — the Alps, the 
Andes, the Himalayas —   at some time were under the sea. Since the ocean once 
covered a vast expanse of land, it may at present occupy the place of former 
land. 

The land masses of today do not change their latitudes; the motive force claimed 
is insufficient by far. Coal beds in Antarctica and recent glaciation in 
temperate latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere all conspire to invalidate the 
theory of wandering continents. 

 



The Changing Orbit. 

The theory of sliding continents having been shown to be built on infirm 
foundations, there remain three theoretical changes in the position of the 
terrestrial globe or its shell in relation to the sun that could cause great 
variations of climate: a change in the form of the orbit, or the path 
the earth follows around the sun; a change in the astronomical direction of the 
axis; a change in the position of the terrestrial shell in relation to the core, 
and thus in the position of the poles (sliding shell). 

At present the elliptical form of the orbit changes by a very small amount. This 
could be the residue of a displacement the earth suffered on its path; but 
following the principle of Laplace and Lagrange concerning the stability of the 
planetary system, this variation in the shape of the terrestrial orbit is 
considered to be an oscillation, the mean shape of the orbit being regarded as 
fixed. The period of this oscillation is supposed to be of very long duration. 

The obliquity of the ecliptic, or the angle which the plane of the equator makes 
with the plane of the earth's orbit, is 23 °; this obliquity causes the sequence 
of the seasons. It changes now at the rate of 0.47' a year, "but the limits of 
its variation are difficult to calculate."  The figures offered by various 
mathematicians differ greatly. Lagrange estimated the angle of the swing to 
be as large as 7° with a period that had its last maximum in the year 2167 
before the present era; Stockwell calculated the angle of oscillation at less 
than 3 °; while Drayson estimated that the obliquity ranged from 35° to 11°, 
that is, a swing of 24.  This variation, whatever its numerical 
value, could have been caused by a disturbance which the earth suffered; but 
again, the cause being unidentified, the effect is considered to be a permanent 
oscillation. 


The earth experiences the precession of the equinoxes, or a large spin of the 
axis with consequent displacement of the seasons in relation to the perihelion 
(the point on the orbit closest to the sun). This precession or "preceding" of 
the vernal and autumnal equinoxes is as great as 50.2' in a year, and the 
terrestrial axis describes a wide circle in the sky in a period 
estimated at about 26,000 years. Newton explained this phenomenon, known since 
the days of Hipparchus (120 B.c.), as produced by the attractive effect of the 
sun and the moon on the bulging part of the equator. But this explanation does 
not account for what in the first place caused the earth's bulging part or 
equator to take the position under an angle to the plane of terrestrial 
revolution, or ecliptic. 

 
This swing of the terrestrial axis — as though the globe were a top disturbed in 
its motion — could also be caused by a disturbance in the motion of the earth 
experienced sometime in the past. 

Finally, we have already spoken of the wobbling of the terrestrial axis, or it’s 
describing a small circle around the geographical pole, or, better, of the 
wandering of the pole that causes small variations in latitudes, discovered late 
in the nineteenth century. 

A theory that employed the changes in eccentricity of the orbit and the 
precession of the equinoxes to explain the variations of climate was advanced in 
1864 by James Croll, and accepted by Charles Darwin and others; it has since 
been abandoned, for it requires alternate glacial ages in the Northern and 
Southern hemispheres, and the evidence contradicts such an order of events. 

More recently, M. Milankovitch introduced the third variable, the obliquity of 
the ecliptic, to correct some of the defects of Croll's theory. In the opinion 
of his critics, however, his curve of climatic changes widely upsets geological 
dates; nor do his variables offer sufficiently effective reasons for the 
vigorous changes of climate. Besides, he assigned an arbitrary length to the 
oscillation period of obliquity. And why were there no ice ages during long 
periods in the past, if the process recurs at calculable intervals? 

Thus the inquiry turned once more to a more radical change —   the displacement 
of the terrestrial crust in relation to the core. 

 



 

The Rotating Crust. 

The theory that the terrestrial crust is swimming on magma was first offered 
when J. H. Pratt, in the 1850s, found that the Himalayas, the largest massif on 
earth, do not exert the expected gravitational pull and do not deflect a plumb 
line. Astronomer G. B. Airy was surprised, to the point of disbelief in fact; 
but then he offered a theory that the granite crust, much lighter than the 
magma underneath, is only sixty miles thick, and that under the mountains, on 
the inside of the crust, there are reversed mountains, immersed in the heavier 
magma, which would account for the lack of gravitational pull by mountains.,  
This is the theory of isostasy. 

To the study of isostasy and its anomalies (gravitation is, strangely, stronger 
over deep seas), F.A. Vening Meinesz, Dutch geophysicist and explorer of oceans, 
made many important contributions. He found in the very structure of the 
terrestrial crust signs of some violent displacements on a global scale. Thus it 
is not merely in order to explain the climates of the past that the dislocation 
of the crust is postulated. 

In 1943, Vening Meinesz analyzed "the stresses brought about by a change in 
position of the rigid Earth's crust with regard to the axis of rotation 
of the Earth." In this analysis he surmised the crust "to have the same 
thickness everywhere and to behave as an elastic body." He pointed out that if 
we assume that the crust happened to move clockwise in relation to the core by 
over 70° the expected effect "shows a remarkable correlation to many major 
topographic features and also to the shearing patterns of large parts of 
the Earth's surface, as, e.g., the North and South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean 
and the Gulf of Aden, Africa, the Pacific, etc. If the correlation is not 
fortuitous, and this does not appear probable, we have to suppose that the 
Earth's crust at some moment of its history has indeed shifted with regard to 
the Earth's poles and that the crust has undergone a corresponding block —  
shearing. 

However, according to the theory of isostasy, the crust is not of the same 
thickness everywhere, the crustal protuberances are immersed in a very thick and 
viscous magma, and for the crust to move, even if it is only sixty miles thick, 
would require a greater force than is available under prevailing conditions in 
the solar system or on the earth itself. 


The very idea of a crust changing its position in relation to the axis of the 
interior, or of the globe itself, presupposes the validity of the theory of 
isostasy. This theory, though generally accepted, finds difficulty in explaining 
the propagation of seismic waves around the globe. If the earth's crust is not 
just sixty miles thick — which, in relation to the volume of the magma, is as 
the 
thickness of the shell to the content of an egg —  but two thousand miles, as 
some scientists assume, then, of course, the displacement of the crust requires 
forces nearly as powerful as would the displacement of the entire globe, by 
inclining its axis into a new position in respect to the cardinal points of the 
sky. 

"We are fully justified in concluding that the lithosphere was displaced during 
the great Ice Ages, and that the displacements were the direct cause of the 
alterations in climates during these periods." The author of these lines, Pauly, 
propagates the idea offered, or revived, by the astronomer Eddington in his 
paper, "The Borderland of Geology and Astronomy." 
According to Eddington, the ice ages were caused by the shifting of the earth s 
outer crust over its interior as a result of tidal friction or the inequality of 
lunar pull on various layers of the earth; this theory abandons every effort to 
find in the earth itself the force that might cause the crust in its entirety to 
change its position in relation to the terrestrial axis, which, in this theory, 
maintains its astronomical direction. In order to pull the lithosphere, or 
crust, over the substratum, or core, a lesser force is required than that needed 
to incline the axis of the whole globe in some new direction, for the crust is 
but a portion of the entire mass of the earth, and the momentum is 
dependent on the mass. However, in order to move the crust, preserving the axis 
of the core as that of the entire globe, the friction between the crust and the 
substratum must be overcome; and because of the equatorial bulge, in order to 
alter the position of the crust, it must be stretched in some parts. This would 
require the application of a great force, which does not appear to exist in 
tidal friction originating in the moon. 

Furthermore, the tidal force acts on the surface of the earth in an east —  west 
direction; and a change in this direction would not disturb the position of the 
latitudes in relation to the pole and could not have been the cause of the ice 
ages. Eddington's theory requires the sliding of the crust northward and 
southward; to explain the origin of such sliding, he suggested that the crust, 
moving slowly in the east — west direction, upon meeting some excessive local 
friction between itself and the substratum, would change its course. But, as 
indicated above, the tidal friction of the moon could hardly stretch the crust 
over the equatorial bulge. 

The theory of the sliding lithosphere shares the quantitative inadequacy of the 
theory of sliding continents. Some motive agent more powerful than tidal 
friction (Eddington), or gravitational differences at various latitudes 
(Wegener), or intermittent radioactivity in the earth (Du Toit), must have been 
at work in order to move continents or the entire lithosphere. Thus these 
theories meet the fate of the earlier theory that postulated the shifting of the 
poles because of a geological redistribution of land and sea. 

Also the theory that would explain the displacement of the crust by an 
asymmetric growth of the polar icecaps is quantitatively indefensible; this 
theory uses the same phenomenon — the growing icecaps — as the cause and the 
effect of ice ages. 

The present survey of theories, which are quantitatively inadequate yet based on 
the well —  reasoned principle of a change of latitudes or, the direction of the 
axis as the cause of the ice ages, was here undertaken to make clear that 
thoughtful researchers among geologists, climatologists, and astronomers were 
unsatisfied with views that would not solve the problem of the geographical 
distribution of the ice cover in the past, a point of which almost all other 
theories are strangely oblivious. It follows, then, that the clamour heard at 
the publication of Worlds in Collision, even from some astronomers and 
geologists, to the effect that the shifting axis or changing latitudes had never 
been heard of, is not supported by scientific literature. 

W. B. Wright, of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, finds that the only way 
to explain ice ages is to assume that "the earth's axis of rotation has not 
always had the same position"; and "since it has now become obvious that 
geological history has witnessed many changes in the position of the climatic 
zones on the surface of the earth and that at least one notable glaciation, that 
of the Permo— Carboniferous, preceding the time of the large reptiles, was due 
to a displacement of the pole from its present position, it becomes worth while 
to inquire whether the Quaternary [Recent] glaciation would not have a similar 
cause." 

But every inquiry in this direction, in Wright's opinion, failed to find a cause 
that would account for recurrent but not periodic ice ages; they did not return 
through geological history at measured intervals. Therefore he concluded: "Among 
the theories that have been brought forward to account for the phenomena of the 
Ice Age, there is not a single one which meets the facts of the 
case in such a manner as to inspire confidence." 

Not only must the cause have been more powerful than the agents invoked, but it 
must have acted with great suddenness. On this we shall dwell in the following 
sections. 

Sudden the agent must have been, and violent; recurrent it must have been, but 
at highly erratic intervals; and it must have been of titanic power. 

 

CHAPTER IX,
AXIS SHIFTED.


THE DISPLACEMENT of the shell alone requires forces not in existence on the 
earth itself; and the turning of the earth's axis in a new direction requires 
more powerful forces still. Of course one change does not preclude the other. 
Each would result in climatic revolution. If the crust moved, the latitudes 
would be displaced and, in an extreme case, the poles and the equator 
could change places; and if the axis turned in a new direction, seasons would 
change their order and intensity and, in an extreme case, a polar region could 
be turned for a large part of the year into the warmest place on the globe, 
being day and night under the direct rays of the sun, as presently is the case 
with Uranus. 

Harold Jeffreys asks in his book The Earth! "Has the inclination of the earth's 
axis to the plane of its orbit varied during its history?" and proceeds: "The 
answer to [this] question is a definite 'Yes!' 
The theory of tidal friction, assumes the equator and the plane of the earth's 
and moon's orbits to coincide. The fact [is] that they do not. 

The moon, it is assumed, issued from the equatorial region of the earth by the 
process of disruption and must, therefore, revolve in the plane of the 
terrestrial equator; but since it does not, there must have 
been a displacement either of the moon or of the terrestrial axis; and the 
position of the moon close to the plane of the ecliptic suggests that the 
terrestrial axis suffered displacement. 

Also, if from the beginning there was a difference in the direction of the axes 
of terrestrial rotation and lunar revolution, this difference must have 
disappeared as the result of tidal friction. Jeffreys 
considered the works of George Darwin, who tried to explain the observed 
positions by recourse to several additional tidal frictions, but he found a flaw 
in Darwin's hypothesis. 

Any internal changes in the earth would be "not important" for the observed 
change in the direction of the terrestrial axis. Jeffreys says: "If we consider 
the axis of the earth's angular momentum, this can change in direction only 
through couples acting on the earth from outside." 

The arguments of astronomers against the idea of the geologists concerning the 
change in the position of the terrestrial axis were correct only in showing that 
the terrestrial causes could not effectively displace the axis of the earth; but 
the very fact of displacement is now claimed because of astronomical 
considerations and by such an authority in this field as Jeffreys. What 
could have played the role of couples, or a vise, acting from outside? And, 
again, was it a gradual change or a sudden displacement? 

 

Evaporating Oceans 

If we take into account the area occupied by ice in the glacial epoch, much 
larger than the area of the present polar ice, we must conclude that the 
shifting of the poles alone cannot explain the origin of the glacial cover. The 
expansion of the glacial cover in its various stages is supposed to 
be known. The usual estimate of its thickness is between six and twelve thousand 
feet. From these figures the mass of the ice is calculated and the quantity of 
water necessary to produce it. 
The water must have come from the oceans; it is estimated that the surface of 
the oceans must have been at least three hundred feet lower when the ice cover 
was developed. Some estimates double, triple, quadruple, and even increase 
sevenfold this figure. 

But for all the oceans to have evaporated to such an extent, turning many areas 
of the continental shelf (the sea at the coast to a depth of a hundred fathoms, 
or six hundred feet) into a desert of sand and shells, an enormous amount of 
heat was necessary. 

John Tyndall, a British physicist of the last century, wrote: 
"Some eminent men have thought, and some still think, that the reduction of 
temperature, during the glacial epoch, was due to a temporary diminution of 
solar radiation; others have thought that, in its motion through space, our 
system may have traversed regions of low temperature, and that during its 
passage through these regions, the ancient glaciers were produced.  Many of them 
seem to have overlooked the fact that the enormous extension of glaciers in 
bygone ages demonstrates, just as rigidly, the operation of heat as well as the 
action of cold. Cold [alone] will not produce glaciers." 

Tyndall then went on to demonstrate the amount of heat necessary to transport 
water to the polar regions in the form of snow. He calculated that for every 
pound of vapour produced a quantity of heat is required sufficient to raise five 
pounds of cast iron to the melting point. 
Consequently, in order to evaporate the oceans and transform the water into 
aqueous clouds that would later descend as snow and turn to ice, a quantity of 
heat was needed that would raise to the melting point a mass of iron five times 
greater than the mass of the ice. Tyndall argued that the geologists should 
substitute the hot iron for the cold ice, and they would get an idea of 
the high temperature immediately preceding the Ice Age and the formation of the 
glacial cover. 

If this is so, then none of the theories offered in explanation of the Ice Age 
really would account for it. Even if the sun disappeared and the earth lost its 
heat to cosmic space, there would be no Ice Age! the oceans and all the water 
would freeze, but there would be no ice formation on land. 

The importance of heat in the formation of the ice cover of the Ice Age was 
stressed even more by another author, an astronomer of our day, Menzel, of the 
Harvard Observatory: solar variability caused the ice ages, I should prefer to 
believe that increased warmth brought them on, whereas a diminution of heat 
caused them to stop."

What could have brought about such a rise in the temperature of the oceans that, 
all over the globe, they evaporated enough to lower their surface not three, not 
thirty, but more than three hundred feet? Could the heat have been generated by 
the decomposition of organic matter in the sediment? It goes without saying that 
this source would have been utterly inadequate. A tremendous heating process 
must have preceded the formation of the ice cover; and since it is 
generally maintained that there were at least four glacial periods in the recent  
Ice Age, in each of which the ice grew and then retreated in the interglacial 
stage, the globe, in a recent geological epoch, must have been repeatedly so hot 
that the portion of the heat the oceans received would have sufficed to turn an 
immense mountain of iron, five times the mass of the continental ice cover, to a 
white glow and melt it. According to Tyndall, if this did not happen, there 
could not have been any ice ages. 

Do we know under what circumstances the earth and its oceans would be heated on 
a stupendous scale? 

If we subscribe to the Ice Age theory, we must assume that the terrestrial globe 
with its oceans was heated as in a furnace, in the age of man, since the Ice 
Age, together with the Recent, is the age of man. Large stretches of the bottoms 
of the oceans must have bubbled with lava. But what could have produced this 
simultaneous activity of subterranean heat over such vast areas? 

We cannot imagine any cause or agent for this, unless it be an exogenous agent, 
an extraterrestrial cause. For the removal of the poles from their places, or 
the shifting of the axis, also, only an external agent could have been 
responsible. The adherents of the Ice Age theory must look to the celestial 
sphere for the causes of at least four separate encounters, in the not 
too distant past, with some celestial mass of matter or field of force. 

On passing through a large cloud of dust particles or meteorites, the earth and 
its atmosphere would be heated by the direct impact of these bodies on its 
atmosphere, its oceans, its land. 
Under such an impact a displacement of the poles or disturbance in axial 
rotation would also produce heat in every particle of the globe, because of the 
conversion of a portion of the energy of motion into heat. This is one 
theoretical possibility. 

The other possibility would be that, on passing through a cloud of dust carrying 
an electromagnetic charge, the earth would react with electrical currents on its 
surface that would develop a thermal effect. If the earth passed through a 
strong field, the heat would be very intense. Selecting the better conducting 
strata, these currents would go through metal — bearing formations, possibly 
deeper in the crust, sparing life in some quarters and destroying it in others. 
Such heat could evaporate oceans to a great depth, cause the intrusion of 
igneous rock into sedimentary rock, start the flow of magma from fissures, and 
activate all volcanoes. 

The earth is itself a large magnet. A charged cloud of dust or gases, moving in 
relation to the earth, would be an electromagnet. An extraneous electromagnetic 
field that would produce a thermal effect on the earth would also shift the 
terrestrial axis and change the rotational velocity of the earth. This, in turn, 
would have a thermal effect, since the energy of motion would be 
converted into heat, and possibly into other forms of energy — electrical, 
magnetic, and chemical, as well as nuclear — with ensuing radioactivity, again 
with thermal effect. 

An extraneous mechanical or electromagnetic force would produce both phenomena, 
which are prerequisites of a glacial period: the astronomical or geographical 
shifting of the axis and the heating of the globe. The astronomers who oppose 
the theory of cosmic catastrophes must likewise reject the theory of the ice 
ages. 

 

 

Condensation. 

In the preceding section it was made clear that, for the ice cover of the 
glacial epoch to be formed, evaporation of the oceans on a large scale must have 
occurred. But evaporation of the oceans would not be enough; rapid and powerful 
condensation of the vapours must have followed. "We need a condenser so powerful 
that this vapour, instead of falling in liquid showers to the earth, shall be so 
far reduced in temperature as to descend as snow."  

An unusual sequence of events was necessary: the oceans must have steamed and 
the vaporized water must have fallen as snow in latitudes of temperate climates. 
This sequence of heat and cold must have taken place in quick succession. 

A precipitate drop in temperature and a rapid condensation of vapours could have 
followed from the screening effect of clouds of dust. Oust of either volcanic or 
meteoric origin, by enveloping the earth, could have impaired the solar light 
and warmth reaching the lower atmosphere. The dust particles ejected by erupting 
volcanoes have been observed to float in the sky around the globe for many 
months. So, after the eruption of Krakatoa in Sunda Strait between Java and 
Sumatra in 1883, dust particles suspended in the atmosphere continued for over a 
year to act as a screen around the world that caused the sunsets to be unusually 
colourful.  Dust from many volcanoes could build a screen that would obstruct 
the solar light. Actually the screening of the earth by clouds of dust of 
volcanic origin was one of the theories concerning the origin of ice in 
the glacial epochs; however, like heat alone, cold alone would not have sufficed 
to produce the continental ice covers. 

In the struggle between heat and cold, snow would descend in some parts of the 
world and torrential rains in others. And, in fact, numerous scientists who 
conducted their field study in various areas outside the former ice cover came 
to the conclusion that those areas bad experienced periods of torrential rains 
that were simultaneous with the glacial periods in higher latitudes. Gregory, 
studying the African continent, observed signs of water action on a great 
scale at the same time that other areas were being covered by advancing ice.8 
There remained in the Sahara and adjacent regions stream channels "not now 
occupied by water courses" that obviously carried great quantities of water. "It 
is believed probable that these stream ways were trenched during a pluvial age 
or pluvial ages" In the Pluvial, Lake Victoria in Africa stood 
over 300 feet above its present level; since that tune there was a complete 
reversal of the river system in the region. Shor Kul, a salt lake in Sinkiang, 
had its level 350 feet higher than it is today. Lake Bonneville, which occupied 
parts of Utah, Nevada, and Idaho, and collected pluvial water as well as melt 
water from the local glaciers in the mountains, stood "more than 1000 feet 
above the present Great Salt Lake." 

Although some geologists, on theoretical grounds, would prefer to think that a 
dry climate prevailed in the world when so much water was concentrated in the 
ice covers, field geology shows the opposite to have been the case: snow fell in 
huge masses, and rain cascaded from the sky at the very same time. 

 




A Working Hypothesis. 

Let us assume, as a working hypothesis, that under the impact of a force or the 
influence of an agent — and the earth does not travel in an empty universe — the 
axis of the earth shifted or tilted. 
At that moment an earthquake would make the globe shudder. Air and water would 
continue to move through inertia; hurricanes would sweep the earth and the seas 
would rush over continents, carrying gravel and sand and marine animals, and 
casting them on the land. Heat would be developed, rocks would melt, volcanoes 
would erupt, lava would flow from fissures in the ruptured ground and cover vast 
areas. Mountains would spring up from the plains and would travel and climb on 
the shoulders of other mountains, causing faults and rifts. Lakes would be 
tilted and emptied, rivers would change their beds; large land areas with all 
their inhabitants would slip under the sea. Forests would burn, and the 
hurricanes and wild seas would wrest them from the ground on which they grew and 
pile them, branch and root, in huge heaps. Seas would turn into deserts, their 
waters rolling away. 


And if a change in the velocity of the directional rotation —   
slowing it down — should accompany the shifting of the axis, the water confined 
to the equatorial oceans by centrifugal force would retreat to the poles, and 
high tides and hurricanes would rush from pole to pole, carrying reindeer and 
seals to the tropics and desert Hons into the Arctic, moving from the equator up 
to the mountain ridges of the Himalayas and down the African jungles; and 
crumbled rocks torn from splintering mountains would be scattered over large 
distances; and herds of animals would be washed from the plains of Siberia. The 
shifting of the axis would also change the climate of every place, leaving 
corals in Newfoundland and elephants in Alaska, fig trees in northern Greenland 
and luxuriant forests in Antarctica. In the event of a rapid shift of the axis, 
many species and genera of animals on land and in the sea would be destroyed, 
and civilizations, if any, would be reduced to ruins. 



Water evaporated from the oceans would rise in clouds and fall again in 
torrential rains and snowfalls. Clouds of dust, ejected by numerous volcanoes 
and swept by hurricanes from the ground, and possibly dust clouds of extraneous 
origin — if a comet train of meteorites was the foreign body causing the 
upheaval — all this dust would keep the rays of the sun from penetrating 
to the earth. The temperature under the clouds would be reduced, but close to 
the ground it would be higher than normal because the heated earth would, by 
convection, dissipate its heat into the atmosphere. Great streams would be 
formed by the melting ice of the polar regions, carried out of the Polar Circle, 
and heated by the ground. Glaciers from the mountains would 
dissolve and inundate the valleys. In higher and in temperate latitudes the 
falling snow would turn to water or even vapour before reaching the ground or 
soon thereafter. For many months and probably years, the snow falling on the 
ground would, melt and run in great streams to the sea, cutting new river 
channels and carrying off great masses of debris. 

Falling again and again in a sunless world, the snow, shielded from the sun's 
rays by thick clouds enveloping the earth, would finally cool the ground to the 
point where it would turn, not into water, but into ice. At first this ice would 
not lie firmly on the ground; from slopes it would slide down to the deeper 
valleys and then toward the sea. Large icebergs would fill the sea and, tossing 
about, melt and drop a load of stones or other detrital material to the bottom; 
other icebergs, floating over valleys filled with water, would deposit their 
loads there. In the course of the years the incessant action of the snow would 
cool the ground in the higher latitudes to such an extent that a permanent cover 
would be built. And the earth would go on shuddering for centuries, slowly 
quieting down, and as time passed one after another the 
volcanoes would burn themselves out. 

This catastrophic shifting of the axis, once or a number of times, is presented 
here only as a working hypothesis but, without exception, all its potential 
effects have actually taken place. 

Assuming now that the working hypothesis is wrong, we are faced with the 
necessity of finding a special explanation for each and every phenomenon 
observed. 

The mountains rose from the beds of the seas and folded and faulted. "What 
generates the enormous forces that bend, break, and mash the rocks in mountain 
zones? Why have sea floors of remote periods become the lofty highlands of 
today? These questions still await satisfactory answers." 

Climate changed, and the continental ice cover formed. "At present the cause of 
excessive ice making on the lands remains a baffling mystery, a major question 
for the future reader of earth's riddles."  

Species and genera of animals were extinguished. The biologist is in despair as 
he surveys the extinction of so many species and genera in the closing 
Pleistocene, the ice Age. "Equally sudden and unexplained changes accompanied 
the close of each geological period. 

What caused tropical forests to grow in polar regions? What caused volcanic 
activity on a great scale in the past and lava flows on land and in the ocean 
beds? What caused earthquakes to be so numerous and violent in the past? 
Puzzlement, despair, and frustration are the only answers to each and every one 
of these phenomena. 

The theories of uniformity and evolution maintain that the geological record 
bears witness that from time immemorial, even from the time this planet began 
its existence, only minutes changes  —   caused by the wind blowing on the 
rocks, the sand grains swimming to the sea —  accumulated into vast changes. 
These causes, however, are inadequate to explain the great revolutions in 
nature, and they evoke expressions of futility on the part of the specialists, 
each in his field. 

 


Ice and Tide. 

Having shown that only global catastrophes could have brought about the building 
and spreading of ice covers, I shall now go on to demonstrate that many effects 
attributed to ice were caused not by it but by onrushing water. The simplicity 
with which cosmic catastrophes can explain the origin of the continental ice 
covers should not make us uncritical. The same catastrophes caused great tides 
to rush over continents. Both phenomena —  waves of translation and ice covers —  
took place. 

Tidal waves traversed continents, moving by inertia when the daily rotation of 
the earth was disturbed; the ocean water also retreated from the equatorial to 
the polar regions, returning to the equator with the adjustment of the diurnal 
rotation. These tidal waves, augmented by others produced by the extraneous 
fields of force, and by tides generated by submarine earthquakes 
and hurricanes, were the main agents that dispersed erratic boulders, 
distributed marine sediment over the land, covered the ground with drift. 
Invasions of the land by the sea, torrential rains, prodigious snowfalls, floods 
caused by the melting ice cover, and multitudinous icebergs sliding into the 
sea, all contributed to the readjustment of the mantle of the earth, shifting 
the sea —  floor sand, the disintegrating rock, the lava, the volcanic and 
meteoric dust and ashes. The arctic lands were denuded and their detachable 
mantle was washed away; thus was formed the barren stone surface of the Canadian 
Shield, its soil being earned away as drift. 

The erosion and drift, the excavation of lakes and valleys, and their filling in 
with clay, boulders, and sand have been ascribed to ice that eroded and moved 
the debris along. The opponents of the Ice Age theory, the last of which is 
George McCready Price, pointed to the effect of the ice cover in Antarctica on 
the rocks beneath: ice plays there a protective and not an eroding role; it 
shields the underlying rock from the erosive action of the elements and 
especially of the high velocity winds that blow most of the year in this part of 
the world. Yet in rapid motion, with many stone fragments and other debris under 
it, ice could scratch the bedrock and erode and flute the slopes of valleys. But 
it is doubtful that the weight of the ice would excavate lake basins in cold, 
hard rock. The ground was heated, lava gushed out of the earth, formations were 
softened, and oceans, pouring water and stones on rock and lava, made deep 
impressions in them. When, after the mountainous ice cover was formed, the 
ground in a new paroxysm gushed lava under the ice, the latter steamed and, 
subsiding, pressed with a great weight on the softened ground; 
in this manner, too, ice could excavate beds of lakes and leave other deep marks 
on the ground it once covered. 

Before the Ice Age theory was conceived, drift and erratic boulders were 
ascribed to the action of great tidal waves. But with the advent of this theory 
the role of water in the deposition of drift and erratic boulders was denied. 
"Gigantic waves," wrote J. Geikie, "were supposed to have precipitated upon the 
land, and then swept madly on over mountain and valley alike, carrying 
along with them a mighty burden of rocks and stones and rubbish." 1 This view 
assumed, however, "the former existence of a cause which there was little in 
nature to warrant." A late opponent of the Ice Age theory, Sir Henry H. Howorth 
(1842 —  1923), sought the origin of such tidal waves in a sudden rise of a 
mountain chain or in an earthquake of the oceanic bottom. 

As we have learned o» preceding pages, a disturbance in the axial rotation of 
the earth must have created a displacement of the oceans and their irruption on 
land; and this very cause  —   the disturbance in the axial rotation of the 
earth —  must have acted also in order to build the continental ice covers; it 
also changed the profile of the earth's crust, lifting some mountains and 
Leveling others. 

All this created scenes of the utmost complexity. An example is the old but not 
antiquated description of the Northeastern United States from Maine to Michigan 
and New Jersey by J. D. Whitney, professor of geology at Harvard (1875 —  96). 
In his work, The Climatic Changes of Later Geological Times (1882), he wrote 
about this area as "a region where the Glacial phenomena exhibit the highest 
degree of complexity. We are beset with difficulties when we attempt to solve 
the problem presented by the Northern Drift in Northeastern America. 

 Extreme complexity in the direction of the striation; proof of the former 
presence of the sea over a part of the region, and of fresh water over another 
extensive portion; enormous accumulations of detrital material evidently 
deposited by water; occasional peculiar transportation of boulders in a manner 
not in harmony with anything we see ice doing at the present time; occurrence of 
linear accumulations of sand gravel, and boulders closely resembling the osar 
[Scandinavian crests of drift] in character; proofs in some parts of the Drift 
region of the prevalence during the Glacial epoch of a colder climate, and in 
others of one warmer than that now existing —  these are some of the 
difficulties which must be met by those who undertake to solve the problem of 
the Northern Drift of Northeastern America." 

 The theories of warm interglacial periods and of the deformation of land and 
its submersion as the result of the removal of the ice cover could explain the 
puzzling phenomena in some cases, but in many others they could not do so. Thus 
bones of seal and walrus are found in Holderness, Yorkshire, with fresh —  water 
mollusks of warm climate. "Despite its anomalous elements, the deposit is 
classed as interglacial." In similar strata in Yorkshire hippopotami are found, 
too. 



The glaciers in the Alps served as observational material for deductions 
concerning the continental ice cover. However, alpine glaciers carry stones 
downhill, not uphill, and the general question was asked whether ice could carry 
rocks uphill.

Erratic boulders are often found in places where continental ice could hardly 
have deposited them. Charles Darwin inquired and learned that erratics are found 
on the Azores, islands separated from the ice cover by a wide expanse of ocean. 

Cumming described erratics close to the summit of the Isle of Man amidst the 
Irish Sea, where only waves could have lifted them.8 In Labrador boulders have 
been seen, rammed against the slopes of the hills, which could have been done 
only by a tidal wave. As already said, in India, in an earlier ice age, detritus 
and blocks were carried, not from the land toward the sea, but in the 
opposite direction, from the sea up the Himalayas, and not from higher latitudes 
toward lower, but in the opposite direction. The whales in the hills of Vermont 
and Quebec were cast there by an irrupting ocean. 

The very profusion of erratic boulders in many places of the world, sometunes 
covering wide stretches of a country, whether carried by ice or by tides, 
presents the problem of their origin: 
they must have been broken off the mountains in great numbers at a time when ice 
and water were thrown into action. The mountains must have been under stress, 
the massifs must have been heated and split, or shattered by earthquakes; they 
must have been mashed and twisted and rent when the seas trespassed their 
borders and carried their billows to mountainous ridges, red and bursting. 

 

 

Magnetic Poles Reversed 

When rock is liquefied it is non —  magnetic but, cooling to about 580° 
Centigrade (Curie point), it acquires a magnetic state and orientation dependent 
upon the magnetic field of the earth. After solidifying, lava rock retains its 
magnetic property, and it would retain it even though it became displaced or the 
magnetic orientation of the earth changed. 

In all parts of the globe rock formations are found with reversed polarization;1 
paleomagnetism almost every month detects more areas of inverted orientation. 
"Sufficient experiments have now been made to allow only one plausible 
explanation of this 'inverted' magnetization  —   that the Earth's magnetic 
field was itself reversed at the period when the rocks were formed." 

At the same time it was admitted that "no known mechanical or electromagnetic 
[local] effect can cause a reversal of magnetization over such an area."  

An even more puzzling fact is that the rocks with inverted polarity are much 
more strongly magnetized than can be accounted for by the earth's magnetic 
field. Lava or igneous rock, on cooling below the Curie point, acquires a 
magnetic charge stronger than the charge this rock would acquire in the same 
magnetic field at outdoor temperature, but only doubly so. The rocks 
with inverted polarity, however, are magnetically charged ten times and often up 
to a hundred times stronger than they could have been by terrestrial magnetism. 
"This is one of the most astonishing problems of paleomagnetism, and is not yet 
fully explained, although the facts are well attested." 


