Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883)

I read Ignatius Donnelly’s Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel for the comet, the gravel, the dates, the myths he lines up, and every sentence in this book that names Atlantis. The copy is the Appleton edition. The title page prints New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1, 3, and 5 Bond Street, 1883, and under his name, author of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. It is illustrated. The epigraph is from Cuvier, on man before the great revolutions of the earth, and on bones under the present seas. The copyright page says Copyright by D. Appleton and Company, 1882. I take the year from the title page. The book is out of copyright. The quotations below are his sentences.

The scan is the Duke University Library copy, Glenn Negley Collection of Utopian Literature, digitized by the Internet Archive. Printed page 1, the opening of Part I, is file page 15. A printed page number is that file page minus 14. The title page, the copyright page, and the first contents page have no printed number. The second contents page is numbered iv. The after-word ends on printed page 441. The index runs from printed page 444 to 452, where the book prints The End.

There is no separate preface. He opens on the Drift. I am not carrying claims over from Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. Where this book repeats one, or argues with one, I say so, and I leave the rest of that book alone. For Plato’s own island and the priests of Sais, see Timaeus & Critias. What follows is only what this volume states.

The book at a glance

• Title: Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel.
• Author: Ignatius Donnelly, named on the title page as the author of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.
• Edition I read: New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1, 3, and 5 Bond Street, 1883. Illustrated. Copyright page, 1882.
• Length: Four parts and thirty-three chapters. The Drift, eight chapters, pp. 1 to 62. The Comet, four chapters, pp. 63 to 112. The Legends, thirteen chapters, pp. 113 to 340. Conclusions, eight chapters, including the after-word, pp. 341 to 441. Index, pp. 444 to 452.
• What he claims: The sheet of clay, sand, gravel, and scratched stones called the Drift was not made by waves, icebergs, glaciers, or a continental ice-sheet. A comet brought the heat, the clay, and the gravel, and the myths remember the order of what followed: fire, caves, darkness, cold, floods, and the return of the sun. He puts the Drift about thirty thousand years ago, from the recession of Niagara, and Noah’s Deluge somewhere from eight to eleven thousand years ago, with about twenty thousand years between them on the plain of Atlantis.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• The gravel is the Drift, and a comet brought it. Till, or hard-pan, is the lower unstratified clay. Above it is bowlder-clay, then looser gravel worked by water. The till has almost no fossils. He rejects waves, icebergs, glaciers, and a mile-thick ice-sheet, then says a comet would meet the requirements: sudden heat, material from above, clay and gravel with none of the earth’s fossils, cyclones, and cracks in the crust (pp. 63, 64).
• One side of the earth. If the debris had taken twenty-four hours to fall, the turning earth would have taken it everywhere. He thinks it fell at once, on the side that faced the comet, and he reads the striae as coming from the north (pp. 93, 97).
• The name Ragnarok. From Anderson he gives “the darkness of the gods,” regin and rokr. He prefers Icelandic, Danish, and Swedish regn, rain, and rok, smoke or dust: a rain of dust. The clay came first as dust. Some Indian legends, he says, call it ashes (p. 141).
• The myth order he insists on. Poisonous gases, caves, fire, the earth split, rain, then floods. After that, darkness, ice, and the sun brought back. He says the legends do not agree in the costume of the monster. They agree on the monster in the air, the heat, the fire, the caves, the darkness, and the return of the light (pp. 135, 253).
• The Toltec gravel sentence. In the Codex Chimalpopoca, the third sun, Quia-Tonatiuh, sun of rain, had a rain of fire, and a rain of gravel. Sandstone and the tetzontli boiled, and rocks of vermilion color rose. The year is Ce Tecpatl, One Flint. The day is Nahui-Quiahuitl, Fourth Rain. Men were turned into goslings (pp. 166, 167).
• His dates, stated together on p. 404. Geologists, on the recession of the Falls of Niagara, put the Drift about thirty thousand years ago. That nearly accords, he says, with the time he takes from Job’s constellations. Noah’s Deluge was somewhere from eight to eleven thousand years ago. About twenty thousand years came between, and those are the “myriads of years” he assigns to Plato’s plain of Atlantis.
• Job’s two figures. A calculation from the precession, one degree in seventy-one and a half years, puts Job’s trial at 2338 B.C. George Smith, on the Septuagint, puts Job, or the book, from 2650 B.C. to 2250 B.C. Or the events may have been 25,740 years before that date (p. 278).
• Atlantis in this book, not borrowed silently. He first says the legends look to an island east of America and west of Europe (p. 126), without the name. He then calls Bifrost a prolongation of land from Atlantis to Europe (p. 161). The Tahoe flood is not, he says, the one he supposed elsewhere to be the destruction of Atlantis, because the traditions speak of several deluges (p. 167). Later he says the island was Atlantis, Ovid’s land of Neptune, Poseidon, and of Atlas (p. 375). The land of Nod may have been Od, Ad, Atlantis, and Odin’s name may have come from Od (p. 368). The Azores are the mountain-tops. The ridge from the British Islands to Atlantis goes down in Ragnarok (p. 382). Job’s cave, Phaeton’s fall, Adam’s fields, the plain of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the deaths of Odin, Thor, and Citli are placed there (p. 388).
• What he withdraws from the earlier book. An objection he prints asks whether he had supposed, in Atlantis, that ridges from Atlantis shut off the Gulf Stream and so caused the Glacial Age. He answers that the ridges mattered to climate after the Drift, by standing or sinking, but that they do not account for the clay, the gravel, the heat, or the downfall of water (p. 396).
• A second Atlantis, not his island. Quoting Geikie on Lower Silurian blocks in the south of Scotland, he prints the suggestion that those bowlders may have come from some ancient Atlantis, transported by ice (p. 434). That is Geikie’s ice, not Donnelly’s comet, and it is a geological aside.