Thus we are confronted with an ever —  growing puzzle. The cause of the reversal 
of the magnetic field in the rocks of the earth is unknown and the fact 
contradicts every cosmological theory. The strength of magnetization of the 
rocks with inverted polarity is astonishing. 

Now, if the earth's axis changed its direction or position under the influence 
of an external magnetic field, we should expect to find the following: 

The external magnetic field would create eddy (electrical) currents in the 
surface layers of the earth; the currents would create a magnetic field around 
the earth that would counteract the external magnetic field. The strength of the 
magnetic field created by the eddy currents would be dependent on the external 
magnetic field and the velocity with which the earth traveled through it. 
The thermal effect of the electrical currents would liquefy the rocks. The 
process would be accompanied by volcanic activity and intrusion of igneous rock 
into surface sedimentary rocks. 
The molten rock would acquire a magnetic state as soon as its temperature 
dropped to about 580 C; also, those rocks that were heated below this 
temperature would acquire the orientation of the prevailing magnetic field. It 
is also apparent that an external magnetic field that could shift 
the terrestrial axis in a short time would have to he of considerable intensity. 

We have all three expected effects: lava flowed and igneous rock intruded in the 
form of dykes or otherwise; the heated rocks acquired a reversed magnetic 
orientation; the intensity of their magnetization is stronger than the earth's 
own field could possibly produce. 

In the section "A Working Hypothesis," it was asserted that the formation of the 
ice cover, pluvial phenomena, and mountain building could be explained if the 
earth's axis was shifted, and it was assumed that the axis was shifted by an 
extraneous magnetic field. Now, the circumstance that rocks the world over show 
reversed magnetic orientation and an intensity of magnetization which 
the earth's magnetic field could not have induced, proves that our assumption 
was not unfounded. 

In a recent article, S. K. Runcorn of the University of Cambridge reports that 
"the evidence accumulates that the earth did reverse its field many times." ,  
"the north and south geomagnetic poles reversed places several times  —    the 
field would suddenly break up and reform with opposite polarity. 

The source of the terrestrial magnetism is supposed to be in electrical currents 
on the surface of the terrestrial core. "Substantial changes in the speed of 
earth's rotation become easier to explain. 

"Whatever the mechanism [of the origin of the terrestrial magnetic fieldl, there 
seems no doubt that the earth's field is tied up in some way with the rotation 
of the planet. And this leads to a remarkable finding about the earth's rotation 
itself.' 

The unavoidable conclusion, according to Runcorn, is that "the earth's axis of 
rotation has changed also. In other words, the planet has rolled about, changing 
the location of its geographical poles." He charted the various positions of the 
north geographical pole. 

The next question, then, is: When was the terrestrial magnetic field reversed 
for the last time? 

Most interesting is the discovery that the last time the reversal of the 
magnetic field took place was in the eighth century before the present era, or 
twenty— seven centuries ago. 
The position of the ancient vases during firing is known. They were fired in a 
standing position, as the flow of the glaze testifies. The magnetic inclination 
or the magnetic dip of the iron particles in the fired clay indicates which was 
the nearest magnetic pole, the south or the north. 


In 1896 Giuseppe Folgheraiter began his careful studies of Attic (Greek) and 
Etruscan vases of various centuries, starting with the eighth century before the 
present era. His conclusion was that in the eighth century the earth's magnetic 
field was inverted in Italy and Greece. Italy and Greece were closer to the 
south than to the north magnetic pole. 

P. L. Mercanton of Geneva, studying the pots of the Hallstatt age from Bavaria 
(about the year  —  1000) and from the Bronze Age caves in the neighborhood of 
Lake Neuchatel, came to the conclusion that about the tenth century before the 
present era the direction of the magnetic field differed only a little from its 
direction today, and yet his material was of an earlier date than the 
Greek and Etruscan vases examined by Folgheraiter. But checking on the method 
and the results of Folgheraiter, Mercanton found them perfect. 

An ancient vase found by F. A. Forel in Boiron de Morges, on Lake Geneva, was 
broken and its pieces were scattered and lay in all directions; when assembled, 
they all showed one and the same magnetic orientation, which proves again that 
the magnetic field of the earth was unable to change the orientation originally 
acquired by the clay when fired and cooled.

These researches, continued and described in a series of papers by Professor 
Mercanton, presently with the Service Meteorologique Universitaire in Lausanne, 
show that the magnetic field of the earth, not very different from what it is 
today, was disturbed sometime during or immediately following the eighth century 
to the extent of complete reversal.

The eighth and the beginning of the seventh centuries before the present era 
were periods of great cosmic upheavals, described in Worlds in Collision, pages 
207 —  359. At one of the occurrences the solar motion appeared to be reversed, 
reflecting some disturbance in the terrestrial motion. 

 

 

Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Comets. 

A great chain of volcanoes girdles the Pacific Ocean. The Andes in South America 
are studded with many volcanic summits, among them the loftiest volcanic 
mountains in the world: Cotopaxi in Ecuador is over 19,000 feet high. The Andes 
reached their present height only in the age of modern man. Magma intruded into 
the rock and lifted it; in many places magma reached the surface, broke through 
vents, and built craters. Most of those volcanoes, however, are already 
extinct. 

Manley speaks of "the possibility of its [earth's magnetic field] reversal in 
historical times, 2500 years ago, to be cleared up by more research." However, 
the more exact date is, according to the original works of Folgheraiter and 
Mercanton, the eighth century before the present era, or shortly thereafter. 

Central America abounds in volcanoes, most of them extinct or dormant; the 
highest, Orizaba in Mexico, over 18,000 feet high, was active for the last time 
three centuries ago. In the United States few volcanoes are active, though many 
became extinct very recently, in the geological sense. Alaska, the Aleutian 
Islands, the Kamchatka Peninsula, and the Kurile Islands encircle the northern 
Pacific with a volcanic arc. The Japanese islands contain volcanoes by the 
score; most of them are extinct, some only recently so. Formosa, the 
Philippines, the so —  called Volcano Islands —  one of which is Iwo Jima —  the 
Moluccas, northern New Zealand, the Sunda Archipelago  —  all are crowded with 
volcanoes, most of them only recently extinct. In the center of this chain are 
the Hawaiian Islands, with fifteen great mountainous volcanoes, all extinct or 
dormant except Mauna Loa and Kilauea, two of the largest volcanoes on earth. 
"How was that 30,000 foot cone built from the floor of the deep sea?" 1 When, in 
1855, Mauna Loa erupted, the lava ran over the land at a velocity of forty miles 
an hour, faster than a swift horse. 

In 1883, when the volcanic island of Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait blew off, it 
sent a column of pumice and ashes over seventeen miles high; it raised tides 100 
feet high that carried steamships miles inland and were felt on the eastern 
coast of Africa and the western coast of the Americas as far as Alaska; it 
created a noise that was heard in Ceylon, in the Philippines, and even in Japan 
over three thousand miles away. This would compare with an explosion in London 
heard in New York. 

When Bandai erupted in Japan in 1888, it cast up almost three billion tons of 
material and blew off one of its four peaks. But these delayed actions of single 
volcanoes look like child's play when compared with the forces that in past ages 
thrust up the Andes, spread the Deccan trap  —  the great lava flows, several 
thousand feet thick, that cover 250,000 square miles in India —  built 
the lava dykes that cross South Africa, spread the Columbia Plateau in America, 
and laid the lava bed of the Pacific. 

The Indian Ocean from Java, an island full of volcanoes, extinct, dormant, and 
active, to Kilimanjaro, an extinct volcano over 19,000 feet high in East Africa, 
is circled with volcanoes and its bottom is of lava, with several volcanic isles 
in the middle of it. Along the Arabian coast of the Red Sea stretches a long 
chain of volcanoes; the numerous craters are all extinct, but it is not so 
long ago that they became inactive, the last eruptions having taken place in the 
year 1222 in northern Syria and in 1253 at Aden.  


In the Mediterranean region Thera (Santorin), which exploded with unusual force 
about  —  1500 b.c. - is still active or dormant; Etna on Sicily, a snow —  
capped volcano, Stromboli, and Vulcano are active. On the mainland of Europe, 
however, the only active volcano left is Vesuvius. In the past France and the 
British Isles saw extensive volcanic activity, and though this activity is 
ascribed to the Tertiary, some of "the cones, craters, and lava —  streams, [in 
France], stand out so fresh that they might almost be supposed to have been 
erupted ony a few generations ago," in the words of Sir Archibald Geikie. 

Iceland in the North Atlantic has 107 volcanoes on it and thousands of craters, 
large and small; none of the volcanoes is geologically ancient, but many of them 
are extinct. The island is covered with coagulated lava, fissures, and crater 
formations. Iceland is one of the rare places where in modern times lava streams 
have been vomited from fissures in the earth without a crater having been 
formed. 

From Iceland down the Atlantic, the Azores, the Canary Islands, the Cape Verde 
Islands, Ascension, and St. Helena are volcanic islands, some of them thrust up 
from the bottom of the ocean; their volcanic activity, like the activity of the 
many known volcanoes on the bottom of the Atlantic, has ceased. 

In Patagonia volcanic eruptions have occurred down to fairly recent times, and 
the land between the Atlantic and the Andes is covered in many places with lava 
flows. 

All in all only about four or five hundred volcanoes on earth are considered 
active or dormant, against a multiplicity of extinct cones. Yet only five or six 
hundred years ago many of the presently inactive volcanoes were still active. 
This points to very great activity at a time only a few thousand years ago. At 
the rate of extinction witnessed by modern man, the greater part of 
the still active volcanoes will become inactive in a matter of several 
centuries. 

The cause of volcanic activity is supposed to be in movements and fractures of 
the outer crust of the earth, "however these may be brought about, a matter as 
yet by no means settled." The coincidence in time and place of mountain folding 
and volcano building is regarded as significant for the solution of the problem 
of the origin of volcanoes. 

Seas of lava and crater formations cover the entire face of the moon. "No one 
who has observed the moon, even through a relatively small telescope, can forget 
this picture of tremendous catastrophe: a flood of molten lava that has engulfed 
and obliterated craters and mountain ridges in its path.

 Whether the crater formations on the moon, some of which reach 150 miles 
in diameter, resulted from bombardment by enormous meteorites, or are extinct 
volcanoes, or, as I assumed in Worlds in Collision are the congealed effects of 
bubbling activity on the surface of the moon that became molten, the face of the 
moon is indisputable proof of catastrophic events on a planetary scale. The 
theory of uniformity can be taught only on moonless nights. 

As with the volcanic activity, the seismic shocks, judged by their effects, must 
have been of a very different order of magnitude in the past. "The earthquakes 
of the present day," writes Eduard Suess in his The Face of the Earth (Das 
Antlitz der Erde), "are certainly but faint reminiscences of those telluric 
movements to which the structure of almost every mountain range bears witness. 
Numerous examples of great mountain chains suggest by their structure, 
episodal disturbances of such indescribable and overpowering violence, that the 
imagination refuses to follow the understanding.

Suess thought that mountain building came to an end before the advent of man; 
but today we know that it lasted well into Recent time, and consequently man 
must have witnessed the great earthquakes that made the globe shudder. 

When the Andes rose in South America, according to the description by R. T. 
Chamberlin, "Hundreds, if not thousands, of cubic miles of the body of the earth 
almost mstantaneously heaved upward produced a violent earthquake which spread  
, throughout the entire globe. Many world shaking earthquakes must have been by 
—  products of the rise of the Sierras." 

Again, we now know that the Sierras attained their present height in the age of 
man, in Recent time. 

And if we give credence to the records of earthquakes in the chronicles of the 
ancient East and in those of the classical age, we shall be amazed at the number 
of seismic shocks and tremors. 
One example is the Babylonian records on clay tablets stored in the library of 
Nineveh, excavated by Sir Henry Layard; another is the Roman records of a later 
age: in a single year during the Punic Wars (in 217 b.c.) fifty— seven 
earthquakes were reported in Rome.

From all this it is apparent that seismic activity on our planet subsided very 
quickly in intensity as well as in the number of occurrences; and this again 
would point to a stress or stresses that took place not so long ago: earthquakes 
are readjustments of the terrestrial strata, with accompanying relief from the 
stress. 

The theory of Alexis Perrey, regularly quoted in textbooks, connects the 
occurrence of earthquakes in our tune with the position of the nearest celestial 
body, the moon. Earth tremors occur more often when the moon is full or when the 
earth is between the sun and the moon; when the moon is new, or when it is 
between the sun and the earth; when the moon crosses the meridian of the 
afflicted locality; and when the moon is closest to the earth on its orbit. With 
the possible exception of the fourth case, the statistics for the last century 
appear to support Perrey's theory. But if this statistical theory is correct, 
then we have to look to the celestial sphere for the stresses that are relieved 
in earthquakes; and the farther in time from the stresses, the less numerous and 
less violent are the shocks. 

Finally, a third natural phenomenon shows a definite downward curve. The number 
of comets visible to the unaided eye in recent centuries is only a small 
fraction of the number of cometary bodies that were observed in the historical 
past, in comparable periods of time. Whereas in our age about three comets are 
seen without the help of a telescope in the Northern Hemisphere in 
a century, in the days of imperial Rome, nineteen centuries ago, comets were so 
frequent that they were associated with many state events, such as the beginning 
of the rule of an emperor, his wars, his death. Often more than one comet was 
seen simultaneously. Some of the comets were spectacular and glowed even in the 
daytime. 

Approaching the sun, a comet emits a tail consisting of gases and dust 
particles. It is believed that these tails are wasted and that their material 
does not return to the head. A comet that recurs every seventy —  six years, as 
Halley's comet does, would have to grow and lose its tail about forty million 
times, if we take the usual figure for the age of the solar system, and such a 
wasting would have long ago reduced the comet to nothing. 

In modern times, several comets of short period, or a period less than that of 
the Halley comet, and thus subject to check by observatories, vanished and did 
not return when expected; the number of comets, at least of those closely 
associated with the solar system, becomes ever smaller. 

According to a hypothesis offered by Swinne and referred to by H. Pettersson, 
"meteorites should be a relatively recent occurrence, limited to the last 25,000 
years, and have been absent during preceding millions of years. 
The rapid decrease in luminosity of periodical comets points to some unusual 
activity in the sky in the geologically recent past; in the careful estimate of 
the Russian astronomer S. K. Vsehsviatsky (1953), this unusual activity took 
place in historical times, only a few thousand years ago. 

All three natural phenomena are on the wane. Volcanic activity is generally 
considered as connected with seismic activity; and the latter appears to be a 
response to a stress; and stress appears to have its origin in forces outside 
our earth.

 

CHAPTER X,
THIRTY —  FIVE CENTURIES AGO.

 Clock Unwound. 

one CAN DETERMINE the time necessary for lakes to collect mud deposited by 
melting glaciers, for rivers to build their deltas, for waterfalls to cut their 
channels and to remove the bedrock, for lakes without outlets to accumulate 
their salts. We can ascertain how much time has passed since beaches were 
raised, by the state of their shells, and the age of volcanic rocks 
by the amount of erosion. By counting the annual bands of clay and silt we may 
find out the number of years spent in their deposition. By studying the rings in 
old tree trunks we can determine the time of climatic changes as reflected in 
their growth. 

The remains of extinct and extant animals  —  their appearance, position on the 
ladder of evolution, and state of fossilization —  enable us to establish their 
time of existence. By the content of radiocarbon in 
organic matter we may detect the time when an animal or plant died, and by the 
accumulation of fluorine in bones the length of time since burial. Finally, by 
studying artifacts and archaeologically determinable strata in the lands of 
antiquity, we may discover the tune of deposit of associated animal or human 
remains; and by associated pollens of plants, a geochronological scale of 
climatic changes can be formulated even for areas where no archaeologically 
datable objects are found.
There are a few other ways of calculating geological time: by measuring the 
amount of sediment on the bottom of the ocean; by computing the amount of salt 
in the oceans and comparing it with the annual influx of salts from land; and, 
finally, by the analysis of rocks for their lead content as a product of decay 
of radioactive elements. But these ways, especially the last two, cannot be 
profitably applied for measuring time in thousands or tens of thousands of 
years; they were devised for reckoning time in millions of years. 

Of the methods used to find how much time has passed since the ice cover started 
to melt, the "varve" method, until recently, was thought to be fairly precise. 
This method was introduced by G.de Geer, who counted the annual bands of silt 
and clay ("varves") deposited, coarse in summer and fine in winter, under the 
ice in the coastal lakes and rivers of Sweden, once covered by the 
glacial sheet of the Ice Age. De Geer calculated that it had taken about 5000 
years to melt the ice cover from Schonen, at the southern tip of Sweden, to the 
place in the north where there are still glaciers in the mountains. In no place 
are there five thousand overlying varves; but De Geer looked for similar series 
or patterns of thick and thin varves from one lake to another, about 
fifteen hundred outcrops altogether, always with the thought that a varve series 
found high in the deposit of some southern lake would repeat itself closer to 
the bottom of a lake to the north. 

Additional figures used in De Geer's evaluation of the time that passed since 
the end of the Ice Age are of a more hypothetical nature. For the preceding 
period, the time allegedly needed for the ice to retreat all the way, from 
Leipzig to southern Sweden, where no varves are found, De Geer offered, as a 
surmise, a span of 4000 years. Then he surmised further that the end of the 
melting of the ice cover coincided with the beginning of Neolithic time, which 
he placed 5000 years ago, thus arriving at the final figure of 14,000 years, or 
12,000 years before the present era. The area of Stockholm was freed from ice 
about 10,000 years ago. Other scientists freely interpreted De Geer's data as 
indicating that the ice cover in Europe started to melt 25,000 or 
even 40,000 years ago.1 The method, when applied to North America, also gave the 
figure the explorers looked for, namely 35,000 to 40,000 years; in this estimate 
great stretches of land without varves in them were freely evaluated as to the 
time in question. 

De Geer applied his method of identifying synchronical varves to countries as 
far apart as Sweden, Central Asia, and South America. His telechronology was 
objected to on the ground that a dry phase in Scandinavia may not necessarily 
have coincided with a dry phase in the Himalayas or in the Andes, and that 
therefore the telechronology was built on an erroneous assumption.2 But the 
method as applied to northern Europe or North America was hailed as a 
most exact geological time clock. The summing up of varves from one dried —  out 
lake to another is a delicate process and often subjective appraisals replace an 
objective method; especially arbitrary are the estimates for intervening 
stretches of land where no varves are found. 

In 1947 an ingenious new method of investigating the age of organic remains was 
developed by W. F. Libby of the University of Chicago. The radiocarbon dating 
method is based on the fact that when cosmic rays hit the upper atmosphere they 
break the nitrogen atoms into hydrogen (H) and radiocarbon (C14), or carbon with 
two extra electrons, therefore unstable, or radioactive. 

The radiocarbon is mixed with the atmospheric carbon and as carbon dioxide it is 
absorbed by plants; it enters the animal body that feeds on plants and also the 
carnivore that feeds on other animals. Thus all animal and plant cells as long 
as they live contain approximately the same amount of radiocarbon; when death 
comes, no new radiocarbon is assimilated and the radiocarbon present in the 
remains undergoes the process of decay, as every radioactive substance does. 
After 5568 years only half of the radiocarbon remains; after another 5568 — year 
period only half of the half, or a quarter of the original content in the 
organic body, remains. A sample undergoing analysis — a piece of wood or skin —   
is burned to ashes and its radiocarbon content is determined by a Geiger 
counter. This method claims accuracy for organic objects between 1000 and 20,000 
years old; bones and shells are unsuitable materials because organic carbon is 
easily lost in the process of fossilization, often being replaced by carbon in 
ground water and by mineral salts. 

The first important result of the radiocarbon dating method in glacial 
chronology was a radical reduction of the terminal date of the Ice Age. It was 
shown that ice, instead of retreating 30,000 years ago, was still advancing 
10,000 or 11,000 years ago. This conflicts strongly with the figures arrived at 
by the varve method concerning the final phase of the Ice Age in North 
America.

Even this great reduction of the date of the end of the Ice Age is not final. 
Radiocarbon analysis, according to Professor Frederick Johnson, chairman of the 
committee for selection of samples for analysis,5 revealed "puzzling 
exceptions." In numerous cases the shortening of the time schedule was so great 
that, as the only recourse, Libby assumed a "contamination" by radiocarbon. But 
in many other cases "the reason for the discrepancies cannot be explained." 
Altogether the method indicates that "geological developments were speedier than 
formerly supposed. 

H. E. Suess of the United States Geological Survey reported recently that wood 
found at the base of interbedded blue till, peat, and outwash of drift, and 
ascribed by its finder to the Late Wisconsin (last) glaciation, is, according to 
radiocarbon analysis, but 3300 years old (with a margin of error up to two 
hundred years both ways), or of the middle of the second millennium before the 
present era. Still more recently Suess and Rubin reported that "a glacial 
advance in the mountains of western United States was determined to have 
occurred about 3000 years ago. Already there is an accumulation of similar 
results that do not fit into the accepted scheme, even if the Ice Age is brought 
as close to our tune as 10,000 years. Professor Johnson says: "There is no way 
at the moment to prove whether the valid dates, the 'invalid ones,' or the 
'present ideas' are in error." " He says also. "Until the number of measurements 
can be increased to a point permitting some explanation of contradictions with 
other apparently trustworthy data, it is necessary to continue to form judgments 
concerning validity by a combination of all available information." 

With this idea in mind, I offer in the following sections a review of the 
results of several other methods of time measurement, especially as regards the 
dating of the last glaciation. 

Libby recognizes that the exactness of his method is dependent on two 
assumptions. The first is that for the last 20,000 or 30,000 years the amount of 
cosmic radiation reaching our atmosphere remained constant; the other is that 
the quantity of water in the oceans has not changed in the same period of time. 
Actually only a minor part of the radiocarbon created by cosmic rays is 
absorbed by plants and animals, the socalled biosphere; a still smaller part is 
present in the atmosphere; the largest share is absorbed by the ocean. 

Libby stressed the significance of these factors. It transpires that if there 
were cosmic catastrophes in the past cosmic radiation could have reached the 
earth at a different intensity; and in a future book I intend to show that the 
waters of the oceans increased substantially in a recent geological age. 

Bearing in mind these limitations, I confidently expect that in the field of 
geology more and more "puzzling" results of radiocarbon tests will compel a 
full—scale revision of the dating of the glacial periods. 



 The Glacial Lake Agassiz. 

Lake Agassiz, the largest glacial lake of North America, once covered the region 
at present occupied by Lake Winnipeg, Lake Manitoba, a number of other lakes in 
Canada, and parts of the North Central States of the United States. It exceeded 
the aggregate area of the five Great Lakes tributary to the St. Lawrence River. 
It was formed when the ice of North America melted. 
Study of its sediment, however, disclosed that its entire duration had been 
definitely less than one thousand years, a measure of time unexpectedly short; 
this indicates also that the glacial cover melted under catastrophic conditions. 
Warren Upham, the American glaciologist, wrote: 
"The geologic suddenness of the final melting of the ice —  sheet, proved by the 
brevity of existence of its attendant glacial lakes, presents scarcely less 
difficulty for explanation of its causes and climatic conditions than the 
earlier changes from mild and warm preglacial conditions to prolonged cold and 
ice accumulation." 

Not only was the life of the glacial Lake Agassiz measured in hundreds of years 
and the melting of the continental ice cover that gave rise to this lake of 
short duration but this melting must have taken place only recently: the erosion 
on the shores of Lake Agassiz indicates that it existed only a short time ago. 
Upham also recognized that the shoreline of the extinct lake is not horizontal, 
which indicates that the warping too occurred recently. 

Although this study of Lake Agassiz by Upham is over fifty years old, its 
conclusions have never been challenged. He also stated: 

"Another indication that the final melting of the ice sheet upon British America 
was separated by only a very short interval, geologically speaking, from the 
present time is seen in the wonderfully perfect preservation of the glacial 
striation and polishing on the surface of the more enduring rocks. 

It seems impossible that these rock exposures can have so well withstood 
weathering in the severe climate of those northern regions longer than a few 
thousand years at the roost." 

Upham realized and stressed that "these measures of time" are "surprisingly 
short, whether we compare them on the one hand with the period of authentic 
human history or on the other hand with the long record of geology." 

How it started, how it ended  —   all appears enigmatic; what is clear is that 
great changes took place but a few thousand years ago, under catastrophic 
conditions. 

 
 


Niagara Falls. 

When Lyell, on his trip to the United States, visited Niagara Falls, he talked 
with someone who lived in the vicinity and was told that the falls retreat about 
three feet a year. Since the natives of a country are likely to exaggerate, 
Lyell announced that one foot per annum would be a better 
figure. From this he concluded that over thirty —  five thousand years were 
necessary, from the time the land was freed from the ice cover and the falls 
started their work of erosion, to cut the gorge from Queenston to the place it 
occupied in the year of Lyell's visit. Since then this figure has 
often been mentioned in textbooks as the length of time from the end of the 
glacial period. 

The date of the end of the Ice Age was not changed when subsequent examination 
of records indicated that since 1764 the falls had retreated from Lake Ontario 
toward Lake Erie at the rate of five feet per year, and that, if the process of 
wearing down the rock had gone on at the same rate from the time of the retreat 
of the ice cover, seven thousand years would have been sufficient to do the 
work. 

However, since in the beginning, when the ice melted and a swollen stream earned 
the detritus abrading the rock of the gorge, the erosion rate must have been 
much more rapid, the age of the gorge must be further reduced. According to G. 
F. Wright, author of The Ice Age in North America, five thousand years may be 
regarded as an adequate figure.

 The erosion and sedimentation of the shores of Lake Michigan also suggest a 
lapse of time reckoned in thousands, but not tens of thousands, of years since 
the beginning of the process.

 In the 1920s, however, when borings were made for a railroad bridge, it was 
found that the middle part of Whirlpool Rapids Gorge of Niagara Falls contained 
a thick deposit of glacial boulder clay, indicating that it had been 
excavated once, had been filled with drift, and then partly re —  excavated by 
the falls in post —  glacial tunes.

While the question of the age of the falls thus becomes complicated, the 
discovery shows that the post —  glacial period was of much shorter duration 
than generally assumed, even if the rate of retreat of the falls is reduced to 
the minimum figure of under four feet per year, as observed in more recent 
years. 

R. F. Flint of Yale writes:
"We are obliged to fall back on the Upper Great Gorge, the uppermost segment of 
the whole gorge, which appears to be genuinely postglacial. Redeterminations by 
W. H. Boyd showed the present rate of recession of the Horseshoe Falls to be, 
not five feet, but rather 3.8 feet, per year. 
Hence the age of the Upper Great Gorge is calculated as somewhat more than four 
thousand years —   —   and to obtain even this,low, figure we have to assume 
that the rate of recession has been constant, although we know that discharge 
has in fact varied greatly during postglacial times."

 If due allowance is made for this last factor, the age of the Upper Great Gorge 
of Niagara Falls would be somewhere between 2500 and 3500 years. It follows that 
the ice retreated in historical times, somewhere between the years 1500 and 500 
before the present era. 






The Rhone Glacier 

C. W. Wolfe, professor of geology at Boston University, in This Earth of Ours, 
Past and Present (1949), writes (p. 176): "A rather satisfactory estimate on the 
recession of the Horseshoe Falls section indicates that the falls are moving 
upstream at the surprising rate of five feet per year.  

The lifetime of a glacier is determined by measuring the detritus deposited by 
the melting ice. 

Albert Heim,the Swiss naturalist, estimated the age of the glacial nver Muota 
that flows into Lake Lucerne as sixteen thousand years. F. A. Forel, another 
Swiss naturalist, undertook an evaluation of the detrital mud deposited by the 
Rhone Glacier on the bottom of Lake Geneva. He arrived at a figure close to 
twelve thousand years as the span of time necessary for the mud and 
detritus to have been deposited on the bottom of the lake, or from the height of 
the Ice Age to the present. Forel's result actually signifies that the Rhone 
Glacier, which feeds the river and the lake, is evidence of the short duration 
of the post —  glacial period, or even of the entire Ice Age if the origin of 
the lake goes back to the first glacial period. These estimates, when announced, 
were much lower than expected. 

The eminent French geologist of the begmning of this century, and a colleague of 
Heim and Forel, A. Cochon de Lapparent, arrived at an even more radical result. 
In the time of its greatest expansion, the Rhone Glacier reached from Valais to 
Lyons. De Lapparent took the average figure of progression as seen today on 
larger glaciers. Mer de Glace, a glacier on Mont Blanc, moves fifty centimeters 
in twenty —  four hours. Moving at a comparative velocity, the Rhone Glacier, 
when expanding, would have required 2475 years to progress from Valais to Lyons. 
Then, comparing the terminal moraines, or stone and detritus accumulation, of 
several present —  day glaciers with the moraines left by the Rhone Glacier at 
its maximum expansion, De Lapparent again arrived at a figure of about 2400 
years. He also concluded that the entire Ice Age was of very short duration. To 
this another geologist, Albrecht Penck, objected.

 His objection was based not on a disproval of the above figures, but on a claim 
that great evolutionary changes took place during the consecutive interglacial 
periods. The divergence of opinion between them was so great that hundreds of 
thousands of years in Penck's scheme were reduced to mere thousands of years in 
De Lapparent's calculations. Penck estimated the duration of the Ice Age, with 
its four glacial and three interglacial periods, as one million years. 
Each of the four glaciations and deglaciations must have consumed one hundred 
thousand years and more. 

The argument for his estimate is this: How much time was necessary to produce 
the changes in nature, if no catastrophes intervened? And how long would it take 
to produce changes in animals by means of a process that in our own day is so 
slow as to be almost imperceptible? 

Carl Schuchardt, in his book, Alteuropa, warned his colleagues not to turn deaf 
ears to voices like that of De Lapparent. Let us assume that the geological 
processes were always as they are now. In Ehringsdorf near Weimar there is a 
tufa layer in which, during the entire last interglacial period, calcium was 
deposited. "But should we even assume all kinds of imaginable causes that 
would have retarded the deposition of calcium so as to make it ten times as slow 
as at present, still we would have only 3000 years and not 100,000!"  

If we follow the principle of quantitative analysis and accept De Lapparent's 
figure as approximately correct, the maximal extension of the Rhone Glacier 
dates from a point well within the bounds of human history. 
The recent field work in the Alps actually revealed that numerous glaciers there 
are no older than 4000 years. This startling discovery made the following 
statement necessary: "A large number of the present glaciers in the Alps are not 
survivors of the last glacial maximum, as was formerly universally believed, but 
are glaciers newly created within roughly the last 4000 years. 

 

The Mississippi.

The Mississippi carries yearly in its stream many billions of tons of detritus, 
a large part of which is deposited in the delta. As early as 1861, Humphreys and 
Abbot calculated the age of the Mississippi by evaluating the detritus borne by 
it and the sediment deposited in the delta. 
They arrived at the low figure of 5000 years as the age of the delta, its birth 
thus being related to about the year 2800 before the present era.1 However, when 
at the close of the Ice Age the ice cover melted in the north, multitudinous 
streams must have earned an enormous amount of detritus into the Mississippi and 
its tributary, the Missouri, and for,  this reason the above figure, if 
otherwise properly calculated, must be appreciably reduced.

 It is assumed that when the continental ice started to melt and the Great Lakes 
became swollen, but the St.Lawrence was still blocked by ice, the water of the 
basin emptied to a great extent into the Gulf of Mexico through the Mississippi. 
The Falls of St. Anthony on this stream at Minneapolis have excavated a long 
gorge by removing the bedrock. In the 1870s and 1880s, Winchell made this falls 
the subject of a study. Comparing topographical maps covering two hundred years, 
he concluded that the falls had retreated 2.44 feet yearly. If this was the 
constant rate of retreat, the falls must have started 8000 years ago.2 But here, 
too, a larger stream carrying abundant detritus, which abraded the 
bedrock, must have flowed when the ice cover melted. 

J. D. Dana, studying the area of Lake Champlain and of the Northeastern states 
in general, came to the conclusion that prodigious floods of almost unimaginable 
magnitude accompanied the melting of the ice cover: in the lower part of the 
Connecticut River the floods rose two hundred feet above the present high —  
water mark.

And if this is true for those regions, it must be true also for the valley of 
the Mississippi. Consequently the gorge of the Falls of St. Anthony must be of 
more recent date than Winchell calculated, though even his figure was regarded 
as much too low. 

The protracted discussion of the results derived from the exploration of Niagara 
and St. Anthony falls demonstrated the need for yet another area of 
investigation, preferably the delta of a stream fed by a still existing glacier 
that could be carefully studied. For that purpose the delta of the 
Bear River was selected (a stream from a melting glacier that enters the 
Portland Canal on the Alaska —  British Columbia border). 

On the basis of three earlier accurate surveys made between the years 1909 and 
1927, G. Hanson in 1934 calculated with great exactness the annual growth of the 
delta through deposited sediment. At the present rate of sedimentation the delta 
is estimated to be only 3600 years old." 

 The glacier that feeds the Bear River was formed and began to melt in the 
middle of the second millennium before the present era. 

 

Fossils in Florida 

On the Atlantic coast of Florida, at Vero in the Indian River region, in 1915 
and 1916, human remains were found in association with the bones of Ice Age 
(Pleistocene) animals, many of which either became extinct, like the saber —  
toothed tiger, or have disappeared from the Americas, like the camel. 

The find caused immediate excitement among geologists and anthropologists. 
Beside the human bones pottery was found, as well as bone implements and worked 
stone. Ales Hrdlicka, of the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, D.C., a 
renowned anthropologist (who generally opposed the view that man existed in 
America in the Ice Age), wrote that the "advanced state of 
culture, such as that shown by the pottery, bone implements, and worked stone 
brought from a considerable distance, implies a numerous population spread over 
large areas, acquainted thoroughly with fire, with cooking food, and with all 
the usual primitive arts"; the human remains and relics could not be of an 
antiquity "comparable with that of fossil remains with which they are 
associated."

 He also published the opinion of W. H. Holmes, head curator of the Department 
of Anthropology of the United States National Museum, who investigated the 
pottery obtained by Hrdlicka from Vero. These were bowls "such as were in common 
use among the Indian tribes of Florida. When compared with vessels from Florida 
earth mounds, "no significant distinction can be made', in material, thickness 
of walls, finish of rim, surface finish, color, state of preservation, 
and size and shape," the ve|sels "are identical." There thus appears "not the 
least ground in the evidence of the specimens themselves for the assumption that 
the Vero pottery pertains to any other people than the mound —  building Indian 
tribes of Florida of the pre —  Columbian time." 

But the bones of man and his artifacts (pottery) were found among the extinct 
animals. The discoverer of the Vero deposits, E. H. Seilards, state geologist of 
Florida and a very capable paleontologist, wrote in the debate that ensued: 
"That the human bones are fossils normal to this stratum and contemporaneous 
with the associated vertebrates is determined by their place in the formation, 
their manner of occurrence, their intimate relation to the bones of other 
animals, and the degree of mineralization of the bones." This "degree of 
mineralization of the human bones is identical with that of the associated bones 
of the other animals.'

 In his view the evidence obtained "affords proof that man reached America at an 
early date and was present on the continent in association with a Pleistocene 
[Ice Age] fauna."2 Anthropologists of the Hrdlicka school would not accept this, 
claiming a late arrival of man on the American continent, and the 
presence of pottery was in their view proof of a late date for the human bones. 
The human skulls, though fossilized, did not differ from the skulls of the 
Indians of today. 

In 1923 —  29, thirty —  three miles north of Vero, in Melbourne, Florida, 
another such association of human remains and extinct animals was found, "a 
remarkably rich assemblage of anunal bones, many of which represent species 
which became extinct at or after the close of the Pleistocene,Ice Age epoch." 

The discoverer, J. W. Gidley, of the United States National Museum, established 
unequivocally that in Melbourne —  as in Vero —  the human bones were of the 
same 
stratum and in the same state of fossihzation as the bones of the extinct 
animals. And again human artifacts were found with the bones. The projectile 
points, awls, and pins" found with the human bones at Melbourne as well as at 
Vero are of the same workmanship as those unearthed in early Indian sites, two 
thousand of which are known in the area. 

All these and other considerations of an anthropological as well as geological 
nature, being summed up, prove, in the opinion of I. Rouse, a recent analyst of 
the much —  debated fossils of Florida, that "the Vero and Melbourne man should 
have been in existence between 2000 B.C. and the year zero A.D." ,  This does 
not solve the problem of the association of extinct animals and man who lived 
between two and four thousand years ago, in the second and first millennia 
before the present era. 

There is no proper way out of this dilemma, other than the assumption that now 
extinct animals still existed in historical tunes and that the catastrophe which 
overwhelmed man and animals and annihilated numerous species occurred in the 
second or first millennium before the present era. 

The geologists are right: the human remains and artifacts of Vero and Melbourne 
in Florida are of the same age as the fossils of the extinct animals. 

The anthropologists are equally right: the human remains and artifacts are of 
the second or first millennium before the present era. 

What follows? It follows that the extinct animals belonged to the recent past. 
It follows also that some paroxysm of nature heaped together these assemblages; 
the same paroxysm of nature may have destroyed numerous species so that they 
became extinct.

 



Lakes of the Great Basin and the End of the Ice Age. 

The Sierra Nevada chain rises between the Great Basin to the east and the 
Pacific, cutting off the drainage to the ocean. Abert and Summer lakes in 
southern Oregon have no outlets. They are regarded as remnants of a once large 
glacial lake, Chewaucan. W. van Winkle of the United States Geological Survey 
investigated the saline content of these two lakes and wrote: 

"A conservative estimate of the age of Summer and Abert Lakes, based on their 
concentration and area, the composition of the influent waters, and the rate of 
evaporation, is 4000 years." 

If this conclusion is correct, the post —  glacial epoch is no longer than 4000 
years. Startled at his own result, Van Winkle conjectured that salt deposits of 
the early Chewau —  can Lake may be hidden beneath the bottom sediments of the 
present Abert and Summer lakes. 

To the east of Sequoia National Park and Mount Whitney in California lies Owens 
Lake. It is supplied by the Owens River and it has no outlet. At some time in 
the past the surface level of the lake, because of a greater water supply, was 
so much higher that it overflowed its basin.
     H. S. Gale analyzed the water of the lake and of the river for chlorine and 
sodium and came to the conclusion that the river required 4200 years to supply 
the chlorine present in the lake and 3500 years to supply its sodium. Ellsworth 
Huntington of Yale found these figures too high, because no allowance was made 
for greater rainfall and "freshening of the lake" in the past, and consequently 
he reduced the age of the lake to 2500 years, which would place its origin not 
far from the middle of the first millennium before the present era.

Another vast lake of the past without an outlet to the sea was Lake Lahontan in 
the Great Basin of Nevada, which covered an area of 8500 square miles. As its 
water level fell, it split up into a number of lakes divided by a desert 
terrain. In the 1880s, Russell of the United States Geological Survey 
investigated Lake Lahontan and its basin, and established that the lake was 
never completely dried out and that the present —  day Pyramid and Winne —  
mucca lakes north of Reno and Walker Lake southwest of it are the residuals of 
the older and larger lake.
He concluded that Lake Lahontan existed during the Ice Age and was 
contemporaneous with the different stages of glaciation of that age. He also 
found bones of Ice Age animals in the deposits of the ancient lake. 

More recently, Lahontan and its residual lakes were explored anew by J. Claude 
Jones, and the results of his work were published as "Geological 
History of Lake Lahontan" by the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

 He investigated the saline content of Pyramid and Winne —  mucca lakes and of 
the Truckee River that feeds them. He found that the river could have supplied 
the entire content of chlorine of these two lakes in 3881 years. 
"A similar calculation, using sodium instead of chlorine, gave 2447 years 
necessary. Jones's careful work led him to agree with Russell that Lake Lahontan 
never fully dried up and that the existing lakes are its residuals. 

But these conclusions require that the age of the mammals of the Ice Age, found 
in the deposits of Lake Lahontan, be not greater than that of the lake. Xhis 
means that the Ice Age ended only twenty —  five to thirty —  nine centuries 
ago. 

Jones checked the figures obtained from the rate of accumulation of chlorine and 
sodium as brought in by the Truckee River, with other methods, such as the 
accumulation of chlorine in lakes during the thirty —  one years that had passed 
since the analysis made by Russell, and also the rate of concentration of salts 
by evaporation, and each time reached the result that the entire history of 
Pyramid and Winnemucca lakes "is within the last 3000years.

 Bones of horses, elephants, and camels, animals that became extinct in the 
Americas, were found in the Lahontan sediments, as well as a spear point of 
human manufacture.

When a branch of the Southern Pacific Railroad was laid through Astor Pass, a 
large gravel pit of Lahontan age was opened, and J. C. Merriam of the University 
of California identified among the bones the skeletal remains of Felix atrox, a 
species of lion found also in the asphalt pit of Rancho La Brea, as well as a 
species of horse and camel, also found in La Brea.

 "All of these forms are now extinct and neither camels nor lions are found on 
this continent as a part of the present native fauna." 

The similarity of the fauna of the asphalt pits of La Brea and the 
deposits of Lake Lahontan led Merriam to decide that they were contemporaneous. 
On the basis of his analyses Jones came to the conclusion that the extinct 
animals lived in North America into historical times. This was an unusual 
statement and it was opposed at first on the ground that his interpretation of 
his observations was "obviously erroneous, since [it} led him to the conclusion 
that the mastodon and the camel lived on in North America into historical 
times."
But this is an argument of a preconceived nature, not based on findings of field 
geology. Either the Ice Age animals survived the Ice Age, or some of the 
vicissitudes of the Ice Age occurred in historical tunes. 



CHAPTER XI,
KLIMASTURZ.

NOT LONG AGO "it was generally believed that variations of climate came to an 
end with the Quaternary Ice Age, a period, moreover, which was placed hundreds 
of thousands years ago." 
It was regarded as an established fact in the history of climate and in 
historical geology that during the period since the close of the glacial ages, 
called Recent, the climate of the earth did not change appreciably. 

Then, in 1910, at the International Geological Congress in Stockholm, facts were 
placed before the scientists that demonstrated great changes and catastrophic 
fluctuations in the climate of the earth in the past few thousand years. Since 
that congress many works have been written to describe the climatic as well as 
geological changes that occurred in this recent tune. 

In many places the present land was covered by sea and the present sea was land. 
For instance, from the changes in the mollusk population of the seas and the 
tree population of the submerged forests, it was concluded that the North and 
the Baltic seas assumed their present shapes during the Recent period. 
Explorations conducted in various countries combined also to demonstrate that 
"the ice age itself was not so remote as it had seemed to be, and that in fact 
the post —  glacial geology of Europe was partly contemporaneous with the 
'history' of Egypt." 

One very strong disturbance in the climate, or climatic plunge (Klimasturz), 
occurred in the Subboreal, a subdivision of the Recent, and is assigned to the 
middle of the second millennium before the present era. The second climatic 
catastrophe of the Recent period took place in the century following the year  —  
800, a time period that is well within recorded history. "The beginning of the 
period of unchanging climate, has advanced later and later before the attacks 
of geologists, and now, in the minds of most of the authors who concern 
themselves with the subject, it apparently stands only a few centuries before 
Christ." 
    The new understanding originated with Axel Blytt, a Norwegian scientist who 
began his work in the seventies of the last century. Gunnar Andersson and Rutger 
Ser —  nander, also Scandinavian scientists, carried on the work that Blytt 
started. Thus it happened that Scandinavia and the surrounding seas were 
investigated first. 
    In Scandinavia the last Klimasturz marked the end of the Bronze Age. The 
following centuries offer a picture of desolation and wretchedness attributed to 
the altered climate. "Opulent plenty" was followed by "striking poverty." 
     Study of changes in the flora, as reflected in the pollens of trees found in 
the ancient moors, also disclosed a picture of a sudden climatic catastrophe. 
"The deterioration of the climate must have been catastrophic in character,' 
wrote Sernander, whose laboratory at the University of Uppsala became the center 
of research in the history of climate. 
To the period of the greatest change he gave the name Fimbul —  Winter, 
borrowing the term from the northern epic, the Edda. In this epic Fimbul —  
Winter is a designation for a snowfall that continued through winter and summer 
alike, uninterrupted for years. 

The last series of climatic disturbances of the eighth and the beginning of the 
seventh centuries did not take the form of a single drop in temperature. 
According to Sernander, "The desolating effect of the Fimbul —  Winter on the 
northern culture was caused not so much by the fall in temperature as by 
oscillations and instability of the climate "
 However, its catastrophic begmning was emphasized by him and also by other 
authors; thus G. Kossinna, who ascribes the Klimasturz to "about the year 700 
B.C.," stressed that it took place with catastrophic suddenness. 


 Tree Rings. 

The annual rings of trees reveal whether in some particular year or period 
growth was stimulated or inhibited. The oldest trees on record are among the 
sequoias of California. Some of them measure ninety feet in circumference. Of 
all the specimens whose rings were counted, the most ancient started life after 
the year 1300 before the present era. The age of the General Sherman 
tree in Sequoia National Park is not known, since it has not been cut down. Thus 
it appears that no tree has survived to modern times from the days of the great 
catastrophe of the middle of the second millennium. The sequoias are protected 
against fire by a bark often two feet thick, which resists combustion almost as 
well as asbestos. In order to survive through the days of global catastrophe a 
tree had also to withstand hurricane and tidal wave, and live in a sunless world 
under a canopy of dust clouds that enshrouded the world for many years. 

The oldest trees that started life about 3200 years ago offer insight into the 
influence on their growth, as caused by a series of later climatic disturbances 
on the global scale that, according to the pollen analysis, took place in the 
eighth and the beginning of the seventh centuries, or 2700 years ago. 

According to the historical material collected in Worlds in Collision, the 
memorable dates are  —  747,  —  702, and especially  —  687. 
The Carnegie Institution published in 1919 a graph drawn by A. E. Douglass, then 
director of Steward Observatory, who studied tree rings in order to discover 
the solar activity of the past.
 The graph actually reveals a spurt of oscillations in the annual growth of the 
tree rings around the year  —  747 (the identification of the rings as to their 
years is approximate). There is an unusually high crest in the last years of the 
eighth century and the beginning of the seventh century. After a record high 
crest of six —  year duration there is in  —  687 a precipitate drop.  
    Natural upheavals of great violence reacted destructively upon the forests. 
But those trees that survived the Klimasturz of the eighth and seventh centuries 
(hurricanes, floods, lava, and fire)  —   were stimulated to growth by the 
increased presence of carbon dioxide in the air, yet impeded by 
a screen of clouds and dust; they might have been invigorated by electrical 
discharges in the atmosphere and possibly magnetic storms, and benefited from 
the addition of ashes to the soil. 
The singeing of leaves and changed conditions of ground water, as well as the 
change of climate generally, must have entered the picture. All in all, strong 
oscillations in the size of tree rings must be expected in years of great 
natural catastrophes. These are clearly recognizable on the annual rings of 
sequoias formed about the years  —  747,  —  702,  —  687, and generally in that 
century. 
Lake Dwellings.

At the close of the Stone Age in Europe, about  —  1800, lake dwellings existed 
in which man and his cattle lived, protected from wild animals. The structures 
were erected on wooden poles driven into the ground. Remains of such dwellings 
were discovered on the shores of the lakes of Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, 
and northern Italy. Sometime in the middle of the second millennium before the 
present era a "high — water catastrophe" occurred. The villages were 
overwhelmed and covered with mud, sand, and calcareous deposit. Life came to an 
end in all lake dwellings. 

Then for about three or four centuries they were not rebuilt; but after  —  1200 
new villages were erected, in some places on top of the earlier ones, in other 
places on new ground. It was already the Bronze Age in Europe; 
bronze articles are found among the remains of the lake dwellings of that 
period. 

After a second period of prosperity, which lasted for about four centuries, in 
the eighth century before the present era a new catastrophe overwhelmed the lake 
villages on all the lakes of central and northern Europe, and again it was a 
"high — water catastrophe"; once more mud and sand covered the villages on 
poles, and, abandoned by man, they were never rebuilt. 

Thus it occurred that twice, once at the close of the Stone (Neolithic) Age and 
the second time at the close of the Bronze Age, the lake dwellings were swamped 
by water and mired in mud. The coincidence of their destruction with the end of 
the cultural ages was called merkwiirdig (remarkable) by Ischer, who explored 
the Bielersee (Lake of Bienne), and ratselhaft, puzzling, by Reinerth, who 
explored the Bodensee (Lake Constance); but all explorers agree that the 
cause was a natural catastrophe at the end of the Stone Age and another natural 
catastrophe before the advent of the Iron Age in central and northern Europe. It 
is also generally held that the catastrophes were accompanied by very great and 
sudden climatic changes, Klimusturze.

 For the first event scientists fix the date at about  —  1500, some diverging 
by a few centuries either way, from  —  1800 to  —  1400. For the second event 
the preferred date is the eighth century before the present era, with some 
authors —   reducing the date to the seventh century. 

In the first edition of his book. Climate through the Ages, Brooks placed the 
beginning of the Sub — atlantic time, that followed the last Klimastuze, in  —  
850 and in the second edition in the end of the sixth century before the present 
era. 

H. Gams and R. Nordhagen made an extensive survey of German and Swiss lakes and 
fens and published a classical work on the subject.6 They found not only that 
the lakes at two periods in the past — the end of the Neolithic (recent Stone) 
Age in Europe, in the middle of the second millennium, and in the eighth century 
before the present era were subjected to high — water catastrophes, but also 
that these catastrophes were accompanied or caused by very strong tectonic 
movements. The lakes suddenly lost their horizontal position, one end often 
being tilted up, the other down, so that the old strand line may now be seen to 
run obliquely to the horizon. 

Such is the case of Ammersee and Wurmsee in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps 
and of other lakes on the alpine fringes. In these catastrophes, the water of 
the Bodensee (Lake Constance)  —   rose thirty feet, and the bed was tilted. The 
tilted strand lines of lakes were also found in regions far away from the Alps, 
for instance, in Norway by Bravais and Hansen and in Sweden by De Geer and 
Sandegren, dating from the same ages.

Some lake basins were suddenly emptied of all their water as the result of the 
tilting, as were Ess —  see and Federsee. The Isartal (the valley of the Isar) 
in the Bavarian Alps was "violently torn out" in "very recent times." 

And in the Inntal in the Tyrol the "many changes of river beds are indicative of 
ground movements on a great scale." 

All the explored lakes of the Swiss Alps region, as well as of the Tyrol, the 
Bavarian Alps, and around the Jura, were flooded twice in catastrophic surges of 
water (Hoch —  wasserkatastrophen), and the cause lay in tectonic movements and 
in the sudden melting of glaciers. It happened in the post —  glacial period, 
the last time actually in the historical age, not long before the Romans started 
to spread into those parts of the world.

Gams and Nordhagen also presented extensive material to show that the tectonic 
disturbances were accompanied not only by high —  water catastrophes 
but also by climatic changes. They undertook a close examination of the pollen 
content of peat bogs. Since the pollen of each species of tree is 
characteristic, it is possible to detect by analysis what kinds of forests grew 
in various periods of the past, and consequently the then prevailing 
climate. The pollen disclosed a "radical change of life conditions, not a slow 
building of fens." 
Men and animals suddenly disappeared from the scene, although at that time the 
area was already rather thickly populated. Oak was replaced by fir, and fir 
descended from the heights on which it had grown, leaving them barren. 

The Alpine passes were much traveled during the Bronze Age: many bronze objects 
from before  —  700 were found in numerous places, especially on St. Bernard. 
Also mines were worked in the Alps in the Bronze Age. With the advent of the 
Klimasturz the mines were suddenly abandoned, and the passes were not traveled 
any longer, as though life in the Alps had been extinguished. 

A chronological scale has been set up relating pollen analysis to archaeological 
finds. The pollen analysis,  like other methods of investigation, showed that in 
the middle of the second millennium and again in the eighth or seventh century 
before the present era central Europe and Scandinavia passed through climatic 
catastrophes. 

Coincident tectonic, high —  water, and climatic catas —  trophies thus brought 
havoc to the entire area investigated, from Norway to the Jura, the Alps, and 
the Tyrol, tearing out valleys, overturning lakes, annihilating human and animal 
life, suddenly changing the climate, replacing forests with bogs, and doing this 
at least twice in Sub —  boreal time, the period that is estimated to have 
lasted 
from about the year  —  2000, or possibly from a date closer to the middle of 
the second millennium before the present era, to  —  800 or  —  700.15 These 
climatic and tectonic catastrophes precipitated the wandering of hordes of 
destitute human beings, including, after the last catastrophe, Celts and 
Cimbrians.16 The migrants came to the desolate lands from other, faraway 
regions, probably equally fearfully devastated. 









 

Dropped Ocean Level. 

In many places of the world the seacoast shows either submerged or raised 
beaches. The previous surf line is seen on the rock of raised beaches; where the 
coast became submerged, the earlier water line is found chiseled by the surf in 
the rock below the present level of the sea. Some beaches were raised to a 
height of many hundred feet, as in the case of the Pacific coast of Chile, where 
Charles Darwin observed that the beach must have risen 1300 feet only 
recently —  "within the period during which upraised shells have remained 
undecayed on the surface." 

He thought also that the "most probable" explanation would be that the coast 
level, with "whole and perfectly preserved shells, was at one blow uplifted 
above the future reach of the sea," following an earthquake.1 In the Hawaiian 
Islands there is a 1200 —  foot raised beach. 
On Espiritu Santo Island in the New Hebrides in the southern Pacific, corals are 
found 1200 feet above sea level. Corals do not grow high above the sea or in the 
depths of the sea; their formation is limited to levels close to the surface of 
the sea. Thus corals of bygone ages are recorders of previous sea levels. 

In numerous instances evidences of submergence and emergence are seen on the 
same rock. One such case we have discussed —  the Rock of Gibraltar. To lesser 
degree the phenomenon is repeated in Bermuda. From the evidence of submerged 
caves, the sea level at Bermuda "must at one time have stood at least 60 to 100 
feet lower than at present," while from raised beaches "it appears to have stood 
at one time at least 25 feet higher than at present. (H. B. Moore). 


These changes date from different ages, but common to all of them is the absence 
of intermediate surf lines; if the emergence or submergence had been gradual, 
intermediate surf lines would be seen in the rock. 

 
R. A. Daly observed that in a great many places all around the world there is a 
uniform emergence of the shore line of eighteen to twenty feet. In the southwest 
Pacific, on the islands of Tutuila, Tau, and Ofu and on Rose atoll, all 
belonging to the Samoan group but spread over two hundred miles, the same 
emergence is evident. In Daly s opinion this uniformity indicates that 
the rise was due to "something else than crustal warping." A force pushing from 
inside would not be "so uniform throughout a stretch 200 miles long." Nearly 
halfway round the world, at St.Helena in the South Atlantic, the lava is 
punctuated by dry sea caves, the floors of which are covered with water —  worn 
pebbles, "now dusty because untouched by the surf." 

The emergence here is also twenty feet. At the Cape of Good Hope caves and 
benches "also prove recent and sensibly uniform emergence to the extent of about 
20 feet." 

Daly proceeds: Marine terraces, indicating similar emergence, are found along 
the Atlantic coast from New York to the Gulf of Mexico; for at least 1000 miles 
along the coast of eastern Australia; along the coasts of Brazil, southwest 
Africa, and many islands of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans; in all 
these and other published cases, the emergence is recent as well as of the same 
order of magnitude. Judging from the condition of benches, terraces, and caves, 
the emergence seems to have been simultaneous on every shore." 

Of course Daly also found many places where the change in the position of the 
shore line was of a different magnitude, but "these local exceptions prove the 
rule." In his opinion, the cause of the world —  wide emergence of the shore 
lies in the sinking of the level of all seas on the globe, "a recent world —  
wide sinking of ocean level," which could have been caused by water being drawn 
from the oceans to build the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland. Alternatively, 
Daly thinks it could also have resulted from a deepening of the oceans or from 
an increase in their areas. 

P. H. Kuenen of Leyden University, in his Marine Geology, finds Daly's claim 
confirmed: "In thirty —  odd years following Daly's first paper many further 
instanceshave been recorded by a number of investigators the world over, so that 
this recent shift is now well established."

Whatever was the cause of the phenomenon observed, it was not the result of a 
slow change; in such case we would have intermediate shore lines between the 
present surf line and the twenty —  foot line on the same beaches, but there are 
none. 

Of special interest is the time of the change. According to Daly, "This increase 
of the ice —  cap or caps has been tentatively referred to late —  Neolithic 
time, about 3500 years ago. At that approximate date there was some chilling of 
the northern hemisphere at least, following a prolonged period when the world 
climate was distinctly warmer than now. Late —  Neolithic man lived in Europe 
3500 years back."

As to the date of the sudden drop of oceanic level, Kuenen writes: "The time of 
the movement was estimated by Daly to be probably some 3000 to 4000 years ago. 
Detailed field work in the Netherlands and in eastern England has shown a recent 
eustatic depression of the same order of magnitude as deduced by Daly. Here the 
time can be fixed as roughly 3000 to 3500 years ago." Thus the work in the 
Netherlands and in England confirmed not only Daly's finding but 
also his dating. The ocean level dropped, of course, all over the world. It was 
not a slow subsidence of the bottom, or a slow spread of the ocean over land, or 
a slow evaporation of oceanic water: whatever it was, it was sudden and 
therefore catastrophic. 

Thirty —  five hundred years ago was the middle of the second millennium before 
the present era, at the close of the Middle Bronze Age in Egypt. 

 

 


The North Sea. 

The stormy North Sea, bordered by Scotland, England, the Low Countries, Germany, 
Denmark, and Norway, is a very recent basin. The geologists assume that the area 
was once before occupied by a sea, but that early in the Ice Age the detritus 
carried from Scotland and Scandinavia filled it, so that 
there was no sea left! it was all turned into land. The river Rhine flowed 
through this land and the Thames was its tributary; the mouth of the river was 
somewhere near Aberdeen. 

In post —  glacial times, so it is assumed, in the Subboreal period, which began 
about 2000 years before the present era and endured to about  —  800, large 
parts of the area were added to the sea. The Atlantic Ocean sent its waters 
along the Scottish and Norwegian shores, and also through the Channel that had 
been formed only a short while before. Human artifacts and bones of land animals 
were dredged from the bottom of the North Sea; and along the shores of Scotland 
and England, as well as on the Dogger Bank in the middle of the sea, stumps of 
trees 
with their roots still in the ground were found. Forty —  five miles from the 
coast, from a depth of thirty —  six meters, Norfolk fishermen drew up a 
spearhead carved from the antler of a deer, embedded in a block of peat.

 This artifact dates from the Mesolithic or early Neolithic Age and serves as 
one of many proofs that the area covered by the North Sea was a place of human 
habitation not many thousands of years ago. From the analysis of the pollens 
found in the peat taken from the bottom of the sea, the conclusion was reached 
that these forests existed in not too remote tunes. It has also been assumed 
that the building of large areas of the North Sea in the Subboreal period 
resulted from a rather sudden sinking of the land, which some authorities 
date at about  —  1500, or a httle earlier, at the same time that floods 
destroyed the lake dwellings of central Europe. 

If we consider that Phoenician vessels were already visiting the Atlantic coast 
of Europe in the days of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, or before  —  1500, we 
begin to see in its historical perspective the catastrophe that spread the North 
Sea over inhabited land. The submerged land must have been occupied by human 
settlements of the Mesolithic and Neolithic ages, whereas Egypt and Phoenicia 
had already reached the Nliddle Bronze. 

The sea did not slowly encroach, finally to evict the population of the 
settlements; it entered the land without much warning, and sent its dark billows 
rolling to find new barriers. The Dogger Bank may have stood out for .some time 
longer, but at last it, too, was taken over by the sea. 

After a hundred generations, man began with great effort to recapture bits of 
land from the sea, building dams and sluices; at this work he, too, discovered 
bones of animals in vast and tangled masses, of extinct and living forms, 
generally ascribed to the Ice Age. So, in the Dutch village of 
Tegelen, in a layer of sand, silt, clay, and peat, ancient elm, ash, and grape 
were found with extinct fresh —  water snails, with bones of elephants, 
mammoths, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, deer, horses, and hyenas. 

A recent investigation of the English Fens by H. Godwin of Cambridge University, 
with emphasis on the plant life in the post —  glacial period, disclosed a 
"general transgression" of the sea "in the period between the Neolithic and 
Romano —  British times, for which our evidence is best." 

The Fens occupy an area of about two thousand square miles of Lincolnshire, 
Cambridge, and Norfolk counties, running east of Norfolk and around the Wash, a 
gulf of the North Sea. "The transgression was broken by two periods of 
retrogression, one in the Bronze Age, and the other after the Iron Age." 

Within the Neolithic period "the forest trees, all fell to the northwest. These 
fallen forests were mostly oak." 

Along with the oak trees were found tools of polished stone. Sonietirne after 
the hurricane that broke all the oaks came another calamity: the land "was now 
suddenly changed by an extensive invasion by the sea." 

Within a short time" almost the whole of the fenland area became a brackish 
lagoon, which later became a fresh —  water area again. Bronze tools and weapons 
are found in abundance in the peat. 

The chmate became "much worse with the change to the Iron Age at about 500 B.C." 
—  other authors ascribe this Klima sturtz to the eighth century. It turned both 
colder and wetter. The area grew quite uninhabitable, for no traces of pre —  
Roman Iron Age man have been found there. Then came the last intrusion of the 
sea. 

Thus, according to Godwin's analysis, in the period between 2000 and 500 before 
the present era, the plain north of Cambridge was more than once invaded by the 
North Sea under circumstances that we would interpret as catastrophic. 

In many places all around England and Wales there are submerged forests which 
are dated as "probably Post Glacial or Recent." On the other hand, their 
submersion did not take place "within the past 2500 years."

 Some of the submerged forests have the stumps of their trees "rooted on 
the spot." The list of these forests is long.

Submerged forests were observed also in many other places, for instance near 
Greenland and off the east coast of America. There exist also less reliable 
reports of walls of sunken cities spied under water  —   in the North Sea, off 
the Atlantic coast in the Mediterranean, all around Europe, as also in faraway 
places, like off the Malabar coast of India. 

Only several thousand years ago, as the raised beaches and sunken forests 
evidence, the land rose and fell and traded its domain with the sea. 

 



CHAPTER XII, 
THE RUINS OF THE EAST.

 Creto. 

THE ISLE of Crete in the blue waters of the Mediterranean, with its precipitous 
reddish, rocky shores, a silent monument of a world that has passed, was 
millennia ago a great center of an unusually rich culture. The Minoan scripts 
are now in the process of being deciphered; the clue was discovered by Michael 
Ventris, an English architect. 

The history of ancient Crete —  or of the Minoan culture on it —  is divided 
into Early, Middle, and Late Minoan ages, corresponding in time with the Old, 
Middle, and New Kingdoms in Egypt. The period of the Hyksos in Egypt, between 
the Middle and the New Kingdoms, coincides with the last —  the third —  
subdivision of Middle Minoan. 

All the great periods in Minoan Crete terminated in natural catastrophes. The 
monumental work of Sir Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos at Knossos, furnishes 
abundant evidence of the physical nature of the destructive agent that brought 
to a close the ages of Mftnoan culture, one after the other. He speaks of a 
great catastrophe" that took place toward the close of Middle Minoan. "A great 
destruction" befell Knossos on the northern shore of the island and Phaestos on 
its southern shore. The isle lay prostrate, overwhelmed by the elements. 

When, finally, the survivors or their descendants began the work of restoration, 
their labor was destroyed again in an "overthrow." Barely half a century passed 
between these two catastrophes: one synchronical with the end of the Middle 
Kingdom in Egypt and the Exodus, the other, one or two generations later. 

In the later phase of Middle Minoan III the phenomena "conclusively point to a 
seismic cause for the great overthrow that befell the Palace and surrounding 
Town." "Throughout the exposed areas of the building [palacel there is evidence 
of a great overthrow, burying with it a long succession of deposits." 

At the end of the next age, Late Minoan, the existence of the palace of Knossos 
"was cut short by some extraneous cause, though without any such signs of 
wholesale ruin as seem to have marked its earlier disaster." However, Marinatos, 
director of the Greek Archaeological Service, finds: "The catastrophe of Late 
Minoan I was fatal and general throughout the whole of Crete. It 
seems certain that it was the most terrible of all which occurred on the 
island." 

The palace at Knossos was destroyed. "The same tragedy befell all the so —  
called mansions.  Whole cities, too, were destroyed.  Even sacred caves fell in 
like the one at Arkalokhori." Volcanic ash fell on the island and great tidal 
waves moved toward the island from the north and swept over it. In this 
catastrophe Crete received "an irreparable blow." The only explanation for the 
upheaval "is 
one of natural causes; a normal earthquake, however, is wholly insufficient to 
explain so great a disaster." 

Then came the destruction of Late Minoan II. The sudden catastrophe interrupted 
all activity, but there are indications also that, though the upheaval was 
instantaneous, some preparations had been made in an effort to appease the deity 
for fear of the impending event. Evans writes; "It would seem that preparations 
were on foot for some anomting ceremony. 
 But the initial task was never destined to reach its fulfillment." Beneath a 
covering mass of earth and rubble lies the "Room of the Throne" with alabaster 
oil vessels. 

The sudden breaking off of tasks begun —   so conspicuous, surely points to an 
instantaneous cause.
It was "another of those dread shocks that had again and again caused a break in 
the Palace history." The earthquake was accompanied by fire. The actual 
overthrow was greatly aggravated by "a widespread conflagration, and the 
catastrophe attained special disastrous dimensions owing to a furious 
wind then blowing.' Evans assigns the final destruction of the building to the 
month of March. 
The disaster, however, did not approach in magnitude that "which, for example, 
had put an end to the building in its Middle Minoan age. 

After this last catastrophe the palace at Knossos was never again rebuilt. 
From the topography of Knossos and its surroundings it appears that sometime in 
the past the site of this city was at the head of an inner harbor connected by a 
channel with a larger open harbor the entrance to which was between two 
headlands to the north. "Some tremendous catastrophe had raised that section of 
the island far above the level which it occupied when the city of Cnossus 
[Knossos] existed." 

Archaeological work on Crete disclosed vast catastrophes of a physical nature. 
Since the termination of the cultural ages on Crete coincided with the end of 
historical periods in Egypt, also brought to their end by natural catastrophes, 
the extent of these repeated upheavals appears not to have been local. 
The island of Crete presents excellent ground for examination of the effect of 
the great catastrophes of the past on an early civilization. The island was not 
invaded until the arrival of the Dorians, so that the effects of anatural 
disaster cannot be mistaken for destruction by the hand of man. 