Part I, Chapter I. The Characteristics of the Drift

He starts from the stratified rocks, ten to twenty miles thick by the geologists’ estimate, and sets them aside. The subject is the Drift on top of them. A well may go through a foot or two of soil and then through fifty, one hundred, five hundred, or eight hundred feet of sand, gravel, and clay before the stratified rocks. It covers continents. It is the soil, the roadbed, and the ground under cities.

The lower part, the till in Scotland and the hard-pan elsewhere, is unstratified. Strata in it, he says, are such as a tempest might make in a dust-heap. James Geikie, Dana, and the American Cyclopaedia are his witnesses for a confused mass of clay, sand, gravel, and scratched stones. The till is also, in his claim, without fossils of a life that existed while it was laid. Shells, where they occur, belong to the close of the glacial period, in bowlder-clay that rests on the eroded till. Lyell is quoted that even the stratified drift is commonly without fossils over large areas of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and the northern hemisphere. The till is so tough that engineers would rather cut rock. Above it lies bowlder-clay, with larger stones. One at Bradford, Massachusetts, he gives as 4,500,000 pounds. Many on Cape Cod are twenty feet across. One at Whitingham, Vermont, is forty-three feet long by thirty feet high. Some of the stone is not found within two hundred miles. Above that, looser gravel, sand, and stones, mixed with remains of man and other animals, look later, and look worked by water and ice. He adds no Atlantis sentence. The chapter is the gravel itself, and the claim that the action was violent and continental.

Part I, Chapter II. The Origin of the Drift not known

He says no accepted origin meets the case. Figuier is quoted that no hypothesis explains the cataclysms or the glacial phenomena, and that science should be willing to say it does not know. Geikie is quoted that many geologists cannot yet be persuaded that till formed under ice. A writer in the Popular Science Monthly for July 1876 is quoted that the facts seem incompatible with any theory that makes the Ice period only a series of earthly causes, and that this strengthens those who look to cosmical causes. He lists four theories, in the order he will take them: great waves and floods, icebergs, glaciers, and a continental ice-sheet. No date, no myth, and no Atlantis.

Part I, Chapter III. The Action of Waves

The first students of the deposits, he says, took them for the Noachic Deluge, called the Drift the Diluvium, and called the time the Diluvial age. The supposed cause was a series of gigantic waves from the far north, “waves of translation,” sweeping mountain and valley. He rejects them. No cause is assigned for waves high enough to leave the marks three thousand feet above the Baltic, four thousand feet high in the Grampians, and six thousand feet high in New England. Sea-waves would have left marine shells, fish, seals, and whales. The unstratified Drift has none. Dana is quoted that over the interior of the continent it contains no marine fossils or relics. Geikie is quoted that not a single trace of any marine organism has been detected in true till. Beaches and rivers could not supply continental sheets hundreds of feet deep, and they do not make the striated stones of the till. The waves could not groove the rocks underneath. He says the hypothesis is almost universally abandoned. The flood he is refusing here is the old explanation of the gravel, not yet his own reading of Noah.