North of Crete is the volcanic island of Thera, or San —  torin. The volcano is 
not yet extinguished. 
Its crater was blown off in a formidable explosion in the past and a large 
caldera was formed. A German —  Greek expedition explored the island and 
published a detailed account of the vehement explosion of the former age. At 
that tune villages were buried by lava, pumice, and ashes; the excavated 
cultural remains showed that the great explosion took place "between 1800 and 
1500 B.C.," or at the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt. The erupted masses 
were so vast that a 
German scholar offered in recent years a theory according to which the Egyptian 
plague of darkness was caused by the eruption of the Thera volcano, six hundred 
miles northwest of the Delta. 

In Egypt the rock structure of the land experienced at least localized 
displacements at the end of the Middle Kingdom. K. R. Lepsius observed that the 
Nilometers at Semneh, dating From the Middle Kingdom, show an average rise in 
the waters of the Nile at that place, where the river is channeled in rock, 
twenty —  two feet higher than the highest level of today. 

"We obtained the remarkable result that about 4000 years ago the Nile used to 
rise at that point, on an average, twenty —  two feet higher than it does at 
present." 

This dropping of the high —  water level must be ascribed either to a change in 
the quantity of water in the Nile or to a change in the rock structure of Egypt. 
However, if the Nile contained so much more water in the past, many residences 
and temples would have been regularly inundated. 

I omit the references to cities swallowed by the ground in Egyptian literature; 
yet the enigmatic and rather regular signs of fire in graves of the Old and 
Middle Kingdoms, as if from the presence of some volatile substance that 
penetrated there and became inflamed by the heated ground, is worth mentioning. 

 


TROY. 

 At the westernmost end of Asia Minor, a few miles from the Dardanelles, lies 
the village of Hissarlik. In 1873, Heinrich Schliemann, though not an 
archaeologist, discovered there the remains of the fortress sung in the Iliad. 
From his early years as grocers apprentice, cabin boy on a ship that was 
wrecked, and bookkeeper in Holland, he had nourished the ambition to find 
Troy. After many wanderings that took him to Russia and California and the Far 
East, he settled in Greece, published his prediction of where he would find the 
city of the Iliad, and was met with jeers. But he soon succeeded in locating the 
legendary city in the Turkish village of Hissarlik. 

It had been built six or seven times and as many times destroyed. Schliemann 
took the rich city on the second lowest level to be the Troy of King Priam, 
which endured the siege and then succumbed to the Greeks, or Achaeans, warriors 
under Agamemnon. Later scholars have identified the second city as of a much 
earlier date, and declared the sixth city from the bottom to be that of Priam 
and Homer. The second city came to an end at the time the Old Kingdom of Egypt 
fell; it was destroyed in a violent paroxysm of nature. 


The archaeological expedition of Cincinnati University under Carl Blegen has 
established that an earthquake destroyed the city besieged by Agamemnon. Claude 
Schaef —  fer, the excavator of Ras Shamra (Ugarit) in Syria, came to Troy to 
compare the finds of Blegen with his own at Ras Shamra and became convinced that 
the earthquakes and conflagrations he had noted at Ras Shamra were synchronical 
with the earthquakes and conflagrations of Troy, six hundred miles away. 
He then compared the findings of these two places with signs of earthquakes in 
numerous other localities of the ancient East. After painstaking work he came to 
the conclusion that more than once in historical times the entire region had 
been shaken by prodigious earthquakes, an area unusually large whencompared with 
the largest areas affected by earthquakes in modern times. 

He wrote: 
"There is not for us the slightest doubt that the conflagration of Troy II 
corresponds to the catastrophe that made an end to the habitations of the Old 
Bronze Age of Alaca Huyuk, of Alisar, of Tarsus, of Tepe Hissar [in Asia Minor], 
and to the catastrophe that burned ancient Ugarit (II) in Syria, the city of 
Byblos that flourished under the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the contemporaneous 
cities of Palestine, and that was among the causes which terminated the Old 
Kingdom of Egypt." 

The city subsequently constructed, Troy III, was also destroyed in a great and 
sudden catastrophe; it was "a most terrible fire." Dorpfeld, the renowned 
archaeologist who worked with Schliemann and survived him by many years, 
wondered at the violence of the earthquake that overturned a sixteen meters 
(over fifty feet) thick fortress wall of Troy III. Schaeffer found that 
the same destruction also spread all over Asia Minor and far beyond. 

Eflorts to build a new city, Troy IV, on the ashes of the old were cut short by 
a new and unexpected conflagration. Once again the ground was covered "with a 
thick bed of ashes and carbonized substance indicating clearly that the 
buildings fell during a fire." 

Troy VI, which followed the fifth city and is usually recognized as the capital 
of King Priam, was destroyed by an earthquake. A natural force more powerful 
than the army of Agamemnon brought about its end. It was a violent shaking of 
the ground, as is also narrated in the Iliad. 
Walls were moved from their places and fell flat. Schaeffer was once more 
impressed by the signs of a simultaneous upheaval in all the excavated sites of 
Asia Minor and the ancient East generally, and dedicated himself to collating 
the archaeological material of the third and second millennia before the present 
era with the special purpose of establishing the stratigraphic synchronism based 
on the sudden and simultaneous interruption of cultural ages in this entire 
area. 

 




The Ruins of the East. 

In the ruins of excavated sites throughout all lands of the ancient East signs 
are seen of great destruction that only nature could have inflicted. Claude 
Schaeffer, in his great recent work, discerned six separate upheavals. All of 
these catastrophes of earthquake and fire were of such encompassing extent that 
Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, the Iranian plateau, Syria, 
Palestine, Cyprus, and Egypt were simultaneously overwhelmed. And some of these 
catastrophes were, in addition, of such violence that they closed great ages in 
the history of ancient civilizations. 

The enumerated countries were the subject of Schaef —  fer's detailed inquiry; 
and recognizing the magnitude of the catastrophes that have no parallels in 
modern annals or in the concepts of seismology, he became convinced that these 
countries, the ancient sites of which he studied, represent only a fraction of 
the area that was gripped by the shocks. 

The most ancient catastrophe of which Schaeffer discerned vestiges took place 
between 2400 and 2300 before the present era. It spread ruin from Troy to the 
valley of the Nile. In it the Old Bronze Age found its end. Laid waste were 
cities of Anatolia, like AJaca Huyuk, Tarsus, Alisar; 
and those of Syria, like Ugarit, Byblos, Chagar Bazar, Tell Brak, Tepe Gawra; 
and of Palestine, like Beth —  Shan and Ai; and of Persia, and of the Caucasus. 
Destroyed were the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Cyprus, and the Old Kingdom 
in Egypt came to an end, a great and splendid age. In all cities walls were 
thrown from their foundations, and the population markedly decreased. 

"It was an all encompassing catastrophe. Ethnic migrations were, no doubt, the 
consequence of the manifestation of nature. The initial and real causes must be 
looked for in some cataclysm over which man had no control." It was sudden and 
simultaneous in all places investigated. 

In a few centuries, migrating and multiplying themselves, the descendants of the 
survivors of the ruined world built new civilizations: the Middle Bronze Age. In 
Egypt it was the time of the Middle Kingdom, a short but glorious resurrection 
of Egyptian civilization and might. Literature reached its perfection, political 
might its apogee. Then came a shock that in a single day made of this 
empire a rum, of its art debris, of its population corpses. Again it was the 
entire ancient East, to its uttermost frontiers, that fell prostrate; nature, 
which knows no boundaries, threw all countries into a tremor and covered the 
land with ashes. 

"This brilliant period of the Middle Bronze Age, during which flourished the art 
of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt and the exquisite art and industry of the Middle 
Minoan Age [on Crete], and in the course of which great centers  —  of trade 
like Ugarit in Syria enjoyed remarkable prosperity, was suddenly terminated.  

"The great activity of international trade, which, during the Middle Bronze Age, 
had been characteristic of the eastern Mediterranean and most of the lands of 
the Fertile Crescent, suddenly stopped in all this vast area.   In all the sites 
in Western Asia examined up to now a hiatus or a period of extreme poverty broke 
the strati —  graphic and chronological sequence of the strata.   In most 
countries the population suffered great reduction in numbers; in others settled 
living was replaced by a nomadic existence." 

In Asia Minor the end of the Middle Bronze came suddenly, and a rupture between 
that age and the Late Bronze is evident in "all sites that were 
stratigraphically examined.' Troy, Boghazkoi, Tarsus, Alisar, present the same 
picture of life vanishing with the end of the Middle Bronze. 

In Tarsus, between the strata of the "brilliantly developed civilization" of the 
Middle Bronze and those of the Late Bronze, a layer of earth five feet thick was 
found without a sign of habitation  —   a "hiatus." 

At Alaca Huyuk the transition from Middle Bronze to Late Bronze was marked by 
upheaval and destruction, and the same may be said of every excavated site in 
Asia Minor. 

On the Syrian coast and in the interior "we find a stratigraphic and 
chronological rupture between the strata of the Middle Bronze and Late Bronze at 
Qalaat —  er —  Rouss, Tell Siroiriyan, Byblos, and in the necropoles of Kafer —  
Djarra, Oraye, Majdalouna." 

All the necropoles examined in the upper valley of the Orontes ceased to be 
used, and habitation of the great site of Hama was interrupted at the moment the 
Middle Kingdom in Egypt went down. Also in Ras Shamra there is a marked gap 
between the horizons of the Middle and the Late Bronze. 
    In Palestine, at Beth Mirsim, there was an interruption in the habitation of 
the site after the fall of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt. In Beth —  Shan, between 
the layers of the Middle Bronze and Late Bronze, the excavators came upon an 
accumulation of debris a meter thick. "It indicates that the 
transition from the Middle Bronze to the Late Bronze was accompanied by an 
upheaval that broke the chronological and stratigraphical sequence of the site." 
A similar situation was found at Tell, Hesy by Bliss. Earth tremors played havoc 
also with Jericho, Megiddo, Beth —  Shemesh, Lachish, Ascalon, Tell Taanak. The 
excavators of Jericho found that the city had been repeatedly destroyed. The 
great wall surrounding it fell in an earthquake shortly after the end of 
the Middle Kingdom. 
Concussions devastated the entire land of the Double Stream. The Russian —  
Persian borderland also shows that there was no continuity between the Middle 
Bronze and Late Bronze. In the Caucasus not an archaeological vestige was found 
ol the centuries between these two ages. 
    A sea tide broke onto the land, as on the coast of Ras Shamra, bringing 
further destruction in its wake. 
    It appears also that the end of the Middle Kingdom was marked by volcanic 
eruptions and lava flows. On the Sinai Peninsula, at an early and undisclosed 
date, a flow of basaltic lava from the fissured ground —  the Sinai massif is 
not a volcano —  burned down forests, leaving a desert behind. In Palestine lava 
erupted, filling the Jezreel Valley. Early in this century a Phoenician vase was 
found imbedded in lava. Geologists have asserted that volcanic activity in 
Palestine 
ceased in prehistoric times. "The assertion of the geologists thus becomes very 
questionable," wrote an author at that time. The vase found in lavaproves 
volcanic activity there "in historical times." 

The verdict of the archaeologists is that the vase "dates from the fifteenth 
century before the present era," and thus the eruption must have taken place in 
the middle of the second millennium.

Egypt, according to Schaeffer, was conquered by the Hyksos, coming from the 
East, when it fell in a catastrophe caused by natural elements. In other 
countries, too, not conquerors or migrating hordes but earthquakes and fire were 
the agents of destruction. "Our inquiry has demonstrated that these repeated 
crises which opened and closed the principal periods of the third and second 
millennia were caused not by the action of man. Far from it, because compared 
with the vastness of these all —  embracing crises and their profound effects, 
the exploits of conquerors  would appear only insignificant. 

Schaeffer finds indications that the climate changed abruptly in the wake of the 
catastrophes; the phenomenon was ubiquitous: "At the same time in the Caucasus 
and in certain areas of prehistoric Europe, changes of climate have caused, as 
it appears, transformations in the occupation and economy of the countries." 

The catastrophe that served as the starting point for two of my works, Worlds in 
Collision and Ages in Chaos, left archaeological imprints on biblical and 
Homeric lands, from the Dardanelles to the Caucasian barrier, the Persian 
highland, and the cataracts of the Nile. The most severe and devastating 
upheaval took place exactly at the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, as 
claimed in these two books. 


What was the nature of the perturbations that caused the end of the Old Bronze 
Age and then of the Middle Bronze Age, and changed the entire aspect of the 
known world from Europe to Asia and Africa? Fire raged, lava flowed, tremors 
traveled across whole continents, and climate went through revolutions. 
Schaeffer wondered at the vast extent of the earthquakes, unknown in 
modern annals. 

He asked: Could it be that in earlier times earthquakes were of very much 
greater force and wider spread than they are now because geological strata, 
originally out of equilibrium, were settling with the passing of time? This 
explanation of the readjustment of geological strata as time goes on is not 
valid if we keep in mind that geology ascribes to this planet three billion 
years of existence, and three thousand years is just one millionth of this 
period. The earth would have adjusted its strata long before, in the geological 
ages. Apparently the earth was thrown out of equilibrium only a few thousand 
years ago, which also explains the change in climate simultaneous with the 
upheaval. 

Schaefler's investigation reaches Persia in the East; inquiring in lands beyond 
Persia, we find that a rich Indus Valley civilization, with many fortified 
cities, came to a sudden end in the fifteenth century before the present era, 
shortly before the arrival of the Aryans. The cause of this sudden termination, 
conveniently equated with the fifteenth century B.C.," is not known; but 
the facts brought forth by R. E. Mortimer Wheeler strongly suggest to various 
scholars that a natural catastrophe engulfed the area in those early Vedic 
times. In its wake the Aryans came into the country; a Vedic Dark Age ensued, 
and on the ashes of the effaced world Aryans, step by step, built a new 
civilization. 

 



Times and Dates. 

The evidence of this and preceding chapters should not be interpreted as proving 
that there were global catastrophes only in the first and second millennia 
before the present era; but as substantiating the claim that in those times, 
too, there were global disturbances: these were actually the last in a line that 
goes back to much earlier times. 

According to the narrative of Worlds in Collision, two series of world 
catastrophes took place in recent times! "one that occurred thirty —  four to 
thirty —  five centuries ago, in the middle of the second millennium before the 
present era; the other in the eighth and the beginning of the seventh century 
before the present era, twenty —  six centuries ago." 

The first of these catastrophes occurred at the end of the Middle Kingdom in 
Egypt and actually caused its termination; in A.ges in Chaos further details 
were given of the closing hours of the Middle Kingdom, which went down under the 
blows of nature. The second series of. catastrophes occurred in the period that 
started in  —  776 and lasted until  —  687, when, in the final act of a 
protracted drama, Sennacherib met his downfall. 

In an independent investigation, Claude Schaeffer came to the conclusion that at 
the end of the Middle Kingdom an enormous cataclysm took place that ruined Egypt 
and devastated by earthquake and holocaust every populated place in Palestine, 
Syria, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, and Persia; previously Sir 
Arthur Evans had shown that, at the downfall of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, 
Crete was overwhelmed by a natural upheaval; also the volcano of Thera erupted 
prodigious quantities of lava; and the Indus Valley civilization came abruptly 
to an end. 

More recent catastrophes embracing the entire Near and Middle East are also 
described by Schaeffer as having taken place a few centuries later. Evans had 
found that the cities of Crete were again destroyed in very severe earthquakes 
that terminated the consecutive Minoan ages on Crete. 

Schaeffer's findings, based on excavations in scores, if not hundreds, of places 
all around the ancient East, where populations were decimated or annihilated, 
the earth shook, the sea irrupted, and the climate changed, are by themselves 
sufficient support for the claims made in Worlds in Collision as to the times 
and the vastness of the catastrophes. But we have much more evidence, and no 
wonder: the catastrophes being ubiquitous, their effects must be found 
everywhere. 

The Rhone Glacier in the Alps started to melt 2400 years ago, in the middle of 
the first millennium. This calculation of De Lapparent coincides with that at 
which we arrived by dating the last catastrophe in  —  687. In this catastrophe 
many older glaciers melted, and the subsequent increased evaporation and 
precipitation built other glaciers that before long also started to melt, a 
process that has been going on ever since. Many glaciers of the Alps, it was 
recently learned with surprise, are less than 4000 years old (Flint). 

Catastrophic changes in climate, found by Sernander and others in Scandinavia, 
correspond almost exactly with our dates: in the second millennium, about  —  
1500, and once more, 800 to 700 years before the present era, or thirty —  four 
and almost twenty —  seven centuries ago. The same dates are established through 
pollen analysis by Gams and Nordhagen for the catastrophic changes of climate in 
German fens and tectonic disturbances in central Europe; and again the same 
dates, close to the middle of the second millennium before the present era and 
once more following the year  —  800, are fixed by Paret and other authors for 
the climatic catastrophes that are reflected in the history of the lake 
dwellings in Germany, Switzerland, and northern Italy. 

Careful investigation by W. A. Johnston of the Niagara River bed disclosed that 
the present channel was cut by the falls less than 4000 years ago. And equally 
careful mvestigation of the Bear River delta by Hanson, who compared 
measurements repeated in periodic surveys, showed that the age of this delta is 
3600 years, its origin going back to the middle of the second millennium before 
the present era. 

Warren Upham's research on the great glacial Lake Agassiz and the striations of 
the exposed rocks there indicates that the lake was formed but a few thousand 
years ago and existed for a short time only. 

The study by Claude Jones of the lakes of the Great Basin showed that these 
lakes, remnants of larger glacial lakes, have existed only about 3500 years, and 
also that the Ice Age fauna survived to a date equally recent. Gale obtained the 
same result on Owens Lake in California and also Van Winkle on Abert and Summer 
lakes in Oregon. 

Radiocarbon analysis by Libby also indicates that plants associated with extinct 
animals (mastodons) in Mexico are probably only 3500 years old. Similar 
conclusions concerning the late survival of the Pleistocene fauna were drawn by 
various field workers in many parts of the American continent. 
    Suess and Rubin found with the help of radiocarbon analysis that in the 
mountains of the western United States ice advanced only 3000 years ago. 
The study of the magnetic properties of the clay of Etruscan vases points to a 
reversal of the general magnetic field of the earth, and also to a passage of 
the earth through strong magnetic fields in historical times. 
    The Florida fossil beds at Vero and Melbourne proved  —   —   by the 
artifacts found there together with human bones and the remains of animals, many 
of which are extinct —   that these fossil beds were deposited between 2000 and 
4000 years ago. As brought out by Godwin, the two irruptions of the sea on 
English shores also took place sometime in the second and first millennia before 
the present era. According to an earlier work, by Prestwich, the irruption of 
the sea was of a very violent nature; it spread to central France and the French 
Riviera, to Gibraltar, Corsica, and Sicily, and to the entire area that 
stretches to the lands of the ancient East. 

In all these places animal bones have been found broken but fresh; these bones 
of extant and extinct species have been found in fissures and caverns, sometimes 
on the tops of high hills, in great numbers. The bones found in English caves, 
covered with diluvium, were also described as fresh and unfossilized. 

From observations on beaches in numerous places all over the world, Daly 
concluded that there was a change in the ocean level, which dropped sixteen to 
twenty feet 3500 years ago; KLuenen and others confirmed Daly's findings with 
evidence derived from Europe. 

To these closely dated geological, climatological, and archaeological evidences 
of catastrophes, we may add numerous others which also point to the recency of 
the great upheavals. 

Animals, torn and broken, many of which are of extinct forms, are found in 
enormous heaps in Alaska, their bones and skin still fresh; the mammoth meat 
discovered in Siberia is still edible; the bones of hippopotami in the rock 
fissures of England still retain their organic matter. The mountain chains of 
China and Tibet, of the Andes, the Alps, the Rockies, and the Caucasus rose 
to their present heights in the Late Stone and even in the Bronze Age, and at 
those times (post —  glacial) Africa was torn by the Great Rift. 

We have the same late dating from all parts of the world, and what is even more 
important, by all kinds of calendars, calculations, and approaches. And actually 
the figures brought together on these pages are from the fields of archaeology 
and climatology, and from fossil beds and waterfalls and deltas and fens (pollen 
analysis), from lake dwellings and glaciers and ocean evels and the magnetic 
polarity of the earth, disclosing the same events and the same dates. 




CHAPTER XIII,
COLLAPSING SCHEMES. 

Geology and Archaeology. 

MEASURED BY anthropological and archaeological evidence, the age of many finds 
is recent; measured by the prevailing geological and paleontological schemes, 
the dates of the same finds are many times more remote. This conflict was very 
sharp in the case of the Vero and Melbourne, Florida, beds containing fossils 
and artefacts, and it repeated itself in a great many places. Romer brought 
together a wealth of material to show the late survival of Pleistocene fauna and 
was widely quoted by archaeologists. A. Kroeber sees no easy way to avoid the 
conclusion that "some of the associations of human artefacts with extinct 
animals may be no more than three thousand years old" and not "twenty — five 
thousand years old." 
Like Jones, he assumes that the Ice Age fauna survived until such a recent time 
by going through a process of slow extinction. But the idea of the slow and 
gradual extinction of Ice Age fauna is opposed by students of the problem, who 
feel that "sudden and decisive geological or climatic changes occurred which 
simultaneously wiped out a considerable number of animal species." 

From the evidence turned up on the European continent, "where documentation from 
early post — glacial sites is much more complete, we find a rather sudden 
disappearance" of the fauna.

When measured by archaeological standards, however, the artefacts and other 
remains of human origin found with the fossils point to a much closer date in 
Europe too, K. Sandford, writing of the conflict of views between geologists and 
archaeologists in England, says:
 The difference of opinion in some instances is so complete that one or the 
other must assuredly be wrong." Those who measure the time in terms of cultural 
or physical anthropology and archaeology stand in very definite opposition to 
all estimates based on a geological or a paleontological time scale. 

As an additional argument the archaeologist points to pictures of extinct 
animals in Babylonian and Egyptian base reliefs, the bones of which have 
actually been found. And the anthropologist believes that even oral traditions 
concerning extinct animals are grounds for far — reaching conclusions. 

"Archaeology has proved that the American Indian hunted and killed elephants; it 
has also strongly indicated that these elephants have been extinct for several 
thousand years. This means that the traditions of the Indians recalling these 
animals have retained their historical validity for great stretches of time. 
Exactly how long, it is impossible to say: probably the minimum is three 
thousand years.   If some Indian traditions have remained historical for so 
many years, undoubtedly traditions of other races and peoples have also." 

The animals of the La Brea asphalt pits in Los Angeles were first regarded as 
belonging to the opening of the Pleistocene or Ice Age, almost a million years 
ago; then, the close relation between the Lahontan fossils and those of La Brea 
compelled a change in this estimate and the assignment of the fauna of La Brea, 
as well as the similar fauna of other asphalt pits in California 
to the end of the Ice Age, presumably twenty or thirty thousand years ago. 

"Perhaps most striking is the conclusion that if these so — called early 
Pleistocene assemblages are actually late Pleistocene in age, early Quaternary 
vertebrate faunas are as yet practically unknown in the western United States." 

This radically revised view was not limited to the western coast of North 
America: the fauna that, two or three decades ago, was thought to have perished 
at the advent of the glacial periods is now thought to have survived the entire 
Ice Age and to have perished at its very end. 

"It seems odd that a fauna which had survived the great ice movement should die 
at its close. But die it did." 

Yet even the reduction of the time when the major part of the Pleistocene fauna 
succumbed on the western coast from one million years to only thirty or twenty 
or even ten thousand years is insufficient if Jones's estimate of the age of 
Lahontan deposits is correct. According to his analysis of the salt accumulation 
in the residual lakes of the larger Lake Lahontan, this glacial 
lake came into existence only 3500 years ago, and the fauna found in it deposit 
could not be older. This compelled further vacillations. J. R. Schultz, writing 
on the fauna of the tar seeps in California, says that in view of the 
established correlation of the fauna of La Brea and the fauna of Lake Lahontan 
it is now possible "to reconcile the veterbrate evidence" even with the opinion 
of Jones "as to the relatively late age of the lake." Would this really signify 
that the extinct animals of the asphalt pits are only 3000 or 4000 years old? 
This would mean that these bones were deposited in the time of the recorded 
history of Egypt and Babylonia. 

Thus we witness a return to the view held by American geologists in the latter 
part of the nineteenth and the beginning of the present century: George 
Frederick Wright, Newton Horace Winchell, Warren Upham. Wright concluded that 
the Ice Age "did not close until about the time that the civilization of Egypt, 
Babylonia and Western Turkestan had attained a high degree of development," and 
this in opposition to the greatly exaggerated ideas of the antiquity of the 
glacial epoch. 

Toward this view, with slow steps, scientific opinion is approaching, though it 
still maintains that there was a great gap between the Ice Age and the beginning 
of recorded history, the survival of many Ice Age animals until the second 
millennium before the present era notwithstanding. 

 


Collapsing Schemes. 

In 1829 Gerard Deshayes published his studies on the fossiliferous strata in the 
Paris area, where marine animals alternate with land animals; these strata 
disclosed that in the upper marine bed were many kinds of shell —  bearing 
mollusks that still inhabit the waters of the sea, and that the deeper the 
stratum, the fewer the living forms of mollusks. 

Following the publication of Deshayes's work, Lyell devised a timetable of 
geological ages. The fossilized remains of ancient animals indicate changes in 
fauna in the course of time; Lyell's measurement of geological periods is based 
on such changes in the animal kingdom, especially among the shell fauna. He 
found that there has been in the Quaternary, or the age of man, not 
more than one twentieth of the evolution that has occurred since the lower 
Miocene (middle series of Tertiary, the age of mammals). From that point on he 
traced one complete "cycle of evolution," during which, at his estimate, 
practically all species that existed at the opening of the cycle were replaced 
by new species. Thus, if a figure of 1,000,000 years is accepted for the age of 
man, which started with the close of the Tertiary epoch, then 20,000,000 years 
were needed to accomplish the changes observed since the lower Miocene; and four 
such cycles of transformation of life forms must have passed since the end of 
the Mesozoic, or the age of reptiles. By this method Lyell reckoned twelve 
cycles, or 240,000,000 years, from the beginning of the Paleozoic, or the time 
of early life forms on the earth. This figure is now considerably increased; the 
other figures are accepted at Lyell's valuation. 

Lyell's scheme, perfected by the introduction of new subdivisions of geological 
epochs, sets forth the following rule. If a stratum contains ninety to a hundred 
per cent modern species of shells, the stratum is Pleistocene, or of the Ice 
Age; if it contains forty to ninety per cent modern species of shells, the 
stratum belongs to the last subdivision of Tertiary —  the Pliocene; if only 
twenty to forty per cent of the shells in a stratum are present —  day 
varieties, then the stratum is of Miocene time, an earlier subdivision of the 
Tertiary; and so on, down to the stratum where shells of extant species of 
mollusks find no direct ancestors. 

Lyell's time system is based on the assumption that no catastrophic events 
intervened and that the extirpation of species was the result of slow 
extinction, which Darwin's theory ascribes to the survival of the fittest in the 
struggle for the limited means of existence. 

But if great catastrophes occurred on the surface of the earth and in the depths 
of the seas, of more than local character, and if in such upheavals some forms 
of life perished and others survived, and the progeny of still others underwent 
strong mutations, then the entire scheme of percentages and time allotment by 
the multiplication of changes observed in the last epoch, with its preconceived 
plan and rigidity, is no more valid than the pronouncements of some theologians, 
like Archbishop Ussher of Ireland, who in 1654 declared that the Creation took 
place at nine o'clock in the morning on the twenty —  sixth day of October in 
the year 4004 B.C. 

The present work does not suggest either a lengthening or a shortening of the 
estimated age of the earth or the universe (which during the few years when this 
book was being written rose from two to six billion years). I do not see why to 
a truly religious mind a small and short-lived universe is a better proof of its 
having been devised by an absolute intelligence. Neither do I see how by 
removing many unsolved problems in geology to very remote ages we contribute to 
their solution or elucidate their enigmatic nature. 

Whatever the age of the universe and the earth, single geological epochs were of 
very different length than has been assumed on the ground of the theory of 
uniformity. The very concept of a 60,000,000 —   year —   long Tertiary when 
mountains were uplifted, followed by 1,000,000 years of Ice Age, a time of great 
climatic changes, followed by 30,000 years of the tranquillity of Recent time, 
with quietude in mountain building and stability in climate, is basically wrong. 
The mountain building went on during the Ice Age, coinciding with climatic 
catastrophes, and both endured into Recent time, only a few thousand years ago. 

 


In Early Ages.

When the earlier rocks are investigated they are found to be records of great 
upheavals in comparison with which the upheavals of later times appear only 
minor. Along the Canadian border west of Lake Superior in the Keewatin area, a 
complex of ancient lava flows and interbedded sedimentary rock reached, 
according to C. O. Dunbar of Yale, "the impressive thickness of 20,000 feet." 

At Michipicoten Bay the volcanic tuff is 11,000 feet thick. In the same area of 
Lake Superior a later flow of lava, in Keweenawan, still very early in the 
history of the world, "has been estimated at 24,000 cubic miles," and in 
northern Michigan and Wisconsin, the Keweenawan system "may reach 50,000 feet, 
much more than half of which is made of lava flows." 
"It stirs the imagination to contemplate the 2,000,000 square miles of granite 
gneiss that floors the Canadian Shield, and to realize that it all came into 
place as fluid magma, which congealed beneath a cover of older rocks now long 
since removed by erosion." 

The impression is gained "that during these primeval eras the crust of the Earth 
was repeatedly broken and largely engulfed in upwellings of molten material. In 
these pre —  Cambrian lavas, glacial deposits were found in Canada as well as in 
Australia and South Africa, "with boulders in part rounded and in part angular, 
and some of them faceted and striated." The detection of this evidence of 
early glaciation came at first as "a shocking discovery," because it appeared "a 
serious obstacle to the belief that the Earth was originally molten."
 Later, however, geologists, by placing some half a billion years between the 
origin of the earth and the early ice phenomena, allowed the rocks to cool off 
first. 

Then in Cambrian time seas flooded the continents, and dolomite and 
metamorphosed rocks 3000 to 4000 feet thick were formed. Only lower animal life 
was present in the world. Yet "the simplest, unspecialized ancestors of modern 
animals, are most intensely modern themselves in the zoological sense and   
belong to the same order of nature as that which prevails at the 
present day." 

In Or —  dovician time the sea submerged "fully half of the present [American] 
continent and reduced it to a group of great islands." In the beginning of that 
period, "the marine waters also spilled over and at times spread widely across 
the central and eastern part of the United States." Later in that period "a vast 
sea spread southward from the Arctic across central Canada to join the southern   
bayments that occupied much of the United States." Mountains were rising, 
folding, and over thrusting, in the so—called Taconian disturbance. This was 
accompanied by volcanic activity. Ash fell from Alabama to New York, "and even 
as far west as Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa." The ash beds vary in thickness 
from a few inches up to more than seven feet. 

"The greatest display of volcanic activity, however, is found farther to the 
northeast, in Quebec and Newfoundland," where volcanic tuff of great thickness 
represents the epoch. At the same time coral reefs were built in arctic Canada, 
from Alaska to Manitoba, as well as in Newfoundland and northern Greenland. 
Indications of an ice age (tillitcs) are found in northern Norway, and if they 
are of the same age they certainly present a problem, because of 
the coral reefs that then grew in the north. Life was concentrated in water, the 
sea was inhabited by thousands of species. 

In the following Silurian period volcanic activity broke out with new vigor. 
"In New Brunswick and especially in south-eastern Maine, ash beds and lava flows 
attain the impressive thickness of 10,000 feet and more." Also in southern 
Alaska and northern California there are imposing lava flows, volcanic breccia, 
and tuff dating from this time. The close of this period was marked by the 
so — called Caledonian disturbance in Europe, with a mountain crest rising 
across the British Isles and Scandinavia. "Throughout the length of Norway and 
Sweden, a distance exceeding 1100 miles, the pre —  Devonian formations were 
folded, overturned, and over thrust with eastward movement on individual fault 
planes as great as 20 to 40 miles." Again coral grew in arctic regions. 

The next (Devonian) period was marked by a so —  called Acadian disturbance, 
with uplifts and depressions. "Much igneous activity accompanied the Acadian 
disturbance. Great thickness of bedded lavas and turfs in southern Quebec. 
Gaspe, New Brunswick, and Maine record volcanoes that were active during 
Devonian time." Magma intruded and lifted the White Mountains and built their 
granite core. Similar processes went on in other parts of the world. The 
Old Red Sandstone of Europe is a Devonian formation. In eastern Australia 
mountains were formed that stretched the full length of the eastern border of 
the continent. 

"Much igneous activity had occurred during the period in this region, and the 
Devonian strata and associated volcanics are said to be over 30,000 feet thick." 
Throughout Devonian time North America must have been connected with Europe by a 
land bridge, which later subsided beneath the north Atlantic." 

Evidence that these two lands met is found in the land plants and freshwater 
animals preserved in the Devonian rocks of the two regions, "which are so much 
alike on both sides of the Atlantic that it seems clear they were free to 
migrate across an easy land bridge." 
    In the Carboniferous period, mountains were made, seas invaded land, corals 
built reefs on the arctic coast of Alaska and on the polar islands of 
Spitsbergen, volcanoes erupted, and glaciation took place, especially in 
Australia. Land animals left their records beside those of rich marine life. 
Coal beds were formed. In the coal basins of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick "the 
coal measures reach a thickness of a few thousand to 13,000 feet." 
Extensive continental glaciation of India, South Africa, South America, and 
Australia took place.

Here I stop quoting from Historical Geology. Again and again the world was a 
playground for Vulcan and Poseidon, the elementary forces of melting rock and 
trespassing sea. But when all is told, we are nevertheless assured that the 
geological record is one of calm and uniformity, and what appears as revolution 
is a telescoped view of slow and ordinary processes; even the seas of lava, 
though obviously formed in single paroxysms, are, in the over —  all picture, 
denied a catastrophic origin. 

One reads, "It is not obvious that the city of Boston rests on the surface of 
one of the world's greatest mountain chains —   yet it does" (it had been 
depressed and also eroded). one reads also that "Boston lay in the equatorial 
rain zone during the Carboniferous and in the region of hot deserts during the 
Permian"; one is, furthermore, told that the site of Boston was 
once under the sea, and that it was once also under a mile — thick cap of ice. 

It is insisted that all these changes took place without any upheavals in 
nature, merely as effects of processes and agents active also in our own time — 
the highest mountains becoming flat, equatorial jungles giving place to hot sand 
deserts and hot deserts to a polar cover of ice, and the polar cover of 
ice to the bottom of the sea and the bottom of the sea to the site of Harvard 
University. It all happened so slowly that no living creature ever perceived the 
change. 

Coal is found in layers that are ascribed to various ages mainly on the basis of 
fossils found in them. Brown coal is a compacted mass of plant remains. Lignite 
(brown coal) is made chiefly out of trees only partially converted into coal. 
Soft or bituminous coal is brittle and of bright luster and contains 
sulfur; its organic nature can sometimes be seen under a lens, and the plants 
that participated in its formation can be recognized by leaves in the shales on 
top of the coal bed. Anthracite or hard coal is metamorphosed bituminous coal. 

The plants that went into the formation of ancient beds include chiefly ferns 
and cycads; layers of later ages are composed of sassafras, laurel, tulip tree, 
magnolia, cinnamon, sequoia, poplar, willow, maple, birch, chestnut, alder, 
beech, elm, palm, fig tree, cypress, oak, rose, plum, almond, myrtle, acacia, 
and many other species. 

The origin of the coal beds is still far from being satisfactorily explained. 
One theory would make peat bogs the place where, in a slow process measured by 
tens and hundreds of thousands of years, coal was born. It is said that the 
plants fall, but before they decompose in the air they are covered by the water 
of the swamps. A layer of sand is deposited over them, forming the soil for 
new plants, and thus the process repeats itself. In order that the layer of sand 
may be deposited, it is necessary that these marshy regions be covered by water 
in motion. 

Since almost regularly marine shells and fossils are found on top of coal beds, 
the sea must have covered the swamps at one time; then, for new land plants to 
grow there, the sea must have retreated. There are places where sixty, eighty, 
and a hundred and more successive beds of coal have formed; this theory would 
then require that as many times the sea trespassed  —   when the land slowly 
subsided — and as many times retreated. In other words, this theory assumes that 
the ground is pulsating and that the sea will return again sometime and cover 
the coal beds as it did a hundred times in the past. 

"Fossils of marine clams, snails are abundant in the shales just above each seam 
of coal. 
Later, with fluctuating sea level, the salt waters withdrew and another 
freshwater marsh came into being, giving rise to another bed of coal above the 
earlier one. Again we are surprised, this time by the large number of such 
alternations of coal with marine sediments; these are now recognized as distinct 
cycles, each cycle representing a common sequence of events Ohio displays more 
than forty such cycles, and in Wales more than a hundred separate seams of coal 
have been discovered. 

Marvin Miller has given 400,000 years as the probable time represented 
by the average Ohio cycle. 

This scheme demands not only that the sea should have covered the land one 
hundred times but also that after each retreat of the sea a fresh —  water marsh 
should have appeared on the vacant ground in order to give the trees a place to 
grow and fall down and decay; and that the process of decay should have been 
checked before going too far, "for otherwise the vegetable matter would have 
disappeared completely and none would have been left in the form of coal." 
And then each time "not only was the real extent of the marshes remarkable but 
the thickness of the coal required a surprising accumulation of vegetable 
matter." 

Many kinds of plants and trees that went into the formation of coal do not grow 
in swamps, and when they die they remain on dry ground and decompose. This fact 
suffices to render the peat — bog theory untenable. 

Seams of coal are sometimes fifty or more feet thick. No forest could make such 
a layer of coal; it is estimated that it would take a twelve —  foot layer of 
peat deposit to make a layer of coal one foot thick; and twelve feet of peat 
deposit would require plant remains a hundred and twenty feet high. How tall and 
thick must a forest be, then, in order to create a seam of coal not one foot 
thick but fifty? The plant remains must be six thousand feet thick. In some 
places there must have been fifty to a hundred successive huge forests, one 
replacing the other, since so many seams of coal are formed. But it is further 
questionable whether the forests grew one on top of the other, because a coal 
bed, undivided on one side, sometimes splits on the other side into numerous 
beds, with layers of limestone or other formations between. 

The consideration of the enormous mass of organic matter needed to form a coal 
seam brought about the birth of another theory of the origin of coal. Fallen 
trees were carried along by overflowing rivers, and coal was formed from them, 
not from the plants in situ. This theory explains the enormous accumulation of 
dying plants in some localities; it may be able to show why, in many cases, a 
fossilized tree trunk is embedded in coal with its lower part uppermost, or 
standing on its head — which the peat — bog theory does not explain. But the 
drift theory cannot account for the fact that various kinds of marine life are 
mixed with the coal. Carbonaceous and bituminous shales are frequently packed 
with fossilized marine fish. Deep — sea crinoids and clear — water ocean corals 
often alternate with the coal beds. 
Erratic boulders, too, are often encased in coal. It was supposed that these 
boulders were carried by chance on natural rafts of closely drifting logs and 
thus became embedded in the coal. 
Close rafts of drifting trunks are conceivable only after a great hurricane. 
However, marine fish would not enter deeply into inundating rivers to be 
entombed together with the boulders, and coral does not grow in muddy water. 
    Apparently the coal was not formed in the ways described. Forests burned, a 
hurricane uprooted them, and a tidal wave or succession of tidal waves coming 
from the sea fell upon the charred and splintered trees and swept them into 
great heaps, tossed by billows, and covered them with marine sand, pebbles and 
shells, and weeds and fishes; another tide deposited on top of the 
sand more carbonized logs, threw them in other heaps, and again covered them 
with marine sediment. The heated ground metamorphosed the charred wood into 
coal, and if the wood or the ground where it was buried was drenched in a 
bituminous outpouring, bituminous coal was formed. Wet leaves sometimes survived 
the forest fires and, swept into the same heaps of logs and sand, left their 
design on the coal. Thus it is that seams of coal are covered with marine 
sediment; for that reason also a seam may bifurcate and have marine deposits 
between its branches. 
    A support of this my view on the origin of coal I find in a recently 
published extensive work by Herbert Nilsson, professor emeritus of botany at 
Lund University.
    
 Nilsson presents the results of an inquiry into the botanical and zoological 
composition of the brown coal (lignite) of Geiseltal in Germany, made by 
Johannes Weigelt of Halle and his group. Many plants found in Geiseltal 
lignite are tropical, of species that do not grow even in the subtropics. A long 
list of tropical families, genera, and species, discerned in Geiseltal coal, was 
made known.
    Besides the dominating tropical flora in Geiseltal, plants are represented 
there from almost every part of the globe. The associated insect fauna of 
Geiseltal coal is found "in present Africa, in East Asia, and in America in 
various regions, preserved in almost original purity (Walther and Weigelt). The 
coal of Geiseltal is rated as belonging to the beginning of the Tertiary time. 
    As to the reptilian, avian, and mammalian fauna, the coal is a "veritable 
graveyard." Apes, crocodiles, and marsupials (pouch animals) left their remains 
in this coal. An Indo—Australian bird, an American condor, tropical giant 
snakes, East Asian salamanders, left their remains there too 
(O. Kuhn). Some of the animals are of the steppe habitat, and others, like 
crocodiles, came from swamps. 
Not only do the origin and the habitats of plants and animals offer a very 
paradoxical picture, but so also does their state of preservation. Chlorophyll 
is preserved in the leaves found in the brown coal (Weigelt and Noack). The 
leaves must have been rather quickly excluded from contact with air and light, 
or rapidly entombed: these were neither leaves falling off the plants in the 
fall nor leaves exposed to the action of light and atmosphere after being torn 
off by a storm. 
  Entire strata of leaves from all parts of the world, counted by the billions, 
though torn to shreds but with their fine fibers (nervature) intact, in many 
cases still green, are found in the Geiseltal lignite. 

It is not different with the animals. If exposed after death for any length of 
time to natural conditions, the structure of animal tissues loses its fineness; 
the muscles and the epidermis (skin) of the animals of the brown coal of 
Geiseltal, were found to have retained their fine structure. Also the colors of 
the insects are preserved in their original splendor. The very process 
of fossilization with silica invading the tissues must have occurred "fast, 
blitzschnell"  —   almost instantaneously, in Nilsson's opinion. While the 
membranes and the colors of the insects are preserved so well, it is difficult 
to find a complete insect: mostly only torn parts are found, (Voigt). 
    Nilsson is convinced that the animals and plants found in Geiseltal coal were 
carried there by onrushing water from all parts of the world, but mainly from 
the coasts of the equatorial belt of the Pacific and Indian oceans —   from 
Madagascar, Indonesia, Australia, and the west coast of the Americas. One thing 
is, however, evident: coal originated in cataclysmic circumstances. 

 






CHAPTER XIV,
EXTINCTION. 
Fossils. 

MILLIONS OF BUFFALOES have died natural deaths on the prairies of the West in 
the more than four hundred years since the discovery of America; their flesh has 
been eaten by scavengers or putrefied and disintegrated; their bones and teeth 
resisted for a while the decaying process, but finally weathered and crumbled to 
powder. No bones of these dead buffaloes became fossils in sedimentary rocks, 
and scarcely any are found in a state of preservation. 

The evolutionary theory of the formation of fossils makes certain conditions 
obligatory: 
Sedimentary rock is formed in a slow process on the bottom of the sea, and the 
bones of animals buried in the sediment become fossilized. Land animals wade in 
the shallow waters of the sea or lakes, die when wading, and their bodies are 
covered with sediment. The sediment must quickly cover the animals, and this is 
most possible when the ground subsides. Therefore Darwin postulated such 
subsidence of the sea bottom as a condition for the formation of fossils,  
On the other hand, the subsidence or emergence of the ground in the theory of 
uniformity or evolution is a very slow process, longer by far than the time 
necessary for a cadaver to disintegrate in water. 
The giant reptiles are supposed to have lived as amphibians —   on land and in 
the shallow sea —   because of the numerous fossil remains in sedimentary rock. 
However, no signs of adaptation for aquatic life are found in their skeletons. 
Their bodies were so heavy, it is assumed, that they looked for an opportunity 
to wade or swim  —   though it would seem that if they had difficulty in 
carrying their bodies on land they must have experienced still more difficulty 
in dragging themselves out of the muddy ground of the shallow water on the 
beaches. Birds too are supposed to have died while wading and been buried. 

When a fish dies its body floats on the surface or sinks to the bottom and is 
devoured rather quickly, actually in a matter of hours, by other fish. However, 
the fossil fish found in sedimentary rock is very often preserved with all its 
bones intact. Entire shoals of fish over large areas, numbering billions of 
specimens, are found in a state of agony, but with no mark of a 
scavenger's attack. 

The explanation of the origin of fossils by the theory of uniformity and 
evolution contradicts the fundamental principle of these theories: Nothing took 
place in the past that does not take place in the present. Today no fossils are 
formed. 

Petrified bones of reptiles, birds, and mammals are often found in large 
unbroken areas; and since it is quite difficult to describe such areas as wading 
places, another explanation of the origin of fossils is sometimes offered: the 
animals were drowned and buried in inundations of large rivers. This explanation 
seems for certain cases generally closer to the truth than the wading theory; 
however, the size of the continental areas covered by floods imply catastrophic 
events on a large scale, and such events, far beyond what is observed on 
seasonally overflowing rivers today, again contradict the principle of 
uniformity. 
Finally, the very process of sediment formation is not without its problem. 
Sediment building is supposed to go of permanently in the sea, the building 
material being the detritus carried by the rivers or broken by the billows from 
the rocks on the coast and, mainly, the ooze, or calcareous skeletons of myriads 
of minute living beings, which are abundant in the sea and find their graves 
on the bottom. 
The thickness of the sediment on the bottom of the ocean is supposed to give a 
timetable for the age of the ocean; but, contrary to expectation, in some places 
on the bottom of the ocean core samples have detected almost no sedimentary 
rock, indicating that the bottom of 
the ocean was formed in those places only recently; and in other places, even on 
land, the sedimentary rock is enormously thick, sometimes tens of thousands of 
feet. If one and the same process continually and equally deposits the 
calcareous ooze and detritus on the sea bottom, the inequalities in sedimentary 
bedrock are as little explained as the formation of fossils. 

Both these phenomena are explainable by cataclysmic events in the past. The 
floor of the ocean was lifted in some places and dropped in others, the sediment 
was violently shifted, the content of the ocean depths was spilled onto the 
land, land animals were engulfed and buried by enormous tides carrying debris, 
in many places avalanches of sand and volcanic dust entombed the aquatic life, 
fish skeletons remaining in poses of death, undevoured and undecayed. 

 






Footprints.
In numerous places and in various formations are found footprints of animals of 
prehistoric times. 
Those of dinosaurs and other animals are clearly impressed in rock. The accepted 
explanation is that these animals walked on muddy ground, and their imprints 
were preserved as the ground became hard and stony. 

This explanation cannot stand up against critical examination. On muddy ground 
one may find impressions of the hoofs of cattle or horses. But the very next 
rain will smudge these impressions, and after a short while they will be there 
no more. 

If we do not find the hoof prints of cattle that passed along a path the season 
before, how is it that the toe imprints of animals of prediluvial times remain 
intact in the mud on which they walked? 

The imprints must have been made like impressions in soft sealing wax that 
hardens before they are blurred or obliterated. The ground must have been soft 
when the animal ran upon it, and then it quickly hardened before changes could 
take place. Sometimes we see imprints of animals that chanced to walk over 
freshly laid concrete. While the substance was soft, a dog or a bird or a large 
insect might have walked on it and left impressions recognizable when it 
hardened. Also, heated sand, turning into a viscous substance on its way to 
becoming hardened glass, could receive and preserve imprints. The vestiges could 
also remain in muddy, unheated ground that was soon covered by lava which filled 
in the imprints and later disintegrated on being weathered away. 

In historical times —   in the volcanic destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum — 
lava and volcanic ashes filled the wheel tracks in the streets of these cities 
and thus preserved them to our day. In the eruption of Kilauea in Hawaii in 
1790, when many people lost their fives, and with them a brigade of the Hawaiian 
army, the footprints of trapped humans and animals were retained in the hardened 
volcanic ash.

Wherever footprints in the ground dating from historical or prehistoric times 
are found, we may assume that most probably a catastrophe took place when these 
vestiges were left or very shortly thereafter. If a catastrophe was in progress 
or was threatening, the animals must have been in terror and flight. The 
footprints actually show that the animals in most cases were fleeing, 
not wading or loitering about; sometimes the configuration of the impressions 
indicates that an animal was indecisive, probably trapped by some peril closing 
in from all sides. 
    The animals that were in flight for their lives may have succumbed a few 
moments later, crushed or burned in the disaster. The ground was swept by driven 
sand and ashes or covered by lava or asphalt, or cement, or fluid silicon, then 
possibly covered by floods, and the imprints in the heated soil that was baked 
to stone have survived to the present day. So it is that we do not find 
tracks of animals that peacefully walked one hundred or three hundred years ago, 
but we do find traces and vestiges of animals that walked and ran many thousands 
of years ago.

 
The Caverns. 
It has been observed that when in a great panic carnivorous animals and the 
animals that usually are their prey flee together without falling upon each 
other or being afraid of each other. So when forests burn, 
horses and wolves, gazelles and hyenas flee along the same paths, all gripped by 
the same terror, paying no attention to one another. When prairies burn or 
jungles are enveloped in flame, wild beasts and tame creatures in mixed herds 
stampede to save their lives. In earthquake or in flood, animals lose their 
mutual animosity in a common fear. It has also been observed that in 
earthquakes and other calamities wild animals will come to the abodes of men. In 
their great migrations animals behave differently than when they travel singly 
or in small herds; so lemming, which scurry away from a man at the sound of his 
footsteps, will overrun house, town, and river when migrating in large bands, 
perishing in great numbers but going forward in a huge wave. 

In great natural catastrophes animals seek cover from terrifying phenomena — 
floods, falling meteorites, burning forests, and frightening portents in the 
sky. Caverns are the places of refuge most sought. An instinct in animals impels 
them to escape into a den, a hole in the ground, and large animals run for 
caverns. They may remember such places in the hour of catastrophe, and 
one may follow another. Of course, many animals never reach the shelter of a 
cave, but some of them do. And when, in the detritus on the floor of a cave, 
bones are found of animals that usually would not associate, and the bones are 
mixed together, and those of the prey animals are not crushed by the teeth of 
the carnivores, then it is almost certain that these animals tried to save 
themselves, unafraid of one another, in this cave in the face of approaching 
catastrophe. 

It is possible that some of the animals in the shelter survived the catastrophe, 
and then their wild instincts must have returned; but in many cases all of them 
succumbed, overwhelmed by gases, smoke, eddying currents on the surface of the 
earth, and tides that burned them under sedunent. 

In numerous places of the world the bone content of caves indicates that they 
served as hideouts in tunes of supreme danger. Lions and tigers, wolves and 
hyenas, gazelles and hares shared the refuge and there found their common grave. 
But not all places where such assemblages of bones are discovered were sought 
for refuge. In many cases the animals were swept from large areas by a tidal 
wave and thrown against rocks, and the water rushing through the fissures left 
behind the animals with all their bones broken within their torn bodies. 

From as far as China, to England and France and the islands of the 
Mediterranean, examples of fissures with bones, splintered and mingled together, 
have been presented in this book. 

Not only fissures in the rocks but caverns in the hills may have been filled 
with bones, though the caverns might not originally have been sought for 
shelter. An irrupting sea or great lake, lifted from its bed and carrying its 
own detritus and land debris, swept heterogeneous herds of animals and carried 
them to the farthest reaches and threw over them hills of gravel, rock, and 
earth. Cumberland cave, described on an earlier page, is one of many examples. 

If the bones are found rolled, they were most probably carried from afar, and 
were from animals that had died long before; if the bones are more or less 
intact, the chances are that the place was a shelter that failed; and if the 
bones are splintered, it is highly probable that the animals were smashed by a 
great force against rocks or resisting ground. 

 

Extinction. 
Many forms of life, many species and genera of animals that lived on this planet 
in a recent geological period, in the age of man, have utterly disappeared 
without leaving a single survivor. 
Mammals walked in fields and forests, propagated and multiplied, and then 
without a sign of degeneration vanished. 

"A considerable group have become extinct virtually within the last few thousand 
years  The large mammals that died out [in America] include all the camels, all 
the horses, all the ground sloths, two genera of musk —  oxen, peccaries, 
certain antelopes, a giant bison with a horn spread of six feet, a giant 
beaverlike animal, a stag —  moose, and several kinds of cats, some of which 
were of lion size.' 

Also the Imperial elephant and the Columbian mammoth, animals larger than 
the African elephant and common all over bJorth America, disappeared. The 
mastodon that inhabited the forests and ranged from Alaska to the Atlantic coast 
and Mexico, and the woolly mammoth that roamed in a broad area adjacent to the 
ice sheets, likewise persisted until a few thousand years 

The dire wolf, the saber—toothed tiger, the short—faced bear, the small horse 
disappeared, and are no longer found either in the Old or in the New World. Many 
birds, too, became extinct. 

These species are believed to have been destroyed to the last specimen" in the 
closing Ice Age. 
Animals, strong and vigorous, suddenly died out without leaving a survivor. The 
end came, not in the course of the struggle for existence —  with the survival 
of the fittest. Fit and unfit, and mostly fit, old and young, with sharp teeth, 
with strong muscles, with fleet legs, with plenty of food around, all perished. 

These facts, as I have already quoted, drive "the biologist to despair as he 
surveys the extinction of so many species and genera in the closing Pleistocene 

In the woolly mammoth the genus of elephants achieved its evolutionary 
perfection; as was already shown by Falconer and known to Darwin, the teeth of 
the mammoth were superior to those of modern elephants; and in many other 
respects their adaptation was perfect. The theory of evolution had in the 
mammoth one of the best examples of a species evolving in the struggle 
for survival by adaptation. Stone Age man made drawings of it; possibly he even 
domesticated some of them. In the Neolithic (Stone Age) town of Predmost in 
Moravia bones of eight hundred to one thousand mammoths were found; their 
shoulder blades were used in building tombs. On the vast plains of northern 
Siberia they roamed in herds. They succumbed there as if in one cold 
night that fell over the land and knew no recess thereafter. They did not die 
from starvation —   their food was found in their stomachs and also between 
their teeth. The best — preserved body of a mammoth — with even its eyeballs 
intact — was found in Beresovka, Siberia, eight hundred miles west of Bering 
Strait. "A fractured hip and fore limb, a great mass of clotted blood in the 
chest, and unswallowed grass between the clenched teeth, all point to the 
violence and suddenness of its passing." Did it fall into a pit, or was it 
tossed by hurricanes and floods? It appears that it was "some sudden and 
unexpected cataclysm," for the mammoths, together with rhinoceroses, bison, and 
others whose bones and teeth make the main substance of the New Siberian 
Islands, fill the bottom of the Arctic Ocean above Siberia, and lie in the 
frozen earth of the Siberian tundras. At about the same time the mammoth also 
perished in Europe and in America. 

The mastodon, too, was exterminated at the dawn of the present era. There was no 
scarcity of their food — it consisted of herbs, leaves, and bark, as is known 
from the undigested food found within their skeletons. They lived in all parts 
of the Americas. Over two hundred skeletons were unearthed in New York State. It 
is not known what brought this widespread group to an end. 

Fossil bones of horses indicate that this was a very common animal in the New 
World in the Ice Age. But when the soldiers of Cortes, arriving at the shores of 
America, rode their horses which they had brought from the Old World, the 
natives thought that gods had come to their country. 
They had never seen a horse. 

Of the horses the Spaniards brought to America some went astray, became wild, 
and filled the prairies, travelling in herds; the land and its vegetation and 
its climate proved to be exceedingly well suited for the propagation of this 
animal. 

In many parts of the Americas fossil hunters found fossilized bones of horses in 
great numbers, often imbedded in rock or in lava, which do not differ in shape 
from the bones of the present — day horse. Why did the horse become extinct with 
the end of the Ice Age if the climate became so favourable? 

In earlier ages there were in America different —  looking horses, with three —  
toed feet, also very small horses the size of cats. However, the one that looked 
exactly like a modern horse inhabited America and there became extinct only 
several thousand years before Cortes brought the European horse to the shores of 
the New World. 

Was not the American horse wiped out by man? In our time the American bison 
(buffalo) was almost destroyed by man, but he used horses to pursue them and 
firearms to kill them. 

C. O. Sauer has advanced the theory (1944) that the terminal Ice Age fauna was 
destroyed by man, by hunters making fire — drives in pursuit of game. However, 
Stone Age hunters burning down forests would not have been able to destroy 
completely many species of animal, leaving not one of the kind from one coast to 
another and from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. 

F. Rainey, now of the University of Pennsylvania, has observed that "in certain 
regions of Alaska the bones of these extinct animals He so thickly scattered 
that there can be no question of human handiwork involved. Though man was on the 
scene of the final perishing, his was not, then, the appetite nor the capacity 
for such giant slaughter." 

And because of the wholesale and rapid extermination of fauna, "it seems 
impossible to attribute the phenomenon to the unaided efforts of man." "Even 
with the known destructiveness of man, however, it is difficult to visualize how 
these early hunters, armed with puny flint — tipped spears, could have destroyed 
enough animals to cause complete extinction. But whatever the actual cause or 
causes may have been, there is no doubt that the end of the ice masses also saw 
the end of the exotic animals of the same period  The ice cliffs in the 
background have shrivelled and gone. The trumpeting herds of mammoths and the 
pounding hooves of the other animals are no more." 

 Eiseley of the University of Kansas wrote: "We are not dealing with a single, 
isolated relict species but with a considerable variety of Pleistocene [Ice Age] 
forms, all of which must be accorded, in the light of cultural evidence, an 
approximately similar time of extinction. 

Then could it have been a disease that caused the extinction? Or the change in 
climate because of the termination of the Ice Age? Professor Eiseley finds that 
epidemic disease or lunatic events attendant on the glacial retreat, are 
sufficient to explain an enormous reduction in the number of a particular 
species, but are yet inadequate to illuminate the reason for the inability of 
the species to rebound, in a few years, from its decimated condition." w 
Besides, no known disease would attack so many species and genera. And as for 
the climatic factor, if glacial conditions are the cause, then, according to G. 
E. Pilgrim, at approximately the same time we witness a similar extinction of 
the mammal faunas of Africa and Asia, though in their case this 
may not have been caused by glacial conditions." 

But even a sudden climatic catastrophe all over the world could hardly have been 
adequate by itself to account for an extermination so wide and, for many 
species, so complete. "Climatic change alone is not enough to explain the 
extinction of the marvellous Pleistocene fauna. There have been other 
suggestions, such as clouds of volcanic gases which destroyed whole herds of 
mammals ' Of what dimensions must these clouds have been? They must have covered 
almost the entire terrestrial globe. But all the volcanoes of the earth, 
erupting together, would not be sufficient to destroy so many species and 
genera. Many agents of destruction must have united their forces with the sudden 
revolution of the climate to wipe out a major part of the animal population of 
the earth with many genera and species leaving no survivors. 


The extermination of great numbers of animals of every species, and of many 
species in their entirety, was the effect of recurrent global catastrophes. Of 
some species every animal was exterminated in one part of the world, but a 
number of animals succeeded in surviving in another part of the world; so the 
horses and camels of the Americas were destroyed without a survivor, 
yet in Eurasia, though decimated, they were not exterminated. But many species 
were completely extinguished, in the Old World as well as in the New — mammoths 
and mastodons and others. They expired not because of lack of food or inadequate 
organic evolution, inferior build or lack of adaptation. Plentiful food and 
superb bodies and fine adaptation and solid procreation, but no survival of the 
fit. They died as if a wind had snuffed life out of all of them, leaving their 
cadavers, with no sign of degeneration, in asphalt pits, in bogs, in sediment, 
in caverns,  Some of the decimated species probably endured for a while, 
possibly for several centuries, being represented by a few specimens of their 
kind; but in changed surroundings, amid climatic vicissitudes, with pastures 
withered, with plants that had served as food or animals that had served as prey 
gone, these few followed the rest in a losing battle for existence, 
surrendering at last in the struggle for survival of a species. 

Burning forests, trespassing seas, erupting volcanoes, submerging lands took the 
major toll; impoverished fields and burned —  down forests did not offer 
favourable conditions for frightened and solitary survivors, and claimed their 
own share in the work of extinction. 

 



CHAPTER XV,
CATACLYSMIC EVOLUTION. 

 
Catastrophism and Evolution. 

THE THEORY of evolution dates back to the age of classic Greece, one of its 
proponents having been Anaximander, and from time to time philosophers have 
offered the evolutionary explanation of the origin of the multiple forms of life 
on earth, as opposed to the theory of special creation or the permanency of 
living forms from the day of Creation. Lamarck thought that acquired 
characteristics were transmissible by heredity and thus might lead to the 
appearance of new forms of life. In 1840, the year that Agassiz's Ice Age theory 
was published, an anonymously printed work, Vestiges of Creation — written by 
Robert Chambers — caused a stir that did not subside for years. It was bitterly 
attacked by every British scientist for teaching 
that human beings are "the children of apes and the breeders of monsters," in 
the words of one critic, the president of the Geological Society, Adam Sedgwick. 
Darwin later acknowledged that the brunt of the attack against his own theory 
was absorbed by Vestiges. 

What was new in Darwin's teaching was not the principle of evolution in general 
but the explanation of its mechanism by natural selection. This was an 
adaptation to biology of the Malthusian theory about population growing more 
quickly than the means of existence. Darwin acknowledged his debt to Malthus, 
whose book he read in 1838. Herbert Spencer and Alfred R. Wallace independently 
came to the same views as Darwin, and the expression "survival of the fittest" 
was Spencer's. 

Darwin wrote his theory with the point of his pen directed against the theory of 
catastrophism. He hardly expected that no opposition would come from the side he 
attacked, otherwise he would not have expended so many arguments in combating 
catastrophism and in subscribing so completely to Lyell s theory of uniformity 
in lifeless nature. As it turned out, most of the attacks against Darwin came 
from the Church, which could not agree that man had risen from inferior beings. 
The Church held to the dogmas of creation in six days less than six thousand 
years ago, and of the primal sin of Adam, to redeem humankind from which, the 
Son of Man came into this world; also to the view that beasts have no souls and 
therefore a barrier stands between man and animal. 

The emotions of this protracted controversy were spent on the issue: Is there 
evolution or is there not? More and more scientists subscribed to evolution; 
religious minds clung to the belief that there had been no change since the 
creation of the world. Actually the debate was between liberals and 
conservatives in the matter of science. The radicals did not participate; for 
catastrophism was dying out with the generation of the founders and classicists 
of geological science. 

Cuvier died in 1832; in England, geologists like Buckland of Oxford and Sedgwick 
of Cambridge, set in their belief in mosaic tradition, ascribed the ubiquitous 
vestiges of the catastrophe to the action of the Deluge. But they could not 
point to a satisfactory physical cause of such catastrophe, and expert estimate 
made it obvious that, had all the clouds over the earth emptied themselves 
simultaneously, the earth would not have been covered by even one foot of 
water. 

Then the geological record showed that there had been not one but several 
deluges. Lyell wrote in a letter: "Cone —  beare [geologist and Bishop of 
Bristol] admits three deluges before the Noachianl and Buckland adds God knows 
how many catastrophes besides, so we have driven them out of the Mosaic record 
fairly." Sedgwick, according to Lyell, "decided on four or more deluges." In his 
last address as president of the Geological Society, Sedgwick admitted that his 
religious beliefs caused him to propagate a philosophic heresy: "I think it 
right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my 
recantation. We ought, indeed, to have paused before we adopted the diluvian 
theory, and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic 
Flood. For of man, and the works of his hands, we have not yet found a single 
trace among the remnants of a former world entombed in these deposits." 

So where were the remains of the sinful population? Cuvier taught that man's 
remains were never found with those of extinct animals. Lyell also declared in 
the first edition of his Principles that man was created after all the extinct 
animals passed away; and not until 1858, a year before the publication of Darwin 
s Origin of Species, did the finds in the Brixham cave shatter this belief 
in the non — coexistence of man and extinct, or "antediluvian, animals. In the 
year of the Origin, the leading English geologists were finally convinced by J. 
B. de Perthes, a notary of Abbeville in France, who for twenty years found only 
deaf ears, that human artefacts (worked flint) and extinct animals are met in 
the same formations, side by side. This opened wide the doors to Darwin's 
theory. By that time the doubts of the catastrophists, who could not understand 
why there were signs of more than one deluge and why there should be no human 
bones left of all the sinful generation that perished in the Flood, had already 
brought about the abandonment of the theory of catastrophism, a theory that 
appeared to be in conflict with the Mosaic record. 

Thus it happened that the entire controversy for and against Darwinism failed to 
respond to the challenge of Darwin, who tried to show that what appeared to be 
the result of global catastrophes could be explained as the product of slow 
changes multiplied by time, with no violence intervening. The opposition was 
concentrated against the idea of evolution and in support of special creation. 
Insisting that all animals were created in the forms in which they are 
found in our days, the opponents of evolution waged their battle on geologically 
indefensible ground. 

But why did Darwin oppose the idea of great catastrophes in the past, contrary 
to his own field observations, and subscribe to the theory of uniformity of 
geological events in all ages and in the present? For species to evolve as a 
result of incessant competition and struggle for survival, all the way from the 
simplest forms to Homo sapiens and other advanced organisms, an enormous 
span of time is required. The teaching of catastrophes appeared to make the 
story of the world very short: if the Deluge occurred less than five thousand 
years ago, then, following the book of Genesis, Creation took place less than 
six thousand years ago. In order to have at the disposal of the evolutionary 
process the almost unlimited time needed, Darwin accepted Lyell's teaching; 
and whereas Lyell tried to show that the usual agents — such as rivers carrying 
sediment — act with comparative speed, Darwin liked to stress their 
sluggishness. 

He wrote: "Therefore a man should examine for himself the great piles of 
superimposed strata, and watch the rivulets bringing down mud, and the waves 
wearing away the sea —  cliffs, in order to comprehend something about the 
duration of past time." The waves of the sea reduce a rock particle by particle, 
and if a visible change is produced, it requires many thousands of years. 