Part I, Chapter IV. Was it caused by Icebergs?

Icebergs floating over sunken land, shedding Arctic debris as they melted, would carry blocks of hundreds of tons. He still rejects them. Material dropped through water would sort itself, heavy blocks below and sand on top. The till is mixed, “higgledy-piggledy, pell-mell.” A sheet dropped in the sea would lie evenly. The Drift is thicker in valleys and thin or absent on ridges, as a snow-storm falls, or as a semi-fluid mass drains into hollows. Icebergs now, he says after Croll, usually sail with no debris. Grounded bergs stay until they break or melt, so they could not score continents from mountain tops down into valleys. If the water stood six thousand feet deep in New England and four thousand feet deep in Scotland, and over the Rocky Mountains, he asks where the rest of the world and its life were. No Atlantis sentence.

Part I, Chapter V. Was it caused by Glaciers?

A glacier, for him, is a river of ice in a valley, fed by mountains and melted by the sun. It is local. It can groove rock and carry detritus, and there the likeness ends. Geikie is his witness that Alpine moraines are angular heaps, not till, and that scratched stones are in the minority. Alpine glaciers have too much water under them to gather a stony clay. Dawkins is quoted that no such clays are proved where ice-sheets have retreated, or where glaciers have left the Alps or the Pyrenees. Glaciers leave terminal moraines, not continental sheets of nearly uniform thickness. He uses Agassiz’s own picture of a terminal moraine to say it does not look like the Drift. Scratched rock is found on crests, including the Sidlaws, the Ochils, the Pentlands, and the Kilbarchan and Paisley Hills, where he cannot imagine a glacier without walls. The plains of northern Italy have neither the stony clay nor the scratched stones of Switzerland. Yet till is found in the low grounds of Switzerland, dissociated from the living glaciers, up to thirty feet. His six objections are: glaciers do not produce striated stones, do not produce drift-clay, could not form continental sheets, could not striate mountain-tops, could not reach the remote plains, and are too few for thousands of square miles of debris. No Atlantis, and no myth.

Part I, Chapter VI. Was it caused by a Continental Ice-Sheet?

This is the theory he says is then most generally accepted: from the poles to 35 or 40 degrees of latitude, a continuous sheet from one mile thick at its southern margin to three or five miles at the poles. European scratches three to four thousand feet up, and New England scratches six thousand feet up, would require ice higher than the mountains. The striae ignore coasts, so the sheet would have filled the bays, and a man might have walked from France to the north pole on ice. He says no one has explained where the ice came from, or what lifted the moisture. He denies the further supposition that the northern lands stood fifteen hundred feet higher, so that the ice could slide south, and then sank again. Croll is quoted that the greater elevation is only assumed to account for the cold, and that the geology points the other way: ice when the land was lower, and warm interglacial times when the land stood higher. H. B. Norton is quoted against lifting the whole circle inside the parallel of 40 degrees, some seven thousand miles across.

The scratches cross each other. He will argue later that the till fell at one time, so the land could not have bobbed from northeast to northwest between grooves. The north sides of hills are striated and the south sides are not. Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire, 3,250 feet (990 meters), is scarified from top to bottom on the northern and western sides, not on the southern. If cold made ice and ice made Drift, the coldest lands should have Drift. He says Siberia has none. Geikie, in The Great Ice Age (1873), is quoted that the great plains of Siberia show no glacial action comparable to the northern drift of Russia and Germany, the asar of Sweden, the kames and erratics of Britain, or the iceberg-drift of northern America, and that the river-deposits with mammalian remains still lie undisturbed at the surface. Mammoth and woolly rhinoceros may, Geikie thinks, have survived in northern Asia to a comparatively recent date. Geikie’s dry-climate explanation is, for Donnelly, worse than the puzzle: enough moisture for ice one to three miles thick in Europe and America, and none for northern Asia.

The Drift is not everywhere in Europe either. Figuier finds glacial traces in the north of Europe, Russia, Iceland, Norway, Prussia, the British Islands, part of northern Germany, and some parts of the south of Spain. Edouard Collomb finds only a shred in France. In North America, J. D. Whitney’s driftless region in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota has no drift, no clays, no gravel, and no rock striae, while the country around it is covered, and the extinct mammals lie in the surface-wash. No traces of northern drift are found in California. Foster, he says, did not extend the Drift to Oregon, and some do not take it much beyond the western boundary of Iowa. Yet Siberia still holds mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison, and horse in ice, which he will treat as formed at the coming of the Drift age. An ice-belt to 35 or 40 degrees would, he argues, have killed the life of the uncovered belt. He then says the Drift itself reaches the tropics, so an ice-sheet there would have ended pre-glacial life, and it did not. Winchell found pebble deposits one hundred feet thick at Jackson, in southern Alabama, and drift-deposits to the Gulf of Mexico. His conclusion is that the Drift is not found where ice must have been, and is found where ice could not have been. No Atlantis sentence. The mammoth and the driftless region are the comparisons I would keep beside other ice-age writers.

Part I, Chapter VII. The Drift a Gigantic Catastrophe

The world the Drift fell on was, for him, a garden. The climate was mild enough that plants now called tropical grew inside the Arctic Circle. He expects oranges and bananas, as fossils, if land is found at the pole. A writer in the Popular Science Monthly for October 1878 is used for a golden age of animals and plants about the site of New York, then a change more complete than language can describe. The Miocene had beeches, maples, walnuts, poplars, and magnolias in Greenland and Spitzbergen. Dr. Dawson is quoted for beeches, oaks, pines, poplars, maples, walnuts, magnolias, limes, and vines at Atane-Kerdluk, north Greenland, latitude 70 degrees, more than a thousand feet above the sea, and similar plants in Spitzbergen at latitude 78 degrees 56 minutes. Sir Edward Belcher brought a tree from Wellington Channel, latitude 75 degrees 32 minutes, roots in place. Trees four feet in circumference stood on Prince Patrick’s Island, latitude 76 degrees 12 minutes. Geikie allows that they may be pre-glacial and Miocene.

He says man, possibly civilized man, had lived in that summer for thousands of years, saw the calamity, and kept it in myths. The action was limited to a definite period and operated simultaneously over a vast area. Figuier is quoted for two cataclysms, a sudden submersion, then sudden cold from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and the Danube, over plains that had held elephants, the horse, the hippopotamus, and great carnivores. Martins is quoted for a shock that displaced the poles and changed the inclination of the axis. Mammoth carcasses in the frozen north look to him, after Cuvier and Wrangel, as if the animals perished suddenly and were enveloped in ice at the moment of death. Palaeolithic man, the man of rude flint, contemporary with mammoth, hippopotamus, and rhinoceros, was stamped out in Europe, and the caves show a long interval before he reappeared. In Siberia there was no such smashing, and he even reports a Russian exile who, within the last two or three years before the book, declared he had seen living mammoths. The three points he asks the reader to keep are: a world-convulsing catastrophe, sudden, and fallen on a forest-covered inhabited land in perpetual summer. He does not yet name Atlantis. The “central land” comes in the next part.

Part I, Chapter VIII. Great Heat a Prerequisite

Agassiz is quoted that science has no clew to the sudden change of climate. A shift of the axis from mountain-building is set aside with Geikie: the equatorial bulge dwarfs any such mountains. Donnelly’s chain is: ice requires snow, snow requires clouds, clouds require evaporation, evaporation requires heat. Tyndall, Croll, and Lubbock are quoted to the same paradox, that cold will not produce glaciers without vapor, and that the primary cause may be greater heat in the tropics. Frankland’s hot ocean, heated by internal fires, is rejected because Lubbock shows the glacial sea-fauna was Arctic, not boiling. A writer in July 1876 is quoted against submarine volcanoes in the tropics as the source of the moisture. Thomas Belt is cited for the claim that ice-sheets at the poles must have lowered the oceans of the world two thousand feet. The ice, then, was not the cause. It was a secondary consequence. The solution of the Drift is heat, not cold. No myth yet, and no Atlantis. This is the step that lets him bring in the comet.

Part II, Chapter I. A Comet caused the Drift

Water and ice were associated with the Drift and did not produce it. He states five requirements. Something instantaneously increased the heat, vaporized the seas, and supplied rain, snow, and ice. Something from above smashed the surface rocks and scattered them for hundreds of miles. Something brought vast masses of clay and gravel that contain none of the earth’s fossils, marked in a way not found elsewhere on earth. Something made cyclones beyond ordinary nature. Something external cracked the crust so that the molten interior boiled up. Then he answers himself.

Would a comet meet all these prerequisites?