"Nothing impresses the mind with the vast duration of time, according to our 
ideas of time, more forcibly than the conviction thus gained that sub aerial 
agencies which apparently have so little power, and which seem to work so 
slowly, have produced great results."  Darwin even went so far as to suggest 
that "he who can read Sir Charles Lyell's grand work on the Principles of 
Geology and yet does not admit how vast have been the past periods of time, may 
at once close this volume, Origin of Species.   

The Geological Record and Changing Forms of Life. 

His thesis of the origin of species by natural selection Darwin supported by 
reference to (1) variations in domestic animals, especially when the breeder 
deliberately develops a certain desirable feature,  
(2) the anatomical similarity of many related species; and (3) the geological 
record. However, though breeders have created new races or variations, they have 
created no new animal species. In the anatomy of living creatures "the 
distinctness of the specific forms, and their not being blended together by 
innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty', and thus the 
entire weight of proof was placed on the geological record. 

This record shows, however, "The Forms of Life Changing Almost Simultaneously 
throughout the World" — the title of a section in The Origin of Species. Darwin 
wrote: Scarcely any palaeontological discovery is more striking than the fact 
that the forms of life change almost simultaneously throughout the world. This 
appears baffling, because according to his theory "the process of modification 
must be slow, and will generally affect only a few species at the same 
time; for the variability of each species is independent of that of all others." 
Could it not have been a sudden change in physical conditions that altered the 
forms of life at one and the same time throughout the world? Darwin answers, No. 
"It is, indeed, quite futile to look to changes of currents, climate, or other 
physical conditions, as the cause of these great mutations in the forms 
of life throughout the world, under the most different climates." If the climate 
or other physical conditions changed in one part of the world, how could this 
alter forms of life in all the other parts of the world? That a change in 
physical conditions could have occurred all over the world at one 
and the same time, Darwin did not even take into consideration. What kind of an 
answer to his problem, therefore, could Darwin propose? 

"Blank intervals of vast duration, as far as the fossils are concerned, occurred  
During these long and blank intervals I suppose that the inhabitants of each 
region underwent a considerable amount of modification and extinction  Hence the 
parallelism of changes in fauna, and flora in similar strata around the world is 
not a true time —  parallelism. 'The order would falsely appear to be strictly 
parallel. 

Darwin then considered "The Absence of Numerous Intermediate Varieties in Any 
Single Formation," and wrote: "If we confine our attention to any one formation, 
it becomes much more difficult to understand why we do not therein find closely 
graduated varieties between the allied species which lived at its commencement 
and at its close." And he found the answer in the conjecture that "although each 
formation may mark a very long lapse of years, each probably is short compared 
with the period requisite to change one species into another." 

Furthermore, the geological record shows "The Sudden Appearance of Whole Groups 
of Allied Species" (the title of another section in The Origin of Species). "The 
abrupt manner, in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain 
formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists for instance, by Agassiz, 
Pictet, and Sedgwick —   as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation 
of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or 
families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the 
theory of evolution through natural selection. For the development by this means 
of a group of forms, all of which are descended from some one progenitor, must 
have been an extremely slow progress; and the progenitors must have lived long 
before their modified descendants." 

Darwin explained this observation, too, by the incompleteness of the geological 
record, which, because of the lacunae, gives the appearance of sudden changes. 

The geological record of extinction of species is discussed under the heading, 
"On Extinction." 
Darwin wrote: "The extinction of species has been involved in the most 
gratuitous mystery. What took place is apparently sudden extermination of whole 
families or orders. According to his theory, "the extinction of a whole group of 
species is generally a slower process than their production," and yet some 
groups were exterminated "wonderfully sudden.' Here, once more, Darwin thought 
that the imperfection of the geological record may in some cases simulate the 
suddenness of the extinction; but he acknowledged in other cases his inability 
to explain the spontaneity of the extinction of some species. He still wondered, 
as in the days of his South American travels, why horses had disappeared in pre 
—  Columbian America where they had every favourable condition for propagation; 
and in a letter to Sir Henry H. Howorth he acknowledged his inability to explain 
the extinction of the mammoth, a well —  adapted animal. But in general the 
deficiency of the geological record was invoked to explain the apparent 
spontaneity of extinction as well as the suddenness with which new species seem 
to have arrived on the scene. 

According to the theory of natural selection, chance variations or new 
characteristics among individuals of a species, if beneficial, are exploited in 
the struggle for survival and, being inheritable, may by accumulation lead to 
the origin of a new species. Because of the chance nature of these new 
characteristics and therefore also of the origin of the new species, Darwin 
assumed "that not only all the individuals of the same species have migrated 
from some one area, but that allied species, although now inhabiting the most 
distant points, have proceeded from a single area the birthplace of their early 
progenitors.  The belief that a single birthplace is the law seems to me 
incomparably the safest." 

Darwin explained the migration of plants from continent to continent and from 
mainland to islands by the transportation of seeds in the intestines of birds; 
the migration of mollusks, by observed instances of small shells clinging to the 
legs of migrating birds. This method of dispersion does not account for the 
geographical distribution of larger animals unable to fly or swim across the 
sea, or traverse climatic zones unsuitable for the species. 

Since animals of such species are found in very distant parts of the globe, 
divided by oceans, Darwin was led to maintain that "during the vast geographical 
and climatal changes which have supervened since ancient times, almost any 
amount of migration is possible." This makes necessary the existence of land 
connections or "land bridges" between islands and mainlands and between all 
continents. But to these geographical and climatal changes, the Ice Age 
included, Darwin ascribed "a subordinate" role in shaping the development of the 
animals; they played an important role only in the migration of the animals. 

Where the land is continuous, as in the Americas, Darwin accounted for the fact 
that identical animals live in higher latitudes of the Southern and Northern 
hemispheres, though they are absent in temperate and tropical latitudes, by 
resorting to a theory which assumes that the glacial periods in the Northern and 
Southern hemispheres were not simultaneous but consecutive. When a glacial 
period was descending upon the north, animals migrated slowly to 
the south, toward the equator; when the glacial period ended, and the climate in 
the subtropics became hot, some animals returned to the north, others remained 
in the subtropical regions, climbing the cool mountains. When the next glacial 
age — this time advancing from the south — arrived, the animals on the mountains 
came down, and when this age also ended, some of them moved to the south, while 
others again retreated to the mountains. Thus identical animals are 
found in the cooler regions of both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. At 
present (means the late 50s), this view of consecutive glacial periods in the 
Northern and Southern hemispheres has hardly any adherents. 

The theory of evolution by natural selection could not do well without the 
theory of the ice ages. 
It needed the Ice Age theory to explain the provenience of the same species in 
the Southern and Northern hemispheres separated by the Torrid Zone; it needed it 
even more to account for the phenomenon of drift. Erratic blocks could have been 
explained, with some straining, by the action of icebergs. But drift, or 
accumulation of clay, boulders, and sand that in many places fills 
valleys hundreds of feet deep, could not have been brought in by icebergs; and, 
finally, icebergs, in order to be produced in great numbers, themselves required 
extended glaciers from which they could break off. Darwinian evolution needed 
the Ice Age theory in order to supplant the tidal wave theory —  which is a 
catastrophic notion. 

Darwin accepted Agassiz's teaching, though not in its original form with a 
catastrophic beginning of the ice ages. But Agassiz rejected Darwin's theory. 
The reason for this he saw in the skeletal remains of ancient fish, a field in 
which he was an authority. In many instances the fish of extinct 
species were better developed and further advanced in their evolution than later 
species, the modern included. Among mammals, too, many better — developed 
species became extinct. But these difficulties in the way of the evolutionary 
theory were less strongly felt in the heat of the fight against the opponents 
who insisted on a six —  thousand —  year —  old world and the immutability 
of species. 

Darwin's theory represented progress as compared with the teachings of the 
Church. The Church assumed a world without change in nature since the Beginning. 
Darwin introduced the principle of slow but steady change in one direction, from 
one age to another, from one eon to another. In comparison with the Church's 
teaching of immutability, Darwin's theory of slow evolution through natural 
selection or the survival of the fittest was an advance, though not the 
ultimate truth. 

The story of his experiences is told by his contemporary and adherent, Thomas 
Huxley. Darwin was "held up to scorn as a 'flighty' person, who endeavours 'to 
prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,' and whose 'mode of 
dealing with nature' is reprobated as 'utterly dishonourable to Natural Science. 
" Thus Huxley quoted from an article by Bishop Wilberforce 
in the Quarterly Review of July 1860. Huxley also wrote in 1887: "On the whole, 
then, the supporters of Mr. Darwin's views in 1860 were numerically extremely 
insignificant. There is not the slightest doubt that, if a general council of 
the Church scientific had been held at that time, we should have been condemned 
by an overwhelming majority. And there is as little doubt that, 
if such a council gathered now, the decree would be of an exactly contrary 
nature." 

Darwin's Origin of Species, Huxley went on, "was badly received by the 
generation to which it was first addressed, and the outpouring of angry nonsense 
to which it gave rise is sad to think upon. But the present generation will 
probably behave just as badly if another Darwin should arise, and inflict upon 
them that which the generality of mankind most hate — the necessity of 
revising their convictions. Let them, then, be charitable to us ancients; and if 
they behave no better than the men of my day to some new benefactor, let them 
recollect that, after all, our wrath did not come to much, and vented itself 
chiefly in the bad language of sanctimonious scolds. Let them as speedily 
perform a strategic right —  about —  face, and follow the truth wherever it 
leads. The opponents of the new truth will discover, as those of Darwin are 
doing, that, after all, theories do not alter facts, and that the universe 
remains unaffected even though texts crumble."   

 

The Mechanism of Evolution. 

Natural selection — the Darwinian mechanism of evolution — is simultaneously 
destructive and constructive. In the struggle for existence it eliminates all 
the unfit among the members of a species; and it destroys the species that 
cannot compete with others for the limited resources of livelihood. The winners 
in this struggle are those individuals that because of some characteristic — or 
favourable variation — have an edge over other competitors. "Under these 
circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable 
ones destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species" 
(Darwin). 


As shown on previous pages, the annihilation of many individuals and of entire 
species in the animal kingdom took place, not only under circumstances of 
competition, but under catastrophic conditions as well. Entire species with no 
sign of degeneration suddenly came to their end in paroxysms of nature. Yet 
extinction of a species through starvation or extermination by enemies 
also takes place: Moa, the gigantic flightless bird of New Zealand that stood 
twelve feet high, was destroyed several centuries ago. The whooping cranes of 
North America were reduced by 1953 to twenty — one individuals. Natural 
selection cannot account for the wholesale destruction of many genera and 
species at one time; it may occasionally be the agent exterminating single 
species. But can natural selection create new species? 

The geological record presents evidence that in the past animals lived that do 
not live any longer; and also that, of the forms living today, many did not 
exist in the past. Then how did they come into being? 

The animal and plant kingdoms are subdivided into phyla, and these into classes, 
orders, families, genera, and finally species. A species can be recognized this 
way; the mating of members of two different species generally does not produce 
offspring, and when it does, such offspring is sterile (horse and ass, and their 
offspring, the mule). Thus all the human race is but one species; and all races 
of dogs, so dissimilar in their body structures, are members of one species. 
There are hundreds of thousands of species in the animal kingdom 
and also in the plant kingdom. 

In the theory of evolution all forms of life evolved by gradual emergence from 
the same most primitive, one — cell living beings. Chance variations occur in 
members of every species — no two individuals are entirely identical. These 
variations are inheritable. As already explained, the favourable variations — 
those that are helpful in the struggle for existence —  may accumulate to such a 
degree that, according to Darwin, a new species originates, the members of which 
can have no fruitful progeny with the members of the parental species. 

Since the first scientific observations were made, no truly new animal species 
has been observed to come into being. The year after publication of The Origin 
of Species, Thomas Huxley wrote: "But there is no positive evidence, at present, 
that any group of animals has, by variation and selective breeding, given rise 
to another group which was, even in the least degree, infertile with the first."  
A few years later Darwin wrote in a letter (to Bentham): "The belief in 
natural selection must at present be grounded entirely on general considerations  
When we descend to details   we cannot prove that a single species has changed; 
nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the 
groundwork of the theory." And at the end of the century Huxley found himself 
compelled to make the statement: "I remain of the opinion   that until selective 
breeding is definitely proved to give rise to varieties infertile with 
one another, the logical foundation of the theory of natural selection is 
incomplete. We still remain very much in the dark about the causes of variation.  

In selective breeding the breeder creates conditions not found in wild life; and 
new races or varieties of animals created by selection and isolation revert to 
their ancestral unselected forms as soon as they are turned free; thus when dogs 
of various breeds mate they give birth to mongrels which resemble their common 
ancestors. Despite all their efforts, breeders have not been able to cross the 
true frontier of a species. Then how could a new species originate in 
chance variations and through crossbreeding in wild life? And how could so many 
new species be produced that they number, together with the extinct, in the 
millions? And how could a human being, so complicated, evolve, not just from 
common ancestors with the primates (apes), but from common ancestors with winged 
insects and crawling worms? The evolutionists drew more checks on time. 

Then, too, the chance character of variations, when they first appear in an 
individual, makes the envisaged progress especially difficult. Darwin professed 
ignorance as to the cause of these variations or new characteristics appearing 
in individuals, and it was generally understood that chance variations, in the 
vast majority of cases, must be in the nature of defects: in a 
complicated and balanced organism a chance variation would probably be a 
hindrance, not a benefit. Then by what rare accidents could ever more perfected 
species have originated? 

Various theories have been offered — one of them being evolution created by 
Henri Bergson —  that assume the existence of a guiding principle in evolution, 
which replaces the chance and accident in variations; these theories are often  
—  united under the name orthogenesis, the best known of such ideas. The 
adherents of orthogenesis claim the existence of a plan and a goal. 
But since, in such a theory, Providence enters into action, and to make nature 
independent of it was a major objective of the theory of evolution as opposed to 
the teaching of special creation, after some deliberation orthogenesis, or 
creative evolution, met largely with rejection. The orthogeneticists could argue 
that many traits, when they first appeared, must have been entirely 
useless, yet not senseless if they were destined to become useful after many 
generations. Then why should these traits have gone on developing from age to 
age, finally to become an asset to the species, unless orthogenesis was in 
action; why should the pocket of the kangaroo have increased in size through 
many generations until it could be used for carrying baby kangaroos? 

The obvious difficulty in explaining the evolutionary process by chance 
variations brought about the revival of Lamarckism. In 1809, the year Darwin was 
born, Lamarck had published his Philosophic zoologique, in which he offered a 
theory of evolution through the appearance of new traits and faculties in 
response to usage; usage in response to need; and need as the 
consequence of changes in physical surroundings. These new acquired traits, he 
assumed, were inheritable. Lamarck also taught uniformity, and thus he was an 
opponent of his contemporary, Cuvier, who taught catastrophism. 

Charles Darwin, generous to Alfred R. Wallace, whom he declared to be an 
independent discoverer of the theory of natural selection, never 
agreed, despite the admonitions of Lyell and Huxley, to acknowledge his debt to 
Lamarck; in a letter to Lyell he referred to Lamarck's book as "absurd" and 
"rubbish," and also as a "wretched book." 

However, Darwin offered the theory of pangenesis, according to which every cell 
in the body of an animal or plant sends an invisible image of the parent cell, 
to the germ cells. In this way Darwin intended to interpret heredity. Thus he 
went even farther than Lamarck in making the cells of the body the carriers of 
heredity, which amounts to hereditary transmission 
of acquired traits. The theory of pangenesis is definitely rejected by everyone. 

In the battle that went on among the representatives of different schools in 
evolution, the neo-Darwinists, led by August Weismann, attacked the neo— 
Lamarckists; and by cutting off the tails of mice in succeeding generations, 
Weismann could show that acquired traits are not inheritable. 
Actually, he did not prove that much, the loss of tails by cutting is not a 
habit or trait acquired through usage or need. It was Weismann who really 
disproved Darwin's pangenesis theory, not Lamarck, but he properly stressed that 
the carriers of hereditary traits are in the germ plasma, or in spermatozoa and 
ova; the soma, or the body, is created in each successive generation by the 
germ plasma, and only changes in the plasma are inheritable. The chance 
variations of Darwin are such changes in the germ plasma and are therefore 
inherited; the response of the body to external agents would not create 
inheritable traits and therefore must be of no value in evolution. 

On evolution as a geological fact all agreed, but on the mechanism of evolution 
the disagreement has been fundamental. The majority of evolutionists have 
rejected the idea that acquired characteristics are inheritable; but Lamarck's 
ideas found followers in the East, in Michurin, who experimented on plants, and 
for a time in Pavlov, who experimented on animals, and not long ago in the 
dominant school of thought in Russia. 

The neo — Darwinists deny that physical surroundings can give rise to new 
species; they may bring about changes in an organism, but the acquired 
characteristics are not inheritable. Can, then, natural selection or competition 
with other animals creates new species? The classic example of a giraffe with 
the longest neck surviving when leaves are left only high on the trees 
does not prove that giraffes with longer necks would become a separate species. 
And, in any event, under the described conditions no new race would evolve: the 
female giraffes, which are smaller in stature, would die out before the male 
competitors, and there would be no progeny; but should there be progeny, the 
young giraffes would probably die because they would be unable to reach the 
leaves. 

The position of Darwinists would be much stronger if a new animal species would 
appear, even if only in controlled breeding. Darwin claimed that the process of 
the appearance of new species is very slow, but he also maintained that the 
process of extinction of a species is even slower. 
Nevertheless, some species of animals have expired before the eyes of the 
naturalists, but no new one has appeared. The theory of natural selection, even 
the very fact of the evolvement of one species from another, needed proof. Some 
scientists went so far as to say that possibly the entire development plan has 
already reached its permanent stage, and the geological records 
tell only of the road to that stage, evolution no longer taking place. 



One part of the Darwinian theory of selection has been generally abandoned: it 
is the idea of sexual selection as a factor in evolution. In natural selection 
the competition is for the means for existence. In sexual selection — a theory 
developed in The Descent of Man (1871) — the competition is among the males for 
acceptance by a female. Darwin thought to explain the origin 
of various secondary sexual characteristics, such as ornamentation and color of 
feathers in birds, by saying that they were the results of gradual selection, 
through many generations, of traits attractive in the eyes of the female. 

But it was shown that when the colourful wings of male butterflies were cut off 
and in their stead female wings, often without the characteristic colouring, 
were glued to the body of the male butterfly, the female did not object to the 
approach of the male. She failed to discriminate against male butterflies with 
no wings at all. Also it was observed that some male fish fertilize the fish 
eggs, having all the male colouring characteristic of such season, but without 
the female fish being present or aware of the act of fertilization. The theory 
of sexual selection to a certain degree had the same fate as the theory of gem — 
mules. But the theory of natural selection would not yield its position unless a 
better explanation of the evolutionary mechanism could be given. 

 

 
Mutations and New Species.

The first ray of light came at the turn of the century, when Hugo De Vries, a 
Dutch botanist, observed spontaneous mutations in the evening primrose. The 
plant, without a recognizable cause, would show new characteristics unobserved 
in its ancestors. Although De Vries claimed that these mutations amount to what 
may be called "little species," they have not caused the primrose to pass beyond 
the frontier of its species. However, it was demonstrated that variations 
within a species do appear in a spontaneous manner, and rather suddenly, and 
not, as Darwin thought, by minute progressions from generation to generation. 
Huxley was correct in urging Darwin not to adhere so dogmatically to his belief 
that nature does not make jumps —  natura non facit saltum. De Vries showed that 
variations are in the nature of jumps, and from this he developed the mutation 
theory of evolution. 

 De Vries, while working on his theory, was as yet unaware of Gregor Mendel's 
investigations in genetics, already published as a paper in 1865, only six years 
after The Origin of Species. 
Mendel's work, unknown to Darwin and his followers in the nineteenth century, 
was rediscovered by De Vries and independently by E. Tscher —  and by K. Correns 
in 1900, the same year that De Vries wrote down his theory of mutations. By 
carefully observing crossings between varieties of the garden pea and counting 
the strains through consecutive generations and the 
transmission of single traits, Mendel established the fundamental laws of 
genetics or inheritance of somatic characteristics. 

The entire work on evolution since the beginning of this century is based on 
genetics and Mendel's laws. Ironically, Mendel was an Augustine monk and made 
his basic contribution at a tune when the war between science and the Church was 
raging, following the publication of Darwin's main work. The spontaneous 
variations in mutants can be followed through as hereditary factors in 
successive generations of offspring. The genes in the germ plasma are the 
carriers of the traits, and a variation (mutation) in a gene would cause a 
variation (mutation) in the offspring. But, generally, only single variations 
appear at a time; they may lead to new races, not to new species. 
    Spontaneous mutations are far too few and insufficient in magnitude to bring 
about the appearance of new species and to explain how the world of animals came 
into existence. Despite all spontaneous variations, no new species of mammals 
are known to have been created since the close of the Ice Age. In 1907, Kellogg 
of Stanford University came to the following conclusion: 

"The fair truth is that the Darwinian selection theories, considered with regard 
to their claimed capacity to be an independently sufficient mechanical 
explanation of descent, stand today seriously discredited in the biological 
world. On the other hand, it is also fair truth to say that no 
replacing hypothesis or theory of species forming has been offered by the 
opponents of selection which has met with any general or even considerable 
acceptance by naturalists. 
Mutations seem to be too few and far between; for orthogenesis we can discover 
no satisfactory mechanism; and the same is true for the Lamarckian theories of 
modification by the accumulation, through inheritance, of acquired or ontogenic 
characters." 

Kellogg also observed that one group of scientists "denies any effectiveness or 
capacity for species forming on the part of natural selection, while the other 
group, a larger   sees in natural selection an evolutionary factor capable of 
initiating nothing, dependent wholly for any 
effectiveness on some primary factor or factors controlling the origin and 
direction of variation, but capable of extinguishing all un adapted, unfit lines 
of development.  For my part," Kellogg concluded, "it seems better to go back to 
the old and safe Ignoramus standpoint." Thus the entire problem was shunted back 
to the place it occupied before The Origin of Species. 

Evolution is the principle. Darwin's contribution to the principle is natural 
selection as the mechanism of evolution. If natural selection, sharing the fate 
of sexual selection, is not the mechanism of the origin of species, Darwin's 
contribution is reduced to very little — only to the role of natural selection 
in weeding out the unfit. 

H. Fairfield Osborn, a leading American evolutionist, wrote: "In contrast to the 
unity of opinion on the law of evolution is the wide diversity of opinion on the 
causes of evolution. In fact, the causes of the evolution of life are as 
mysterious as the law of evolution is certain." 
 And again: "It may be said that Darwin's law of selection as a natural 
explanation of the origin of ail fitness in form and function has also lost its 
prestige at the present time, and all of Darwinism which now meets 
with universal acceptance is the law of the survival of the fittest, a limited 
application of Darwin's great idea as expressed by Herbert Spencer.  

These were not the opinions of single evolutionists, but generally held views. 
William Bateson, a leading English evolutionist, in his address before the 
American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1921, said: 
"When students of other sciences ask us what is now currently believed about the 
origin of species we have no clear answer to give. Faith has given place to 
agnosticism.  Variation of many kinds, often considerable, we 
daily witness, but no origin of species.   I have put before you very frankly 
the considerations which have made us agnostic as to the actual mode and 
processes of evolution." 

Nore, in a series of guest lectures delivered at Princeton University, asked: 

"If natural selection is a force which can destroy but cannot create species and 
if the reasons for this destruction are unknown, of what value is the theory to 
mankind?   The collapse of the theory of natura selection leaves the philosophy 
of mechanistic materialism in a sorry plight. 

On De Vries's theory of evolution by mutations More said: 

"The idea is destructive to scientific theory, as it really does away with the 
whole idea of continuity which should be the basis of an evolution theory.  The 
thought at once occurs that each of the surprising breaks in the paleontological 
record, such an one as separates the reptile from the feathered bird, may have 
been taken at a single leap during an overstimulated period of nature." 

De Vries made observations of spontaneous mutations in plants; a decade later X. 
H. Morgan found spontaneous mutations in Drosophilci, the vinegar fly, including 
various colorings of the eyes and various lengths of wings, and many other 
changes in progeny not present in any of the ancestors. H. J. Muller, by 
subjecting the vinegar fly to the action of x—rays, increased the frequency of 
mutations one hundred and fifty times. It was also found that some 
chemicals and temperatures close to the limits that the insect organism can 
endure may act as mutation — provoking agents. 


Muller concluded that spontaneous mutations are "usually due to an accidental 
individual molecular or sub molecular collision, occurring in the course of 
thermal agitation," and this is indicated "by the amount of rise in the 
frequency of mutations that is observed when the temperature is raised, so long 
as temperatures normal to the organism are not transgressed. 
Since chemical changes similar to but more extreme than those of thermal 
agitation may also be produced by x —  rays and other high —  energy radiation 
and by ultra —  violet, it is not surprising that mutations like the so —  
called 'spontaneous' ones can be induced in great abundance by these 
means, and that the number of these mutations is, in general, proportional to 
the number of physical 'hits' caused by the radiation."' The origin of mutations 
in the evening primrose, observed by De Vries, like every other spontaneous 
mutation, must be ascribed to one of those irritants acting directly on the 
genes. It could have been the result of hits by cosmic rays; only it 
must be shown why the evening primrose is more susceptible to such an agent than 
most other plants. 

The practical absence of x — rays in surrounding nature caused this powerful 
agent of mutations in laboratories to be regarded as not operative in 
spontaneous mutations and therefore also not in the process of evolution. Muller 
stressed this point. However, an x — ray component is present in 
radium radiation. At the beginning of the present century it was noticed that 
tadpoles or embryonic frogs in the presence of a tube containing radium give 
rise to various freaks. 
Radioactivity and cosmic radiation are agents present in nature, one of 
terrestrial, the other of extraterrestrial, origin. 


If, as the experiments with the vinegar fly demonstrated, a mutation of some 
gene can produce a wingless fly, many mutations simultaneously or in quick 
succession would be quite able to transform an animal or plant into a new 
species. In the bomb craters of London new plants, not previously known on the 
British Isles, and possibly not known anywhere, were seen to sprout. 
"Rare plants, unknown to modern British botany, were discovered in the bomb 
craters and ruins of London in 1943.”

It appears that the thermal action of bomb explosions was the cause of 
multiple metamorphoses in the genes of seeds and pollens. If this is so, then 
the statement made earlier that no new species has been observed in the process 
of making its first appearance must be retracted. 

It must be retracted anyway, so far as the plant (not animal) kingdom is 
concerned, in view of the claims made by a certain school of plant geneticists 
that now and then some plants may produce an abnormal offspring with a double 
number of chromosomes and, further, that, though hybrids in plants, as in 
animals, generally have no offspring, hybrids from the double — chromosome 
parents may occasionally produce a true new species, it can reproduce itself 
indefinitely, but it cannot reproduce by crossing with the original species, or 
if it does the offspring resulting from the crossbreeding is sterile. 

An alkaloid (colchicine) from the roots of the autumn crocus, when 
applied to cells in the process of division, helps to produce cells with twice 
the normal number of chromosomes. Thus a fertile cross between the radish and 
the cabbage was achieved, and the proponents of "cataclysmic evolution" claim 
that chance appearance of double —  chromosome plants was responsible in the 
past for the origin of cultivated wheat, oats, sugar cane, cotton, 
and tobacco, and will permit production in the laboratory of a gram that would 
combine the desirable qualities of both wheat and rye. What causes a plant to 
produce spontaneously an offspring with a double number of chromosomes is not 
yet sufficiently known; and most probably, again, thermal, chemical, or 
radioactive agents are involved. 

 

Cataclysmic Evolution. 

When, therefore, the earth, covered with mud from the recent flood, became 
heated up by the hot and genial rays of the sun, she brought forth innumerable 
forms of life, in part of ancient shapes, and in part creatures new and strange. 

An enormous expansion of radioactivity in bygone ages was postulated by various 
theorists as an explanation of great oscillations in climate in the past; the 
thermal effect of widespread radioactivity is likewise claimed as a motive force 
by the author of the modern version of the theory of drifting continents (Du 
Toit). It appears to me that if such radioactivity really occurred its 
mutation effect could not have failed to take place too. 

Cosmic rays or charges, hitting nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere, transform this 
element into radiocarbon. These charges, arriving from outside the earth, are 
very strong per particle, averaging several billions of electron volts and 
sometimes carrying a potential of a hundred billion electron volts. As 
comparatively few such rays or charges hit our atmosphere, their 
general effect is not spectacular. But it is conceivable that, where a cosmic 
ray or charge hits a gene of germ plasma, a biological mutation takes place, 
comparable to the physical transmutation of the elements. 

After all, the genes, like any proteins, are biochemical compounds composed of 
carbon, nitrogen, and a few other elements. Should a somatic chromosome be hit 
by a powerful charge, it might at worst cause disorganized growth and be the 
origin of a neoplasma; but if the genes of the germ plasma should be the target 
of a collision with a cosmic ray or secondary radiation, a mutation in the 
progeny might ensue; and should many such hits occur, the origin of a new 
species, most probably incapable of individual or genetic life, but in some 
cases capable, could be expected. 

Thus, increased radioactivity coming from outside this planet or from the bowels 
of the earth could be the cause of the spontaneous origin of new species. Should 
an interplanetary discharge take place between the earth and another celestial 
body, such as a planet, a planetoid, a trail of meteorites, or a charged cloud 
of gases, with possibly billions of volts of potential difference and nuclear 
fission or fusion, the effect would be similar to that of an explosion of many 
hydrogen bombs with ensuing procreation of monstrosities and growth anomalies on 
a large scale. 

What matters is that the principle that can cause the origin of species exists 
in nature. The irony lies in the circumstance that Darwin saw in catastrophism 
the chief adversary of his theory of the origin of species, being led by the 
conviction that new species could evolve as a result of competition with 
accidental characteristics serving as weapons only if almost limitless time were 
at the disposal of that competition, with no catastrophes intervening. Now 
exactly the opposite is true: competition cannot cause new species to evolve. 
Mutations in single traits and the resulting new varieties within a species are 
caused by radiation hitting some gene, as did the x — rays in the 
experiments on the vinegar fly; it is a hit, or a collision, or a miniature 
catastrophe. In order for a simultaneous mutation of many characteristics to 
occur, with a new species as a resultant, a radiation shower of terrestrial or 
extraterrestrial origin must take place. Therefore we are led to 
the belief that evolution is a process initiated in catastrophes. Numerous 
catastrophes or bursts of effective radiation must have taken place in the 
geological past in order to change so radically the living forms on earth, as 
the record of fossils embedded in lava and sediment bears witness. 

How would this understanding of evolution meet the facts, and especially those 
facts that always appeared to be in discord with the theory of natural 
selection? 

The fact that some organisms, like foraminifera, survived all geological ages 
without participating in evolution, a point of perplexity in the theory of 
natural selection, would be explained by catastrophic evolution in which many 
species would be destroyed, others would be subjected to multiple mutations, and 
some specimens of species would escape mutations and procreate their 
old form. 

The fact that the geological record shows a sudden emergence of many new forms 
at the beginning of each geological age does not require the artificial 
explanation that the records are always defective; the geological records truly 
reflect the changes in the animal and plant worlds from one period of geological 
time to the next. Many of the new species evolved in the wake of a 
global catastrophe, at the beginning of a new age, were entombed in a subsequent 
paroxysm of nature at the end of that age. 

The fact that in many cases the intermediary links between present —  day 
species are missing, as well as those between various species of the geological 
record, a vexing problem, is understandable in the light of sudden and multiple 
variations that gave rise to new species. 

It was objected that if a new characteristic appeared in only a single animal, 
as the theory of natural selection claims, or even in a few animals of the same 
species, it would disappear in succeeding generations through interbreeding 
unless the new animal had been protected by isolation on secluded islands. 
However, in catastrophic evolution, the simultaneous mutation of 
many genes could produce a new species at the first fertilization; all the 
offspring of a litter could be affected similarly. And it is not inconceivable 
that in more than one creature of the same species, under similar circumstances 
of radiation, similar changes in the genes would occur; so in the x — ray 
experiments on Drosophila, similar mutations occurred in more than one fly. 

The objection to the theory of natural selection, that the developed plan in a 
new species must appear suddenly or the race would expire —  as in the case of 
the kangaroo pockets —  is answerable within the framework of catastrophic 
evolution; however, the purposefulness of animal structures will remain a 
problem deserving of as much wonder as, for instance, the 
purposeful behaviour of leucocytes in the blood that rush to combat a noxious 
intruder. 

The fact stressed by Agassiz that numerous earlier species of fish showed a more 
highly developed organism when compared with later species of fish can be 
explained by the destruction of earlier forms, not in the process of 
competition, but in upheavals against which superior structure is no defense. 

The observation that healthy species of animals, like mammoths, with no sign of 
degeneration suddenly became extinct greatly troubled the evolutionists. This 
fact is unexplainable by natural selection or the principle of competition; not 
so by the catastrophic intervention of nature. 

The fact that at several stages of the past many animals of various species and 
many species in total were rather suddenly exterminated, in conflict with the 
idea of slow extinction in natural selection, conforms with the theory of 
cataclysmic evolution. 

The enigmatic observation that the larger animals were particularly subject to 
extinction —  the giant mammals that succumbed at the end of the Tertiary, and 
again in the Pleistocene, as earlier the dinosaurs did —  is comprehensible if 
one thinks of the better chances smaller animals have of finding refuge from the 
ravages of nature. 