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 64

I think it would.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 64

No date is fixed in this chapter, and Atlantis is not named.

Part II, Chapter II. What is a Comet?

He argues that comets are not mere smoke. Padre Secchi, watching Donati’s comet of 1858 from 15 to 22 October, saw the nucleus throw out brilliant masses twisted backward. He stacks the recorded close approaches: the comet of 1774, Lexell in 1767 and 1779, Biela’s comet in 1832, the comet of 1843 with a tail he gives as one hundred and fifty million miles, the great comet of 1811, Winnecke’s and Brorsen’s comets, Coggia’s comet of 1874, Swift’s faint comet of 10 October 1880, which at nearest was 0.13 of the earth’s distance from the sun and returns in eleven years, or in 1891, and the comet of 22 June 1881, distant 0.28 at nearest. Five comets were discovered in 1881. The period of the comet of July 1844 has been estimated at not less than one hundred thousand years. The chapter is the astronomical permission for a collision. His own question, at the end, is whether in the last thirty thousand, fifty thousand, or one hundred thousand years one of these bodies may not have struck the earth. That is a range, not yet the Niagara date. No myth, and no Atlantis.

Part II, Chapter III. Could a Comet strike the Earth?

He answers yes, from the number of comets and from orbits that already cross or graze the earth’s path. Biela’s comet and Lexell’s comet are the cases he leans on: a comet can be perturbed, split, and brought near. I do not treat the orbital arithmetic as a finding beyond that permission. The chapter adds no gravel myth and no Atlantis sentence. It is the bridge to the consequences.

Part II, Chapter IV. The Consequences to the Earth

This is the order he says the legends will repeat. He cannot say whether the head fell into the sun, or close to it, as with the comet of 1843, and the tail, hundreds of millions of miles long, swept the earth, or whether the comet struck head on and changed the inclination of the axis. In the tail-sweep, the facing side intercepts stones, gravel, and dust that water compacts into clay. The tail of the great comet of 1811, from Schellen, was nearly fourteen million miles broad and one hundred and sixteen million miles long. The earth, which he gives as 7,925 miles (12754 kilometers) wide, would make a bullet-hole through such a tail, and in that moment the facing side might be covered with hundreds of feet of debris. A head-on shock might also explain the fiords, the trap-rocks, and the basins of the Great Lakes. Lake Superior, he says, is nine hundred feet deep, and an ice-sheet would have dug such holes everywhere if it could dig them at all. Lyell is used to deny that glaciers cut those basins, and to deny that the crust simply sank, because the strata under the lakes are continuous. The lake belt runs from the northwestern United States through the Hudson Bay Territory, Canada, and Maine, to Finland, and does not reach below 50 degrees north in Europe or 40 degrees in America. The striae, he says, show the comet came from the north.

Donati’s comet was estimated by Faye and Roche at about one seven-hundredth of the bulk of the earth, which Faye compared to a sea of forty thousand square miles, one hundred and nine yards deep. Donnelly supposes a larger comet. The Drift on one side of the globe, matching his frontispiece and the map on p. 93, means it fell at once. Twenty-four hours of falling would have wrapped the whole earth, because of the daily revolution. He gives the speed as three hundred and sixty-six miles a second, twenty-one thousand six hundred miles a minute, and 1,296,000 miles (2085704 kilometers) an hour. “Crag and tail” is a wind-drift shape, not the fold of plastic ice. In England, ninety-four percent of the stones in the bowlder-clay are strangers to the drainage where they lie.

Heat is the other half. Guillemin is quoted that an incandescent nucleus could raise the air enough to calcine living beings in a passage of many days through a furnace. A comet falling into the sun could feed the sun’s light. Proctor’s new stars of 1866 and 1876 are the comparison: even a hundred-fold increase in the sun would destroy life. He also allows a chemical fire. Of forty-five miles of atmosphere, one fifth is oxygen. A shock that sent more oxygen downward, or that split water into the gases which make the hottest blow-pipe flame, would wrap things in flame. The heat may have preceded the gravel by minutes or hours, softened the rocks, and baked the till so hard it will not blast. Hartt found surface-rocks under the Drift, in Brazil and near New York, decomposed from a few inches to a hundred feet, feldspar turned to slate and mica parted from its iron. Heusser and Clarez suppose nitric acid. Donnelly calls this the conflagration the legends describe.