Natural selection had its role, too, but not in procreating new species; it was 
a decisive factor in the survival or dying out of new forms, in the struggle for 
existence, not only between individuals, races, species, and orders, but also 
against the elements. In natural selection all those forms 
were weeded out that could not meet competition or the rapidly changing 
conditions of a world in upheaval. 

The origin of new species from old could be caused by the processes that can be 
duplicated in laboratories — by excessive radiation or some other irritant in 
abnormal doses, thermal or chemical, all of which must have taken part in 
natural catastrophes of the past, and could have played a role in building new 
species, as the case of new plants in the bomb craters appears to indicate. 

The theory of evolution is vindicated by catastrophic events in the earth's 
past; the proclaimed enemy of this theory proved to be its only ally. The real 
enemy of the theory of evolution is the teaching of uniformity, or the non — 
occurrence of any extraordinary events in the past. This teaching, called by 
Darwin the mainstay of the theory of evolution, almost set the theory apart 
from reality. 

Great catastrophes of the past accompanied by electrical discharges and followed 
by radioactivity could have produced sudden and multiple mutations of the kind 
achieved today by experimenters, but on an immense scale. The past of mankind, 
and of the animal and plant kingdoms, too, must now be viewed in the light of 
the experience of Hiroshima and no longer from the portholes of the Beagle. 

 



CHAPTER XVI,
THE END. 

 IN THE present book the testimony of stone and bone has been written down. We 
have listened to witnesses of various epochs, old and recent, of different 
latitudes, north and south, of various origins, from mountain peak and ocean 
bottom — skeletons, and ashes, and lava. Long before the crowd of witnesses 
finished filing by, we knew that we would not be able to evade the 
conclusion that global catastrophes have shaken this world of ours. I have not 
included here the testimony of ancient literary sources or of folklore. Shall I 
be confronted with the argument that, though the geological and archaeological 
records speak for catastrophic occurrences in the past, the absence of human 
testimony contradicts this interpretation of the geological record of recent 
date? Is not Worlds in Collision a book of human evidence? And was not this 
testimony disputed because, first of all, of a presumed conflict with the 
findings of geology? 

Although no references to historical inscriptions or to literary monuments of 
ancient times have been adduced here to show correspondence between the 
geological and historical records, no attentive reader, not even a cursory 
peruser of these pages, could have read them without associating their content 
with that of many chapters of Worlds in Collision, if he had read the 
other book too. There the story was told of hurricanes of global magnitude, of 
forests burning and swept away, of dust, stones, fire, and ashes falling from 
the sky, of mountains melting like wax, of lava flowing from riven ground, of 
boiling seas, of bituminous rain, of shaking ground and destroyed cities, of 
humans seeking refuge in caverns and fissures of the rock in the mountains, of 
oceans up heaved and falling on the land, of tidal waves moving toward the poles 
and back.

 of land becoming sea by submersion and the expanse of sea turning into desert, 
islands born and others drowned, mountain ridges levelled and others rising, of 
crowds of rivers seeking new beds, of sources that disappeared and others that 
became bitter, of great destructions in the animal kingdom, of decimated 
mankind, of migrations, of heavy clouds of dust covering the face of the earth 
for decades, of magnetic disturbances, of changed climates, of displaced 
cardinal points and altered latitudes, of disrupted calendars, and of sundials 
and water clocks that point to changed length of day, month, 
and year, of a new polar star. 

All this was presented in Worlds in Collision as having taken place in two 
series of events, the first in the fifteenth century before the present era, or 
thirty —  four centuries ago, the other, of lesser intensity, in the eighth 
century and the beginning of the seventh, twenty —  seven centuries ago. Events 
of a similar nature and on an even more grandiose scale took place also in 
earlier ages. The narration of some of these events, as far as the human memory 
retained their recollection, is reserved for another volume, a sequel to Worlds 
in Collision. 

Wherever we investigate the geological and paleontological records of this earth 
we find signs of catastrophes and upheavals, old and recent. Mountains sprang 
from plains, and other mountains were levelled; strata of the terrestrial crust 
were folded and pressed together and overturned and moved and put on top of 
other formations; igneous rock melted and flooded 
enormous areas of land with miles — thick sheets; the ocean bed flowed with 
molten rock.

 ashes showered down and built layers many yards thick on the ground and on the 
bottom of the oceans in their vast expanse; shores of ancient lakes were tilted 
and are no longer horizontal.
 
seacoasts show subsidence or emergence, in some places over one thousand feet; 
rocks of the earth are filled with remains of life extinguished in a state of 
agony; sedimentary rocks are one vast graveyard, and the granite and basalt, 
too, have embedded in them numberless living organisms; and shells have closed 
valves as they do in a living state, so unexpectedly came the 
entombment.

 and vast forests were burned and washed away and covered with the waters of the 
seas and with sand and turned to coal; and animals were swept to the far north 
and thrown into heaps and were soaked by bituminous outpourings; and broken 
bones and torn ligaments and the skins of animals of living species and extinct 
were smashed together with splintered forests into huge piles; and whales were 
cast out of the oceans onto mountains; and rocks from disintegrating mountain 
ridges were carried over vast stretches of land, from Norway to the 
Carpathians, and into the Harz Mountains, and into Scotland, and from Mount 
Blanc to the Juras, and from Labrador to the Po —  conos; and the Rocky 
Mountains moved many leagues from their place, and the Alps travelled a hundred 
miles northward, and the Himalayas and the Andes climbed ever higher; and the 
mountain lakes emptied themselves over barriers.


and continents were torn by rifts, and the sea bottom by canyons; and land 
disappeared under the sea, and the sea pushed new islands from its bottom, and 
sea beds were turned into high mountains bearing sea shells, and shoals of fish 
were poisoned and boiled in the seas, and numberless rivers lost 
their channels, were dammed by lava and turned upstream, and the climate 
suddenly changed, tillable land and meadows turned into vast deserts. 

Reindeer from Lapland and polar fox and arctic bears from the snowy tundras and 
rhinoceroses and hippopotami from the African jungles, and lions from the desert 
and ostriches, and seals, were thrown into piles and covered with 
gravel, clay, and tuff, and the fissures of multitudes of rocks arc filled with 
broken bones; regions where the palm grew were moved into the Arctic, and oceans 
steamed, and the evaporated seas condensed under clouds of dust and built 
mountainous covers of ice over great stretches of continents, and the ice melted 
on heated ground and cast icebergs into the oceans in enormous fleets; and all 
volcanoes erupted, and all human dwellings were shattered and burned, and 
animals tame and fierce and human beings with them ran for refuge to mountain 
caves, and mountains swallowed and entombed those that reached the refuge, and 
many species and genera and families of the animal kingdom were annihilated down 
to the very last one; and the earth and the sea and the sky again and again 
united their elements in one great work of destruction. 

Following the trail of geology, we were led by the merciless logic of facts and 
figures to the conclusion that the earth was more than once a stage on which 
acts of a great drama took place, and no place on earth was free of its effects. 

In the face of the evidence we were also compelled to concede that the most 
recent paroxysms of nature happened in historical times, only a few thousand 
years ago, when in some parts of the world civilization was already entering the 
Iron Age, but in other parts still lingering in the Neolithic or even in the 
Paleolithic, or rude stone, Age. The laminations of lakes, the salt content 
of those without outflow, the retreat of waterfalls, the elevation of mountains, 
pollen analysis, and archaeological finds, as well as the recent drop of the 
ocean level, all show how close to our time must have occurred the more recent 
paroxysms of nature. 

The evidence is also overwhelming that the great global catastrophes were either 
accompanied or caused by shifting of the terrestrial axis or by a disturbance in 
the diurnal and annual motions of the earth. 

The shifting of the axis could not have been brought about by internal causes, 
as the proponents of the Ice Age theory in the nineteenth century assumed it 
was; it must have occurred, and repeatedly, under the impact of external forces. 
The state of lavas with reversed magnetization, hundreds of times more intensive 
than the inverted terrestrial magnetic field could impart, reveals the nature of 
the forces that were in action. 

Thus from the geological evidence we came to the conclusion to which we had also 
arrived travelling the road of the historical and literary traditions of the 
peoples of the world — that the earth repeatedly went through cataclysmic events 
on a global scale, that the cause of these events was an extraterrestrial agent, 
and that some of these cosmic catastrophes took place only a few thousand years 
ago, in historical times. 

Many world — wide phenomena, for each of which the cause is vainly sought, are 
explained by a single cause. The sudden changes of climate, transgression of the 
sea, vast volcanic and seismic activities, formation of ice cover, pluvial 
crises, emergence of mountains and their dislocation, rising and subsidence of 
coasts, tilting of lakes, sedimentation, fossilization, the provenience of 
tropical animals and plants in polar regions, conglomerates of fossils of 
animals of various latitudes and habitats, the extinction of species and genera, 
the appearance of new species, the reversal of the earth's magnetic field, and a 
score of other world —  wide phenomena. 

As important as the "world catastrophes" conclusion is, it grows in significance 
for almost every branch of science when, to the ensuing question, "Of old or of 
recent tune?" the answer is given, "Of old and of recent." There were global 
catastrophes in prehuman times, in prehistoric times, and in historical times. 
We are descendants of survivors, themselves descendants of survivors. 
We read here a few pages from the logbook of the earth, a rock rolling in space, 
circling with its attendant lifeless satellite around a fire — breathing star, 
moving with this its primary and other revolving planets through the galaxy of 
the Milky Way of hundreds of millions of burning stars, and together with this 
entire host, through the void of the universe. 



More on Immanuel Velikovsky (from wikipedia.)

Born, 10 June 1895 – dead 17 November 1979, was a Russian-Jewish independent 
scholar, best known as the author of a number of controversial books 
reinterpreting the events of ancient history, in particular the US bestseller 
Worlds in Collision, published in 1950. Earlier, he played a role in the 
founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, and was a psychiatrist 
and psychoanalyst.

His books use comparative mythology and ancient literary sources (including the 
Old Testament) to argue that Earth suffered catastrophic close contacts with 
other planets (principally Venus and Mars) in ancient times. In positioning 
Velikovsky among catastrophists including Hans Bellamy, Ignatius Donnelly, and 
Johann Gottlieb Radlof, the British astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier 
noted". Velikovsky is not so much the first of the new catastrophists .; he is 
the last in a line of traditional catastrophists going back to mediaeval times 
and probably earlier." Velikovsky argued that electromagnetic effects play an 
important role in celestial mechanics. He also proposed a revised chronology for 
ancient Egypt, Greece, Israel and other cultures of the ancient Near East. The 
revised chronology aimed at explaining the so-called "dark age" of the eastern 
Mediterranean (c. 1100–750 BC) and reconciling biblical history with mainstream 
archaeology and Egyptian chronology.

In general, Velikovsky's theories have been ignored or vigorously rejected by 
the academic community. Nonetheless, his books often sold well and gained an 
enthusiastic support in lay circles, often fuelled by claims of unfair treatment 
for Velikovsky by orthodox academia. The controversy surrounding his work and 
its reception is often referred to as "the Velikovsky affair"

In 1950, after eight publishing houses rejected the Worlds in Collision 
manuscript, it was finally published by Macmillan, which had a large presence in 
the academic textbook market. Even before its appearance, the book was enveloped 
by furious controversy, when Harper's Magazine published a highly positive 
feature on it, as did Reader's Digest, with what would today be called a 
creationist slant. This came to the attention of Shapley, who opposed the 
publication of the work, having been made familiar with Velikovsky's claims 
through the pamphlet Velikovsky had given him. Shapley threatened to organise a 
textbook boycott of Macmillan for its publication of Worlds in Collision, and 
within two months the book was transferred to Doubleday. It was by then a 
bestseller in the United States. In 1952, Doubleday published the first 
instalment in Velikovsky's revised chronology, Ages in Chaos, followed by the 
Earth in Upheaval (a geological volume) in 1955. In November 1952, Velikovsky 
moved from Manhattan to Princeton, New Jersey.

For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, Velikovsky was persona non grata on 
college and university campuses. After this period, he began to receive more 
requests to speak. He lectured, frequently to record crowds, at universities 
across North America. In 1972, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a 
one-hour television special featuring Velikovsky and his work, and this was 
followed by a thirty-minute documentary by the BBC in 1973.
During the remainder of the 1970s, Velikovsky devoted a great deal of his time 
and energy to rebutting his critics in academia, and he continued to tour North 
America and Europe to deliver lectures on his ideas. By that time, the elderly 
Velikovsky suffered from diabetes and intermittent depression, which his 
daughter said may have been exacerbated by the academic establishment's 
continuing rejection of his work. He died in 1979.

Posthumous administration of literary estate.
A volume of Velikovsky's discussions and correspondence with Albert Einstein 
appeared in Hebrew in Israel, translated and edited by his daughter Shulamit 
Velikovsky Kogan. In the late 1990s, a large portion of Velikovsky's unpublished 
book manuscripts, essays and correspondence became available at the Velikovsky 
Archive website. In 2005, Velikovsky's daughter Ruth Sharon presented his entire 
archive to Princeton University Library.

Ideas.
Notwithstanding Velikovsky's dozen or so publications in medical and 
psychoanalytic journals in the 1920s and 1930s, the work for which he became 
well known was developed by him during the early 1940s, whilst living in New 
York. He summarised his core ideas in an affidavit in November 1942, and in two 
privately published Scripta Academica pamphlets entitled Theses for the 
Reconstruction of Ancient History (1945) and Cosmos without Gravitation (1946).
Rather than have his ideas dismissed wholesale because of potential flaws in any 
one area, Velikovsky then chose to publish them as a series of book volumes, 
aimed at a lay audience, dealing separately with his proposals on ancient 
history, and with areas more relevant to the physical sciences. Velikovsky was a 
passionate Zionist, and this did steer the focus of his work, although its scope 
was considerably more far-reaching than this. The entire body of work could be 
said to stem from an attempt to solve the following problem: that to Velikovsky 
there appeared to be insufficient correlation in the written or archaeological 
records between Biblical history and what was known of the history of the area, 
in particular, Egypt.

Velikovsky searched for common mention of events within literary records, and in 
the Ipuwer Papyrus he believed he had found a contemporary Egyptian account of 
the Plagues of Egypt. Moreover, he interpreted both accounts as descriptions of 
a great natural catastrophe. Velikovsky attempted to investigate the physical 
cause of these events, and extrapolated backwards and forwards in history from 
this point, cross-comparing written and mythical records from cultures on every 
inhabited continent, using them to attempt synchronisms of the historical 
records, yielding what he believed to be further periodic natural catastrophes 
that can be global in scale.

 He arrived at a body of radical inter-disciplinary ideas, which might be 
summarised as: Planet Earth has suffered natural catastrophes on a global scale, 
both before and during humankind's recorded history.
There is evidence for these catastrophes in the geological record (here 
Velikovsky was advocating Catastrophist ideas as opposed to the prevailing 
Uniformitarian notions) and archeological record. The extinction of many species 
had occurred catastrophically, not by gradual Darwinian means.
The catastrophes that occurred within the memory of humankind are recorded in 
the myths, legends and written history of all ancient cultures and 
civilisations. Velikovsky pointed to alleged concordances in the accounts of 
many cultures, and proposed that they referred to the same real events. For 
instance, the memory of a flood is recorded in the Hebrew Bible, in the Greek 
legend of Deucalion, and in the Manu legend of India. Velikovsky put forward the 
psychoanalytic idea of "Cultural Amnesia" as a mechanism whereby these literal 
records came to be regarded as mere myths and legends.
The causes of these natural catastrophes were close encounters between the Earth 
and other bodies within the solar system — not least what are now the planets 
Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars, these bodies having moved upon different 
orbits within human memory.

To explain the fact that these changes to the configuration of the solar system 
violate several well-understood laws of physics, Velikovsky invented a role for 
electromagnetic forces in counteracting gravity and orbital mechanics.
Some of Velikovsky's specific postulated catastrophes included:[citation needed]
A tentative suggestion that Earth had once been a satellite of a "proto-Saturn" 
body, before its current solar orbit.

That the Deluge (Noah's Flood) had been caused by proto-Saturn's entering a nova 
state, and ejecting much of its mass into space.
A suggestion that the planet Mercury was involved in the Tower of Babel 
catastrophe.

Jupiter had been the culprit for the catastrophe that saw the destruction of 
Sodom and Gomorrah.
Periodic close contacts with a "cometary Venus" (which had been ejected from 
Jupiter) had caused the Exodus events (c. 1500 BCE) and Joshua's subsequent "sun 
standing still" (Joshua 10:12 and 13) incident.
Periodic close contacts with Mars had caused havoc in the 8th and 7th centuries 
BCE.
As noted above, Velikovsky had conceived the broad sweep of this material by the 
early 1940s. However, within his lifetime, whilst he continued to research, 
expand and lecture upon the details of his ideas, he released only selected 
portions of his work to the public in book form:[citation needed]
Worlds in Collision (1950) discussed the literary and mythical records of the 
"Venus" and "Mars" catastrophes.

Portions of his Revised Chronology were published as Ages in Chaos (1952), 
Peoples of the Sea (1977) and Rameses II and His Time (1978) (The related 
monograph Oedipus and Akhenaten, 1960, posited the thesis that pharaoh Akhenaten 
was the prototype for the Greek mythic figure Oedipus.)
Earth in Upheaval (1955) dealt with geological evidence for global natural 
catastrophes.

Velikovsky's ideas on his earlier Saturn/Mercury/Jupiter events were never 
published, and the available archived manuscripts are much less developed. Of 
all the strands of his work, Velikovsky published least on his belief that 
electromagnetism plays a role in orbital mechanics. Although he appears to have 
retreated from the propositions in his 1946 monograph Cosmos without 
Gravitation, no such retreat is apparent in Stargazers and Gravediggers. Cosmos 
without Gravitation, which Velikovsky placed in university libraries and sent to 
scientists, is a probable catalyst for the hostile response of astronomers and 
physicists to his later claims about astronomy. However, other Velikovskian 
enthusiasts such as Ralph Juergens, Earl Milton, Wal Thornhill, and Donald E. 
Scott have claimed that stars are powered not by internal nuclear fusion, but by 
galactic-scale electrical discharge currents. Such ideas do not find support in 
the conventional literature and are rejected as pseudoscience by the scientific 
community


Emigration to the USA and a career as an author.
In 1939, with the prospect of war looming, Velikovsky travelled with his family 
to New York, intending to spend a sabbatical year researching for his book 
Oedipus and Akhenaton. The book was inspired by Freud's Moses and Monotheism and 
explored the possibility that Pharaoh Akhenaton was the legendary Oedipus. Freud 
had argued that Akhenaton, the supposedly monotheistic Egyptian pharaoh, was the 
source of the religious principles that Moses taught to the people of Israel in 
the desert. Freud's claim (and that of others before him) was based in part on 
the resemblance of Psalm 104 in the Bible to an Egyptian hymn discovered on the 
wall of the Tomb of Akhenaton's general, Ai, in Akhenaton's city of Akhetaten. 
To disprove Freud's claim and to prove the Exodus as such, Velikovsky sought 
evidence for the Exodus in Egyptian documents. One such document was the Ipuwer 
Papyrus, which he felt reported events similar to several of the Biblical 
plagues. Since conventional Egyptology dated the Ipuwer Papyrus much earlier 
than either the Biblical date for the Exodus (ca. 1500—1450 BCE) or the Exodus 
date accepted by many of those who accepted the conventional chronology of Egypt 
(ca. 1250 BCE), Velikovsky had to revise the conventional chronology.

Within weeks of his arrival in the United States, World War II began. Launching 
on a tangent from his original book project, Velikovsky began to develop the 
radical catastrophist cosmology and revised chronology theories for which he 
would become notorious. For the remainder of the Second World War, now as a 
permanent resident of New York City, he continued to research and write about 
his ideas, searching for a means to disseminate them to academia and the public. 
He privately published two small Scripta Academica pamphlets summarising his 
theories in 1945 (Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History and Cosmos 
Without Gravitation). He mailed copies of the latter to academic libraries and 
scientists, including Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley in 1947.
SUPPLEMENT Worlds in Collision in the Light of Recent Finds 
inArchaeology,Geology, and Astronomy. 
AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE GRADUATE COLLEGE FORUM OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 
ON OCTOBER 14, 1953. 

ONE HUNDRED and eighty years ago, in 1773, Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749 — 
1827), then twenty — three years old, stood before the Academie des Sciences in 
Paris and read a paper in which he proved the stability of the solar system: all 
deflections of the planets from their paths are only periodic oscillations from 
their mean courses; and the celestial mechanism is wound up 
to go on forever. 

Laplace's contemporary, Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744 —   1829), set out to 
demonstrate in a series of works that this earth has ever been an abode of 
peaceful evolution, free from spasmodic disturbances, in opposition to the 
dominant views of his day. 

These ideas of harmony or stability in the celestial and terrestrial spheres 
gained ground in the nineteenth century and became the foundation of scientific 
thought. In 1846 Leverrier, by announcing the existence of the planet Neptune, 
which was immediately thereafter discovered in the part of the sky indicated by 
him, proved the gravitational theory of Newton and the orderly 
universe of Laplace to be correct. However, in the same year, by detecting the 
anomaly in the revolution of Mercury, always accumulating in one and the same 
direction, he threw the first doubt on the infallibility of these very laws. 



The theory of uniformity, as understood by Lamarck and Hutton and developed by 
Lyell, became the cornerstone of the Darwinian theory, and Darwin went so far as 
to say that anybody who was unconvinced by Lyell's teaching should refrain from 
reading the Origin of Species. The principle of uniformity, or the explanation 
of all past events in the history of the globe in terms of the 
processes in action in our own age, or the denial of catastrophic crises in the 
past, gave Darwin what he needed most for his idea of the origin of species: 
almost unlimited time. In order that from the struggle for existence, or 
competition, new forms should evolve, and that an animal like the spider with 
its many legs and human beings should have had a common ancestor, untold eons 
were necessary. 

By the end of the nineteenth century the war between the theory of evolution and 
the theory of creation in six days, less than six thousand years ago, was 
concluded, with victory to the theory of evolution. The only difficulty left 
was, in the view of Thomas Huxley, that no really new species 
had appeared on the world scene since the scientific observations were made, not 
even in breeding experiments. The geological record, however, spoke 
unequivocally of the fact: in the past lived animal forms that do not live any 
longer, and of the forms that five in our age, many 
were not present in the geological past. 

Laplace's theory of the origin of the solar system from a rotating nebula was 
replaced, by the end of the century, with a theory of a catastrophic beginning 
in a near — collision of the sun with another star, with debris forming the 
planets. But it was stressed by the authors of this new theory that the universe 
is orderly, and this beginning in a cataclysm was an unusually rare 
occurrence in the cosmos, and that the solar system is governed by the principle 
of stability, as annunciated by Laplace, and the earth by the law of uniformity, 
and the animals and plants by the law of evolution through continuity. 

It appeared that, basic principles having been established, science had before 
it only the work of refinement in observation and in the addition of details for 
the perfection of knowledge; but the time of basic discoveries was over. 

This was the outlook in 1895. In April of that year Fridtjof Nansen, in an 
attempt to discover the North Pole, reached a point less than four degrees from 
it. The scientific world looked upon the discovery of the North Pole as the most 
coveted goal still left to be attained by science. 

But before Nansen, drifting from latitude 86, reached his home in Norway, the 
scene changed. Konrad Roentgen of Wurzberg discovered the x — rays or cathode 
rays that pass through opaque bodies. In the same year of 1895 twenty — year —  
old Marconi, working at the home of his father near Bologna, made the first 
successful experiment with wireless transmission. That year, too, Sigmund Freud 
published his first paper (together with Joseph Breuer), which led to a 
new understanding of the realm known as the subconscious; and at the same time 
Pavlov made his contribution to the psychology of the reflexes. 

The next year, and still before Nansen had landed on the Norwegian coast, Henri 
Becquerel, working on uranium, discovered the phenomenon of radioactivity. Two 
years later he was followed by the Curies, who discovered radium. In 1897 J. J. 
Thomson announced that the atom is divisible and is actually a microcosm, and he 
was followed by Rutherford. 

In 1900 Planck presented the theory of quanta, or energies dispatched in bundles 
or shots, and not in a continuous stream. And in the field of the origin of 
species, in 1900, Van Vries announced mutations in plants, observed for the 
first time: a process of spontaneous changes in living nature fundamentally 
different from the process of evolution through continuity as postulated by 
Darwin. 


Thus in a few years, in a spectacular series of discoveries, the entire world —  
matter and energy and living species and the human soul —  opened new horizons 
and everything appeared to be in incessant vibration, collisions, and 
transformation: the macrocosm, the microcosm, and even the subtle world of the 
mind, all alike. 



And in 1905 Albert Einstein, then twenty —  six years old, offered his 
understanding of the physical world, an understanding that required a new mental 
approach, as a testimonial that the age of basic discoveries had not ended with 
the victory of Darwin over the Book of Genesis. 

Since then another fifty years have passed. Once more, as before the end of the 
nineteenth century, we are told that the fundamentals are all known; the age of 
basic discoveries is definitely terminated, this time for certain; and present 
and future generations will have to satisfy themselves with detecting details, 
accumulating data, and adding decimals. And though the exciting decade of 1895 
to 1905 threw light on processes in matter, life, and soul, processes that 
are certainly not inert and are marked by spontaneity and conflict, science in 
its various branches adjusted the new discoveries and ideas to the framework of 
the old great principle reigning equally in lifeless and living nature: the law 
of harmony and unperturbed stability. The time was ripe for heresy. 

In 1950, a book, Worlds in Collision, created an outburst of emotions almost 
unprecedented in science. In the Preface to the book I wrote: "Harmony or 
stability in the celestial and terrestrial spheres is the point of departure of 
the present — day concept of the world as expressed in the 
celestial mechanics of Newton and the theory of evolution of Darwin. If these 
two men of science are sacrosanct, this book is a heresy. 

I came upon the idea that traditions and legends and memories of generic origin 
can be treated in the same way in which we treat in psychoanalysis the early 
memories of a single individual. I spent ten years on this work. I found that 
the collective memory of humankind spoke of a series of global catastrophes that 
occurred in historical times. I believed that I could even identify the 
exact tunes and the very agents of the great upheavals of the more recent past. 
The conclusions at which I arrived compelled me to cross the frontiers into 
various fields of science — archaeology, geology, and astronomy. The result was 
a book, a prolegomenon. In its concluding pages I conceded that more problems 
were raised than had been solved, and I promised, always reckoning with the 
limitations of the individual scholar, to pursue my study into these 
fields too. But already the implications of the fact of great global 
catastrophes on the earth, one of the celestial bodies, in a time so recent, had 
caused my critics to assert, in the words of a Harvard astronomer, that here was 
the "most amazing example of a shattering of accepted concepts on record." 

In the heat of the debate in the press the book was pronounced "one of the most 
significant books written since the invention of printing," and also "the worst 
book since the invention of movable characters." 

Believing that an emotional atmosphere is not well suited to fruitful debate, I 
have entered only infrequently into the controversy. I have made short factual 
corrections of statements by the Royal Astronomer and by J. B. S. Haldane 
appearing in their reviews of my book, and I participated in a debate with your 
professor of astronomy, J. Q. Stewart, in the pages of Harper's Magazine (June 
1951). I appeared before the American Philosophical Society, which at its 
annual meeting in April 1952 held a symposium on "Some Unorthodoxies of Modern 
Science," my unorthodoxy being the chief subject on the agenda. Otherwise I have 
kept myself out of the verbal conflict. 

Now more than three and a half years have passed since the publication of the 
book, and I appreciate the opportunity offered me by your invitation to present 
a dispassionate review of recent finds in the three fields named in the title of 
my address. 

 

Worlds in Collision and Recent Finds in Archaeology. 

In my book I described the great natural catastrophes of the second and first 
millennia before the present era. Prominent place is given to the description of 
the natural upheaval that occurred in the closing hours of the Middle Kingdom in 
Egypt. I synchronized this event with the Exodus, when sea, land, and sky were 
in uproar. The collective human memory retained an inexhaustible 
array of recollections of the time when the world was in conflagration, when sea 
engulfed land, earth trembled, celestial bodies were disturbed in their motion, 
and meteorites fell. 
My narrative is based on historical texts of many peoples around the globe, on 
classical literature, on epics of northern races, on sacred books of the Orient 
and Occident, on traditions and folklore of primitive peoples. 

The question that arose was: Where is the archaeological evidence? In later 
chapters of my book I gave such evidence: water clocks and sundials that show a 
different length of the day or altered latitudes; change in the orientation of 
ancient temples which originally faced toward the east but do so no longer. I 
also closely examined in my book the calendars of the civilized 
peoples of antiquity, from Mexico and Peru to Greece, Iran, Israel, Egypt, 
Babylon, Assyria, India, and China, and the calendar reforms that were made. All 
this material gave strong support to the literary evidence. 

Working independently of me, Professor Claude Schaeffer, whose earlier 
excavations at Ras Shamra (Ugarit) caused a complete revolution in biblical 
exegesis, published a volume printed by the Oxford University Press. In this 
very detailed and technical work, comprising, together with 
tables, almost a thousand pages, Schaeffer demonstrates that on several 
occasions, each marking the end of an epoch, the entire ancient East was shaken 
and devastated. Modern annals of seismology know nothing comparable in severity 
and extent. The most devastating of these upheavals took place at exactly the 
end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, causing its downfall — as claimed in Worlds 
in Collision and Ages in Chaos, Cities were overturned; epidemics left the dead 
piled in common graves; the pursuit of arts and commerce came to an abrupt end; 
empires ceased to exist; strata of earth, dust, and ashes yards thick covered 
the ruined cities. In many places the population was annihilated, in others it 
was decimated; settled living was replaced by nomadic existence. Climate 
changed. 

Claude Schaeffer analyzed the archaeological finds of every place excavated from 
Troy at the Dardanelles over all Asia Minor, Armenia, the Caucasus, Persia, 
Syria, Cyprus, and Palestine to Egypt in Africa; he summarizes his extensive 
volume thus: 

"Our inquiry has demonstrated that these repeated crises which opened and closed 
the principal periods of the third and second millennia v/ere not caused by the 
action of man. Far from it, because compared with the vastness of these all — 
embracing crises and their profound effects, the exploits of conquerors   would 
appear only insignificant. 

Schaeffer's work sheds a new light on the conclusions at which Sir Arthur Evans 
arrived after many years of archaeological work on Crete: the island was 
shattered in violent catastrophes that were accompanied by fire, and in these 
upheavals the cultural and political ages of the Minoan kingdom went down, at 
the same time that corresponding Egyptian ages were terminated. Troy III was 
destroyed and its fifty feet thick fortress wall fell when the Middle 
Kingdom in Egypt fell; the volcano on the island of Thera exploded with almost 
unimaginable fury; recent archaeological work in the Indus Valley showed, too, 
that about — 1500, and in advance of the Arian invasion, cities with great walls 
were destroyed and a flourishing civilization came to a sudden end. 

The synchronization of the Exodus with the end of the Middle Kingdom was also 
the starting point of a reconstruction of ancient history from that point on to 
the advent of Alexander the Great, which took the form of a two —  volume work, 
Ages in Chaos, the first volume of which was published in the spring of 1952. 
The problem of the time of the Exodus in Egyptian history had 
never been solved. In the Papyrus Ipuwer and the Naos of El Arish I found 
descriptions of a natural upheaval very similar, sometimes identical, with the 
description in the Book of Exodus: 
following plagues, when the river was blood —  colored, amid a hurricane and 
darkness of seven days' duration, the pharaoh and his host were drowned in a 
whirlpool at Pi—ha—Kiroth, the same place where the pharaoh of the Exodus was 
drowned. 

These parallels compelled me to fix an unorthodox date for the Exodus. Collating 
the historical texts of following generations for twelve hundred years, I could 
establish numerous correlations between the histories of Egypt and of 
Israel which could not be accidental; my reconstruction demonstrated that 
Egyptian history and the histories of the nations which are written in harmony 
with it are out of line with the historical past by about six to seven hundred 
years. 
Thus both my works have their starting point in the recognition that the Middle 
Kingdom in Egypt went down in a great natural catastrophe. 

The recent excavation in Jericho has confirmed the fact that the great walls of 
the city fell a few decades after the end of the Middle Kingdom. But at the time 
in which conventional chronology places the arrival of the Israelites under 
Joshua in Canaan, there was no city at Jericho and no walls to fall. According 
to Ages in Chaos, however, the Israelites came to the walls of Jericho 
one generation after the end of the Middle Kingdom and the enigmatic hiatus of 
six hundred years proves not to be real. 

I expect new evidence from the Minoan scripts and the so — called Hittite 
pictographs. Texts in the Minoan script were found years ago on Crete and in 
Mycenae and in several other places on the Greek mainland. I believe that when 
the Minoan writings unearthed in Mycenae are deciphered they will be found to be 
Greek. I also claim that these texts are of a later date than generally 
believed. "No 'Dark Age' of six centuries' duration intervened in Greece between 
the Mycenaean age and the Ionian age of the seventh century."  