The spectra of Winnecke’s comet and Brorsen’s comet, both in 1868, match burning carbon. Carbureted hydrogen, the miners’ fire-damp, burns yellow, and some legends, he says, speak of the comet’s yellow hair. Mixed with air it explodes. That is his account of the world-appalling noises. Then the scene he will hunt in the myths: a storm of stones, gravel, and clay-dust, hundreds of feet thick, cyclones, rivers and the ocean evaporating, survivors in caves, animals with them. An Arabian legend, he says, indicates years of heat. After the stones stop, the survivors look on a blasted world, no clouds, no rivers, the sun a ball of fire. That, he says, is the Norse legend of Mimer’s well, where Odin gave an eye for a drink. Condensation follows. The heat has carried up perhaps one fourth of all the water. The clouds steal the sun. “Darkness is on the face of the deep.” Rain turns to snow. He refuses a mile-thick sheet to the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Mexico. He allows glaciers in the valleys, and an arctic flora and fauna in the temperate regions, meaning only that the varieties which could stand the cold survived. People wander, eating bark, dead animals, and one another. For days, weeks, months, years, the rain and snow fall, and the light returns. “And the evening and the morning were the first day.” Floods cut the Drift into the stratified, secondary, or Champlain drift. The survivors have lost the cardinal points, build fires, and make human sacrifices to bring the sun back. They burn or cast down the animal gods of the pre-glacial time, and sun-worship begins. The Tertiary summer is gone. Every later comet would, he says, end in a glacial age that would pass away. He notes that some geologists assert several Ice periods, one as far back as the Devonian. The close of the chapter turns to man and the myths. Atlantis is not named yet. The order of events is the list I would set beside any other comet-myth writer.

Part III, Chapter I. The Nature of Myths

Primitive minds, he says, repeat. A tale at a million hearth-fires is not rewritten by one clever teller. When children ask where it happened, the teller points at a local mountain or a local cave, so the story loses its geography. An old name that means something else in the new language forces a new explanation. A hundred years before his own time, written history was trusted and legends were despised. He defends Ossian against Johnson on that ground. Then collectors went into Hindoo villages, German cottages, Highland huts, and Indian tepees, and found the same stories. He lists the German, Gaul, Gael, Greek, Roman, Hindoo, Persian, Egyptian, Arabian, and the red people of America as having once dwelt under one roof and used one language. Legend’s enemy is civilization, and then the poets. Ovid’s conflagration and Tennyson’s Arthur are, for him, a hippopotamus smothered in flowers. American Indian legends stay closer to the events. European myths survive, garbled, among peasants.

A universal myth, he concludes, rests on a fact, and probably dates from before the races that tell it had separated. Geography and chronology cannot be trusted. Ararats and Olympuses are everywhere. Europe has fastened the oldest heroes of the Sagas, the Eddas, and the Nibelungen Lied onto Barbarossa, Charlemagne, Boabdil, Charles V, William Tell, Arthur, Robin Hood, Wallace, and St. Patrick. The mind cannot invent a wholly new fact. The dragon is the memory of the pterodactyl. Sindbad’s roc is the dinornis. Winged beasts breathing fire are a recollection of the comet. It is impossible, he says, that the whole world preserved traditions of a comet, great heat, conflagration, cave-life, an age of darkness, and the return of the sun, if those things never occurred. This chapter states the rule he will use. It names no Atlantis.

Part III, Chapter II. Did Man exist before the Drift?

If man did not live before the Drift, no myth of it could come down. He says man had already spread to Scotland, England, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Africa, Palestine, India, and the United States. Dawkins is quoted that the palaeolithic hunter of the mid and late Pleistocene river-deposits in Britain is probably pre-glacial, and that man was in the lower Thames before the Arctic mammals fully possessed it and before the big-nosed rhinoceros was extinct. A human fibula from Victoria Cave, near Settle, Yorkshire, identified by Busk, lay under stiff glacial clay with ice-scratched bowlders. Geikie calls that direct proof of men in England before the last inter-glacial period.