Before long new evidence will come from the so — called Hittite pictographic 
writings found in Asia, Minor Mesopotamia, and northern Syria. Since the recent 
discovery in Karatepe in Asia Minor of bilingual inscriptions — in ancient 
Hebrew and in pictographs — efforts at decipherment have entered a new stage. 
Today the Hittite pictographs are already in the process of being read. In 
my reconstruction I come to the conclusion that they are Chaldean signs, not 
Hittite. I also expect unequivocal evidence that these signs were used down to 
the last century before the present era. Owing to the confusion in the 
conventional chronology, the Chaldean writings of the Neo—Babylonian Empire are 
ascribed to early centuries and an imaginary empire. 


W. F. Libby and his associates at the University of Chicago have developed the 
radiocarbon method of dating organic matter. Wood from under the foundation of 
the "Hittite" fortress of Alisar in Asia Minor turned out to be seven to eight 
hundred years younger than conventional chronology would allow, thus giving full 
support to my dating. Hittite history, interwoven with Egyptian history of the 
New Kingdom, cannot be shortened without at the same time shortening 
the history of Egypt. The age of pieces of wood from the tombs of the Old and 
Middle Kingdoms in Egypt also proved to be in harmony with my reconstruction. 
However, for the decisive period   — that of the New Kingdom — no radiocarbon 
analysis has been made. 


In Worlds in Collision, p. 329, I expressed my belief that human settlements 
would be discovered "farther to the north on the Kolyma or Lena rivers flowing 
into the Arctic Ocean. 

On the lower Lena, north of the confluence with Viliy, inside the polar circle, 
monuments are found of a characteristic culture; outstanding finds were made 
near the lake Yolba, not far from Jigansk. 

As soon as the archaeologists started a methodic investigation of the area, in 
Yakutsk itself was found a workshop of an ancient metallurgist in which, at the 
end of the second millennium before the present era, he made bronze axes similar 
to the axes manufactured about that time in the Near Hast and in Europe. 

"In the Yakutsk taiga two and a half [or three] thousand years ago, there 
already lived artisans in metals who were able to extract copper from ore, to 
melt it and pour it into forms, and to make axes, beautiful bronze tips for the 
spears, knives and even swords." 

These relics of a civilization in the taiga of north-eastern Siberia imply that 
the climate changed there in the age of advanced man. Before the ice froze the 
region, voracious members of the elephant family roamed there in large herds. 
 

Recent Finds in Geology. 

Archaeological evidence of continental upheavals in the second millennium having 
been presented in detail by Schaeffer, the evidence of geology and paleontology 
called for elucidation. 
To this I have dedicated a special work, now close to completion, and since it 
will be published before very long, I shall refer here only briefly to some of 
this material. 

A little over a decade ago it was observed that the gold — digging hydraulic 
giants in the Fairbanks District in Alaska, sluicing out miles — long cuts, 
opened great hecatombs of animals. "Their numbers are appalling. They 
Bronze Age may have been well on its way in the centers of ancient civilization. 
Palms were found to have grown in northern Greenland, where now for half a year 
there is darkness and it is permanently cold. At some time in the remote past 
corals grew in Spitsbergen, and sequoia forests in Alaska, and it was early 
understood that the terrestrial axis must have changed its position. 

Airy, Lord Kelvin, George Darwin, and many others, including Schiaparelli 
and Simon Newcomb, participated in a long debate on the astronomical and 
geological possibility of a sudden change in the direction of the terrestrial 
axis, a debate that was erroneously thought to have been started as a 
consequence of Worlds in Collision. It was understood that such a change must 
have taken place unless the strange finds are to be left without explanation. 
The theory of drifting continents, offered as a substitute, was rejected for 
many reasons. Jeffreys showed that the mobile force invoked by Wegener is one 
hundred billion times too small to move the continents. Eddington thought that 
possibly only the crust, in its entirety, moved, and the axis of the core was 
left unchanged in direction. But the mobile force he invoked —  the tidal 
inequalities of lunar origin —  would not have moved the latitudes out of their 
places, the directional pull being east — west. 

W. B. Wright, in his The Quaternary Ice Age (2nd ed., 1937), says that during 
geological history there occurred many changes in the position of the climatic 
zones on the surface of the earth which cannot be explained except by a shifting 
of the axis or a displacement of the pole from its present position. 

But what could have brought about a change in the inclination of the terrestrial 
axis to the plane of the ecliptic? I discussed this question in the closing 
pages of Worlds in Collision and suggested the entrance of the earth into a 
strong magnetic field. 

The newly developed science of paleomagnetism brought, and daily continues to 
bring, confirmation of the fact that lavas and igneous rocks in all parts of the 
world are reversely magnetized. But what is even more startling is to find that 
the reversely magnetized rocks are a hundred times more strongly magnetized than 
the earth's magnetic field could have caused them to be. H. Manley, in his 
review, writes: 

"It may seem strange that a rock, which is made magnetic by the earth's field" 
should become so strongly magnetized "compared with the generating force. This 
is one of the most astonishing problems of paleomagnetism."  

Manley also refers to the tests made years ago by G. Folgheraiter and P. L. 
Mercanton on the clay of ancient Etruscan vases. They were found to have been 
fired when the vases were closer to the south magnetic pole; their position 
during the firing is known, because of the flow of the glaze; and the magnetic 
dip or inclination of the clay is found. Manley writes: "This implies that in 
the sixth century B.C. the earth's magnetic field was reversed in the Central 
Mediterranean area." He speaks also of a general "reversal in historical times, 
2500 years ago," that must be cleared up by additional research. 

Knowing from my study of ancient literary sources the proper time of exogenous 
disturbances in terrestrial rotation, I suspected an inaccuracy in the last 
sentence of an otherwise well — written article by Manley! the reversal must 
have occurred in the eighth century and again in the beginning of the seventh 
century (687). I was gratified to find, in the original publication of 
Professor Mercanton, to whom I directed my inquiry that the vases with reversed 
polarity date from the eighth century. 

I expect that, should the research be extended to vases dating from the end of 
the Middle Kingdom in Egypt (circa 3500 years ago), other periods of "unnatural" 
polarity would be determined in Egypt and elsewhere. 

Professor R. Daly of Harvard University found that 3500 years ago all over the 
world the level of the oceans suddenly dropped. He thought it might be due to a 
sudden sinking of the crust. And in an authoritative work, Marine Geology 
(1950), Professor P. H. Kuenen of the Netherlands finds that "this recent shift 
is now well established" on observations in many places of the world, 
and he, too, assigns this catastrophic drop of the ocean level to 3500 years 
ago. 

The recent expedition of the Oceanographic Institute at Goteborg, under H. 
Pettersson, which covered the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, found, 
according to its leader, "evidences of great catastrophes that have altered the 
face of the earth." He speaks of "climatic catastrophes," 
and of "tectonic catastrophes [that] raised or lowered the ocean bottom hundreds 
and even thousands of feet, spreading huge tidal waves which destroyed plant and 
animal life on the coastal plains." At many places "a lava bed of geologically 
recent origin [was} covered only by a thin veneer of sediment." He discovered 
that the Pacific and Indian ocean beds consist "largely of volcanic ash that had 
settled on the bottom after great volcanic explosions." He also found a 
large nickel content in the clay of the ocean bottoms, and decided that this 
abysmal nickel must have been of meteoric origin. Consequently, he concludes, 
there were "very heavy showers of meteors." "The principal difficulty of this 
explanation is that it requires a rate of accretion of meteoric dust several 
hundred times greater than that which astronomers   are presently 
prepared to admit."   

Professor Ewing of Columbia University carried on his investigation in the 
Atlantic. In 1949 he published his results, and, like Pettersson, he found that 
lava spread only recently on the bottom of the ocean. He also came upon signs of 
land deep on the bottom of the ocean and concluded: 
"Either the land must have sunk two to three miles, or the sea once must have 
been two or three miles lower than now. Either conclusion is startling.' 

The pollen analysis, made by various scientists, of the bottom of the North Sea, 
between Germany, England, Scotland, and Norway, convinced researchers that this 
sea in its present shape originated only very recently —  in the Subboreal, the 
date of 1500 before the present era often being selected. At that time there 
occurred a Klimasturz. Once there had been a sea; then it was covered by debris 
carried from the mountains of Norway; later, in a catastrophic advance, 
the North Sea was formed once more. Human artefacts have been found from the 
time when the North Sea was land. 

The investigation of the delta formation of the Bear River (on the Alaskan 
border), very carefully made by Hanson, showed that "at the present rate of 
sedimentation the delta is estimated to be only 3600 years old." A.Lapparent, 
the leading French geologist of the beginning of the century, calculated that, 
since the time the Rhone glacier started to melt, less than 3000 years 
have passed.

 Modern research confirms that many of the alpine glaciers are less than 4000 
years old. Professor Flint of Yale refers to the redetermination of the age of 
the Upper Great Gorge of Niagara Falls and writes (1947): "The age of the Upper 
Great Gorge is calculated as somewhat more than four thousand years —   and to 
obtain even this [low] figure we have to assume that the rate of recession has 
been constant, although we know that discharge has in fact varied greatly during 
postglacial times." 

Sernander and others demonstrated that in — 1500 and again after  —  800 there 
occurred climatic catastrophes of global dimensions. These researches, unknown 
to me when I wrote Worlds in Collision, coincide completely with my conclusions 
and their dating. 

In both these periods the lake dwellings in Switzerland, Germany, northern 
Italy, and also in Scandinavia were overwhelmed by "high water catastrophes" and 
abandoned, the first time for four centuries, the second time never to be 
rebuilt. 

H. Gams and R. Nordhagen showed, with very extensive documentation, that at 
these two time dates the lakes of Europe were tilted, and many of them, like 
Essee and Federsee, were emptied of all their water. The Isartal in the Bavarian 
Alps was "violently torn out" and this "in very recent times"; and in the Inntal 
in the Tyrol the "many changes of river beds are indicative of 
ground movements on a great scale."   

de Terra of the Carnegie Institute and Peterson of Harvard came to the 
conclusion that the Himalayas, in violent upheavals, reached their present form 
and height in the age of man, partly even in the time of advanced man. The same 
conclusion is made concerning the Andes, where, too, the upheaval must have been 
catastrophic. In the age of man the Andes rose many thousands of feet amid 
volcanic activity. 

In the hills of Montreal and New Hampshire and in Michigan, five and six hundred 
feet above sea level, bones of whales have been found. In many places on the 
earth —   —  on all continents —  bones of sea animals and polar land animals 
and tropical animals have been found in great melees; so also in the Cumberland 
Cave in Maryland and in the Choukoutien fissure in China, 
and in Germany and Denmark. Hippopotami and ostriches were found together with 
seals and reindeer. Wherever we turn our interest — from the Arctic to the 
Antarctic and from sunrise to sunset, in the high mountains and in the deep seas 
— we find innumerable signs of great upheavals, ancient and recent. 

A circular meteoric crater (Chubb crater) was discovered in the summer of 1950 
in northern Labrador; it covers an area of four square miles. It is much larger 
than the Arizona crater, which is four fifths of a mile in diameter (two thirds 
of a square mile in area); whereas the Arizona 
crater could accommodate two million people in its amphitheater, the Chubb 
crater could accommodate twelve million people. It must have been created by the 
impact of an asteroid. 
According to the published opinion of geological authorities, the asteroid must 
have fallen about four thousand years ago. 

Following, or shortly preceding, the discovery of the Chubb crater, several 
other large meteoric craters were discovered in Australia, Arabia, and Mexico. 
The tens of thousands of oval formations on the Atlantic coast of the United 
States, especially in the Carolinas, some of them attaining a length of a few 
miles each, were conclusively identified, in a monograph by Prouty (1952), as 
having been caused by the fall of large meteorites. 

And finally, the largest of crater formations, situated in Quebec north of Sept 
lies, in Canada, and occupying an area of 680 square miles, is under 
investigation as to its meteoric origin by a group of Mines Department 
scientists led by Dr. Innes. 

Of the many other new developments in the field of geology, I would stress some 
of the results obtained by the radiocarbon method. The time of the Ice Age is 
moved much closer to our time. 

Instead of 25,000 years as the terminal date of the last glacial period, it is 
shown that 10,000 or 11,000 years ago the ice was still advancing,' and even 
with this low dating there remain "puzzling exceptions," among them the finding 
of mastodons and mammoths in strata only 3500 years old. [Moreover, organic 
vestiges in the drift of the last glaciation have been found to 
be of a radiocarbon age pointing to a time 3500 years ago. ! 

Radiocarbon analysis of oil has also shown that in the deposits of the Gulf of 
Mexico the age of oil is measured in thousands of years, not millions. This 
destroys the main argument the geologists have raised against the theory of the 
exogenous origin of some deposits of oil. 

Hydrocarbons have been identified in cometary tails by spectral analysis; also 
carbohydrates. But here we are already outside the domain of geology and in the 
realm of astronomy. 

 

Worlds in Collision and Recent Finds in Astronomy. 

In the years when the manuscript of Worlds in Collision was in the hands of the 
Macmillan Company, accepted for publication though not yet published (194649), 
and in the years following its publication in 1950 several fundamental 
observations were made and explanations offered that have a clear bearing on the 
theory of that book. 

The zodiacal light, or the glow seen in the evening sky after sunset, stretching 
in the path of the sun and other planets (ecliptic), the mysterious origin of 
which has for a long time occupied the minds of astronomers, has been explained 
in recent years as the reflection of the solar light from two rings of dust 
particles, one following the orbit of Venus, the other an orbit between Mars and 
Jupiter, places where, according to Worlds in Collision, collisions of planets 
and a comet took place. 

The origin of asteroids, or small planets, that circle between Jupiter and Mars, 
some of which cross the orbit of Mars and even that of the earth, has lately 
been explained as the result of the explosion of a planet and more recently 
(1950) as the result of a collision between two planets in an early age 
(Kuiper).  Bobrovnikoff of the Perkins Observatory offered anew his own 
explanation of the origin of the asteroids, they are remnants of a gigantic 
prehistoric comet." 
F. Whipple, upon calculating the orbits of the asteroids, came to the conclusion 
(1950) that two collisions occurred between these bodies and a comet, once 4700 
years ago and the second time 1500 years ago, or within historical times. These 
dates of collision in the solar system are of the same order as those offered in 
Worlds in Collision, deduced there from historical evidence and testimony. 
C. Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, explained (1950) the dark areas and the 
canals of Mars as resulting from collisions of Mars with asteroids. According to 
Worlds in Collision, Mars was involved in repeated collisions with large 
cometary masses. 

Actually, in January 1950, an explosion observed on Mars was interpreted (by 
Opik) as a collision with an asteroid; clouds of dust of continental dimensions 
rose and screened surface features of the planet. 

Struve of Yerkes Observatory, reviewing the achievements of astronomy during 
1950, wrote that by a bizarre coincidence" in that year a deluge of sound 
papers" on "collisions within the solar system" followed on the heels of Worlds 
in Collision. 

There are two theories concerning the origin of lunar craters. Their size is 
enormous —  nothing comparable is known on earth. According to one theory, these 
craters are the result of a collision of the moon with very large meteorites, of 
the size of asteroids; according to the other theory, they are volcanic 
formations. 

Both theories assume very violent events in which the celestial 
bodyclosest to the earth was involved. In Worlds in Collision I offered the 
following explanation of the lunar craters, as well as of the seas of lava and 
the rifts on the lunar surface: During the great catastrophes, when the moon 
together with the terrestrial globe passed through the fabric of a great comet 
and again when, in the eighth century before the present era, the earth and the 
moon were strongly perturbed by Mars, "the moon's surface flowed with lava and 
bubbled into great circular formations, which rapidly cooled off in the long 
lunar night, unprotected by an atmosphere from the coolness of cosmic spaces. In 
these cosmic collisions and near contacts the surface of the moon was also 
marked by clefts and rifts." 

If the circular formations on the moon are these bubbles which collapsed, then 
probably there are smaller bubbles on the moon that have not yet burst. Dr. H. 
Percy Wilkins, the English selenographer, actually found over forty unexploded 
bubbles or domes on the moon, several of which lie to the northeast of 
Copernicus crater; the largest of these is found within Darwin crater 
and is twenty miles in diameter, according to an article by F. Benario in Vega 
(1953). 

I have expressed my opinion that many comets are of recent origin, and I have 
supported this view by reference to the frequency and luminosity of comets in 
the days of imperial Rome in comparison to the number of comets visible to the 
unaided eye in the last centuries. 

This notion received vigorous confirmation in the extensive work on comets done 
in Soviet Russia by a leading authority on the subject, Professor S. K. 
Vsehsviatsky. His research reveals that periodic comets, as observed during 
recent decades, are losing their luminosity and their matter at a rate so rapid 
that fifty or sixty revolutions suffice to disintegrate a comet completely. 
Thus the Halley comet can hardly go back beyond 3500 years, or the year 1500 
before the present era. In the last century several comets with short periods 
have failed to return, having apparently lost all their matter, and a few others 
actually fell apart before the eyes of observers. 

The rapid decay of comets excludes the possibility that they have belonged to 
our solar system from the beginning, or from the time the planets were formed. 
The theory that sees in comets bodies that arrived from o, her solar systems has 
been generally abandoned. Vephsviatsky also shows whv we must reject a theory of 
the capture of comets through which our solar system passed sometime in the 
past. He comes to me conclusion that the comets were born in eruptions from 
planets, even from satellites like our moon, where circular formations indicate 
violent events in the past, , but the main activity must have taken place on 

The gases of Jupiter and Saturn are in violent motion despite their low 
temperatures,  yet the velocity necessary for escape from the maior planets is 
so great (60 kilometers per second from Jupiter) that Vsehsviatsky admits not 
knowing the mechanism that could in conditions presently 
prevailing on maior planets impart this velocity to the exploded matter. 
Nevertheless, Vsehsviatsky insists that in the recent past conditions on these 
planets must have been such that this was possible, even if these conditions 
cannot be defined. 


In the Publications of the Kiew Observatory for 1953, Vsehsviatsky says,  

"The history of the planetary system was characterized, we assume, by definitely 
more rapid changes and more active physical processes than appeared when only 
gravitational interrelations in the solar system were taken into account." 

All this is in complete harmony with the conclusions at which I arrived in 
Worlds in Collision concerning the time (a few thousand years ago) of the birth 
of comets of short periods and their origin (by eruption from the planets, 
especially the major planets). There I also explained the 
forces or conditions that caused the major planets to eject the cometary masses. 
"The [near] collision between major planets brought about the birth of comets" 
(p. 373). 

Now my claim, based on historical material, that the composition of the solar 
system was changed in historical times, is given the support of observation and 
calculation,  


The electromagnetic nature of the universe, deduced in Worlds in Collision from 
a series of historical phenomena, is supported by another series of recent 
observations. 

At Evans Signal Laboratory of the United States Army Signal Corps, in Belmar, 
New Jersey, researchers conducting pioneer experiments on the reception of radar 
echoes from the moon detected noises coming from the sun. These noises point to 
discharges of strong potentials. 

In the fall of 1947, at the meeting of the British Association for the 
Advancement of Science, Sir 
Edward Appleton reported that radio noises coming from the sun coincide with 
solar flares. 
According to him, "a sunspot is the most powerful ultra —  short —  wave radio —  
station known, its power being much greater than a million kilowatts." 

In 1948 and 1949 Donald Menzel produced motion pictures of prominences or 
explosions of matter on the sun; they were made at the Solar Observatory in 
Climax, Colorado. The exploded matter rose at a very great speed to immense 
heights, all the time gaining in velocity, and then descended to the sun, not on 
a curved path as a missile would do, but by retreating on the path 
it had covered, comparable to a missile reversing its direction and returning to 
its point of departure. Moreover, the velocity of its descent was without the 
acceleration expected in a fall, and this too was in violation of gravitational 
mechanics. 

It has been observed that when protuberances or surges of exploded matter on the 
sun run into one another, both of them recoil violently; such observation was 
made by McMath and Sawyer, and on another occasion by Lyot. The conclusion drawn 
by E. Pettit of Mount Wilson Observatory (1951) is that solar protuberances are 
electrically charged. 

Above the protuberances "the coronal structure is often bent into the form of an 
arch, sometimes intoseveral concentric arches. Xhis is additional evidence of 
the electrical nature of the prominences [protuberances] and corona." ,  

In the configuration of the cometary nuclei and tails there was found "good 
evidence that all 
particles in the comet influence the motion of each other," and the 
configuration of the streamers 
in the tails of many comets "strongly indicate a mutual repulsion." Thus wrote 
Professor N. T. 
Bobrovnikoff, director of the Perkins Observatory (1951).,  It was also 
calculated that the repulsion of the tails of the comets by the sun is twenty 
thousand times stronger than the gravitational attraction, and the implication 
is that it cannot be caused by the pressure of light, as 
previously thought, and that electrical repulsion must be in action. From 
spectral analysis it is known that the cometary tails do not shine merely by 
reflected light, and that their light is not caused by combustion either, but 
most probably is an electrical effect, comparable to the effect 
of a Geissler tube. 

In order to explain the general magnetic field of the terrestrial globe, Dr. E. 
C Bullard, of Great Britain's National Physical Laboratory, assumed (1953) 
electrical currents in the liquid metal core of the earth. 

The polar lights have been explained by various scientists as electrical charges 
arriving from the sun. Following disturbances on the sun there is an immediate 
disturbance in the ionosphere and radio —  transmission, ground currents, and 
the magnetic field of the earth; there is also a second retarded but pronounced 
reaction about twenty —  five hours later, and auroral displays. 

In 1948 Enrico Fermi explained the enigmatically high charges of the cosmic rays 
as a result of the positive particles having traveled through magnetic fields in 
space. In 1951 Richtmyer and Teller, following an earlier idea of Swann, 
explained these charges as originating in the sun: 
protons and heavy nuclei could be accelerated to the enormous velocity of cosmic 
—  ray particles by an extended magnetic field of solar origin. Both theories 
assume the existence of magnetic fields in space. I could add to this that if 
the earth is a negatively charged body the great energy with which positive 
charges — the cosmic rays rush toward the earth is not in the least enigmatic: 
a negatively charged body attracts positive charges. 

At Mount Wilson Observatory Harold Babcock determined (1947) that some of the 
fixed stars possess general magnetic fields of great intensity. (One of the 
stars was found to reverse its polarity every nine days from plus 7000 gauss to 
minus 6300 gauss. Xhis may be understood as a sign that the star is rotating, 
turning another pole to us every nine days. The star shows no Zeeman effect in 
between, that is, when the observer is in the plane of the equatorial belt of 
the star, in the same position in which we are permanently in relation to our 
sun. 

By 1952 the Royal Astronomer, Sir Harold Spencer Jones, estimated that magnetic 
properties were established in more than one hundred stars, and the number of 
identified magnetic stars is rapidly growing. 

Several years ago Dr. J. S. Hall, of the United States Naval Observatory, and 
Dr. W. Hiltner, of Yerkes Observatory, found that the light from certain stars 
is strongly polarized. It was surmised that starlight must pass through 
particles of magnetized interstellar dust. The question raised 
was why the particles of dust should all be oriented in the same direction as 
their magnetic axes. 
However, if these clouds of dust are electrically charged and in motion, the 
common magnetic orientation of these particles is only natural. 

In June 1950 W. Baade of Palomar and L. Spitzer of Princeton offered a theory of 
colliding galaxies. By November of 1952 it was definitely spoken of as "a 
titanic collision of two giant star clusters" behind the constellation Cygnus 
(Swan) of the Milky Way. 

The fact of the "big crash" was substantiated by strong evidence —  the radio 
noises coming from beyond the Milky Way and sifting through it. Galaxies, each 
as large as the Milky Way, with numberless stars, were riding one through 
another, colliding and sending out a terrible S.O.S. 
through the universe in the form of anguished radio noises. These signals were 
interpreted by Baade and K. Minkowski as the reverberations of crashes on a 
galactic scale. After millions of years of traveling with the velocity of light, 
these signals reached our radio —  telescopes as clearly 
audible noises. They left the place of the catastrophe so long ago, yet, because 
of the magnitude of galaxies, the collision is possibly still going on. The 
signals that are emitted today will reach our solar system when our sun may have 
already turned into a dwarf star and our planet into clouds of dust. 

Not only the fact of the collision of galaxies startled the astronomers, but 
even more the medium through which it became known: the colliding galaxies send 
electromagnetic signals, thus evidencing the electromagnetic structure of 
galaxies and of the very space of the universe. 

By August 1953 the statement was made that another celestial host of stars was 
charging on a rival galaxy in the direction of the sky where we see the Crab 
nebula and that still another collision was going on behind the constellation 
Cassiopeia. 

In the March 1951 issue of RCA Review, John H. Nelson of the engineering 
department of RCA Communications, Inc., announced the results of several years 
of careful observations on the dependence of regular radio transmission on the 
position of planets in the solar system. He drew graphs and wrote: "It can be 
readily seen from these graphs that disturbed conditions show good 
correlation with planetary configurations.   It is definitely shown that each of 
the six planets studied is effective in some configurations. 

The press reported: "Evidence of a strange and unexplained correlation between 
the positions of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars in their orbits around the sun and the 
presence of violent electrical disturbances in the earth s upper atmosphere   
seems to indicate [thatl the planets and the sun share in a cosmic electrical —  
balance mechanism that extends a billion miles from the center 
of our solar system. Such an electrical balance is not accounted for in current 
astrophysical theories. 

Short —  wave frequencies are disturbed when Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars line up —  
either in a straight line or at right angles to one another. Nelson emphasized 
that the phenomenon "is not due to gravitational effect or tidal pulls between 
planets and the sun." 
Actually, the phenomenon indicates that the planets are electrically charged 
bodies. 

In this connection, the older theory of a direct but unexplained relation 
between the revolution of Jupiter and the sunspot cycle is seen in a new light. 
Also, the observation of Stetson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
that the moon affects radio reception —  it is twice as good 
when the moon is under the horizon as when it is overhead —  belongs in the same 
category as Nelson's observation of planetary influences on the ionosphere. 
Stetson thought this effect was caused by some radiation emanating from the 
moon, for a neutral moon could not produce the phenomenon. 

By 1953 the strange fact was established that the solar tides in the earth's 
atmosphere are sixteen times more powerful than the lunar tides in the 
atmosphere, a fact in complete conflict 
with the tidal theory, according to which the action of the moon on oceanic 
tides is several times more powerful than that of the sun. The fifty —  fold 
discrepancy is still without an acceptable explanation. 

These are only a few of the recent discoveries that make a revision of the 
mechanistic concept of the universe quite mandatory. 

Exactly because of the accuracy achieved without reckoning with forces that 
appear to exist, celestial mechanics, a solid work of great mathematical minds 
for almost three centuries, may seem even more in need of such revision. All 
this has little direct bearing on the story of Worlds in Collision, which claims 
only the effect to be expected if a magnetic body like the earth should come 
very close to another magnetic body. It was my skepticism concerning the 
infallibility of the celestial mechanics, which assumes the celestial bodies to 
be electrically and magnetically sterile, that was the real cause of the 
emotional outburst. 

Let us think of a binary  —  or double star; both stars revolve around each 
other or a common center. A half —  revolution period of a few days or only 
hours is common. Let us assume that the stars of the binary are magnets 7000 
gauss strong. It is immediately obvious that even should 
the electrical component of the electromagnets be disregarded these stars are 
not moving in a system purely mechanical. 

But this is enough to render the purely mechanical celestial system fallible in 
respect also to single stars and equally so to the sun and its planets. 

In Jupiter and its moons we have a system not unlike the solar family. The 
planet is cold, yet its gases are in motion. It appears probable to me that it 
sends out radio noises as do the sun and the stars. I suggest that this be 
investigated.,  

Uranus is the only planet about which we know that, for a considerable part of 
its revolution, it turns one of its poles toward us. If the gases on Uranus are 
not in turbulent motion, but have a smooth reflecting surface, I would expect 
the solar light reflected from the polar regions of Uranus to be polarized: as 
is well known, light reflected from the poles of a magnet is polarized. 

[It is generally thought that the magnetic field of the earth does not 
sensitively reach the moon. 
But there is a way to find out whether it does or not. The moon makes daily 
rocking movements —  librations of latitude, some of which are explained by no 
theory. I suggest investigating whether these unaccounted librations are 
synchronized with the daily revolutions of the magnetic poles of the earth 
around its geographical poles.] 

C. Paine —  Gaposchkin of Harvard who in the last years has written many long 
articles against the theory of worlds in Collision, in which she asserted that 
the celestial bodies could not possibly possess electrostatic charges enough to 
produce any of the [observed] effects on motion within 
the solar system," now makes, in the September 1953 issue of Scientific 
American, this confession: 

"Ten years ago in our hypotheses of cosmic evolution we were thinking in terms 
of gravitation and light 

 On April 5, 1955, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Dr. 
Bernard F. Burke and Dr. Kenneth L. Franklin, of the Department of Terrestrial 
Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution, announced the unexpected discovery of 
strong radio noises arising from Jupiter. 
They found it difficult to explain the phenomenon, since no radio noises were 
expected from planets. The above sentence in the lecture to the Forum, 
predicting noises from Jupiter, was In the typescript of the draft of the 
lecture as deposited in January 1954 with Professor V. 
Bargmann of Princeton University, and also as edited by the staff of Doubleday & 
Company in the summer of 1954, eight months before the discovery. 

Pressure.
 Tomorrow we may contemplate a galaxy that is essentially a gravitating, 
turbulent electromagnet. 
There will be more concessions as time goes on. Our sun and its planets are not 
outside a galaxy; they are not unique or an exception in the plan of the 
universe. 

I like to tell this story. Once, in the twilight hour, a visitor came to my 
study, a distinguished —  looking gentleman. He brought me a manuscript dealing 
with celestial mechanics. After a glance at some of the pages, I had the feeling 
that this was the work of a mathematical genius. I 
entered into conversation with my visitor and mentioned the name of James Clerk 
Maxwell. My guest asked: "Who is he?" Embarrassed, I answered: "You know, the 
scientist who gave a theoretical explanation of the experiments of Faraday. 

And who is Faraday? inquired the stranger. 

In growing embarrassment i said: "Of course, the man who did the pioneer work in 
electromagnetism." 

"And what is electromagnetism?" asked the gentleman. 

"What is your name?" I inquired. 

He answered: "Isaac Newton." 

I awoke. On my knees was an open volume: Newton's.
This story is told to illustrate what I have said before. Would you listen to 
anybody discuss the mechanics of the spheres who does not know the elementary 
physical forces existing in nature? 
But this is the position adopted by astronomers who acclaim as infallible a 
celestial mechanics conceived in the 1660s in which electricity and magnetism 
play not the slightest role. 

In the fields of archaeology, geology, and astronomy the last few years have 
brought a vast array of facts to corroborate the claim made in Worlds in 
Collision that there were physical upheavals of a global character in historical 
times; that these catastrophes were caused by extraterrestrial agents; and that 
the nature of these agents may be identified. Although I arrived 
at results in conflict with orthodox beliefs, yet recent years have disclosed 
new observations and findings, all in support and none in refutation. 

What I want to impress upon you is that science today, as in the days of Newton, 
lies before us as a great uncharted ocean, and we have not yet sailed very far 
from the coast of ignorance. In the study of the human soul we nave learned only 
a few mechanisms of behavior as directed from the subconscious mind, but we do 
not know what thinking is or what memory is. And in 
biology we do not know what life is. The age of basic discoveries is not yet at 
its end, and you are not latecomers, for whom no fundamentals are left to 
discover. As I see so many of you today, I visualize some of you, ten or twenty 
or thirty years from now, as fortunate discoverers, those of you who possess 
inquisitive and challenging minds, the will to persist, and an urge to 
store knowledge. Don't be afraid to face facts, and never lose your ability to 
ask the questions! 
Why? and How? Be in this hke a child. 

Don't be afraid of ridicule; think of the history of all great discoveries. I 
quote Alfred North Whitehead: 


"If you have had your attention directed to the novelties of thought in your own 
lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain 
aspect of foolishness when they are first produced." 



Therefore, dare. 

And should even the great ones of your age try to discourage you, think of the 
greatest scientist of antiquity, Archimedes, who jeered at the theory of 
Aristarchus, twenty —  five years his senior, that the earth revolves around the 
sun. Untruth in science may live for centuries, and you may not see yourself 
vindicated, but dare. 

Don't persist in your idea if the facts are against it; but do persist if you 
see facts gathering on your side. It may be that even the strongest opposition, 
that of figures, will crumble before the facts. The greatest mathematician who 
ever walked on these shores, Simon Newcomb, proved in 1903 that a flying machine 
carrying a pilot is a mathematical impossibility. In the same year of 
1903 the Wright brothers, without mathematics, but by a fact, proved him wrong. 

In religion, the great revelations and the great authorities,  —  the founding 
fathers —  belong to the past, and the older the authority, the greater it is. 
In science, unlike religion, the great revelations lie in the future; the coming 
generations are the authorities,  and the pupil is greater than the 
master, if he has the gift to see things anew. 

All fruitful ideas have been conceived in the minds of the nonconformists, for 
whom the known was still unknown, and who often went back to begin where others 
passed by, sure of their way. 
The truth of today was the heresy of yesterday. 

Imagination coupled with skepticism and an ability to wonder —  if you possess 
these, bountiful nature will hand you some of the secrets out of her 
inexhaustible store. The pleasure you will experience in discovering truth will 
repay you for your work; don't expect other compensation, because it may not 
come. Yet, dare. 


*   *   *

extra-terrestrials confirmations of Velikovsky’s ideas by physical contacts:

http://galactic.no/rune/destroyercometorigin.htm
 
 http://galactic.no/rune/semjeng6.html 




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