At St. Acheul, near Amiens, Lubbock’s section is: brick earth four to five feet, a thin angular gravel, sandy marl five to six feet, then partly rounded gravel on the chalk, and the flint implements especially in the lower part of that gravel. Graves of the early Christian period, made fifteen hundred years ago, cut the upper beds. Mammoth, wild bull, deer, horse, rhinoceros, and reindeer lie near the bottom with the flints. All the fossils are land animals. A jaw at Moulinguignon, and a skull and bones in the Seine valley found by Bertrand, are added, and palaeolithic flints in the lowest part of the Shrub Hill gravel in England. The Engis skull, from the cave of Engis near Liege, is Huxley’s “fair average human skull,” which might have belonged to a philosopher or a savage. The Neanderthal skull, near Hochdal, between Dusseldorf and Elberfeld, is the brute. Donnelly asks the reader to remember both when he comes to a California legend of the daughter of the gods married to a son of the grizzly bears.

On this page he states the island without the name Atlantis. The legends on both sides of the Atlantic look to some central land, east of America and west of Europe, an island of the ocean, where a godlike race dwelt, and where alone, it would seem, the race was preserved to repeople the earth, while the Neanderthal people were crushed. He says the great southern mammals perished in Europe when the Drift came, that the two skulls are mixed with those bones, and that the skulls therefore belong to men who lived during or before the Drift age. After the English caves had been occupied for untold ages, palaeolithic man disappeared, and with him many animals now locally or wholly extinct. Twelve feet of stalagmite formed while man was absent. Above it, neolithic, bronze, iron, and historic remains appear, with a sharp break and no passage.

Man is also traced below the Drift. Stone implements and cuttings on bone in the upper Pliocene at St. Prest, near Chartres, with Elephas meridionalis, an elephant wholly lacking in the Drift. In the lower Miocene, stone knives and bone-cuttings at Thenay, Marne-et-Loire, and at Billy, Allier. J. D. Whitney reports similar finds in California. The American Naturalist for 1873 is quoted for E. L. Berthoud’s fire-places, rude stone monuments, and implements along Crow Creek, Colorado, in a deposit as old as the Pliocene and perhaps the Miocene. The Scientific American for 1880 is quoted for a skull, ribs, vertebrae, and collar-bone, with two flint arrow-heads and charcoal, eighteen feet down in Franklin County, Missouri, and more bones at twenty-four feet, on what may have been a bed of twigs in a cave in the Lower Silurian sandstone. Donnelly reads the six feet of separation as a man torn apart by the world-tempest. The Calaveras skull was found in a shaft one hundred and fifty feet deep, under five beds of lava and volcanic tufa and four beds of auriferous gravel. A polished syenite plummet was found thirty feet down in the San Joaquin Valley. In Louisiana, pottery six inches thick, with matting and baskets, lay twelve feet down, under what Foster believes to be Drift strata. The chapter’s Atlantis-related sentence is the unnamed central island. The name comes later.

Part III, Chapter III. Legends of the Coming of the Comet

He sorts legends by the stage of the event, and warns that one legend may cover several stages.

The second Hindoo avatar, from Maurice: a being shaped like a boar, white and exceedingly small, issued from the essence of Brahma and in one hour grew to the size of the largest elephant, and remained in the air. It uttered a sound like the loudest thunder. Shaking its mane, erecting the hairs of its body, showing two exceedingly white tusks and wine-colored eyes, it descended and plunged head-foremost into the water, and the sea rose in waves. Donnelly reads the mane as the comet’s hair, and the noise as carbureted hydrogen exploding in the air. He compares Lockyer’s description of Coggia’s comet, a fan-shaped head with ear-like appendages.

The Zendavesta, through Faber: an age of innocence, which he takes for the Tertiary climate, then a man-bull on an elevated region, then Ahriman, who visited heaven and descended as a serpent. The man-bull was poisoned and died, and the universe was thrown into chaos. He reads the poison as comet gas.

The ancient Britons, from Mythology of the British Druids: a pestilential wind, a pure poison, every blast death. The patriarch and his company were shut in an enclosure with a strong door, which Donnelly glosses as the cave. A tempest of fire split the earth to the great deep. Lake Llion burst its bounds. The sea rose around Britain. Rain poured, and the waters covered the earth. He numbers the order: gases, caves, fire, the earth cleft and the trap-rocks, rain, floods.

The Greek account is Hesiod. Comets come in pairs or threes. Biela’s comet divided. The great comet of 1811 had a companion. Ephoras, in the fourth century before Christ, recorded a comet separating, and Seneca thought it incredible. Chinese annals record three comets together in the year 896, and two in Hercules on 27 June, A.D. 416. Earth gave Cronus a large sickle of white iron, jagged, and he wounded Heaven. Night bore Destiny, black Fate, Death, and Nemesis, and also Echidna, half nymph and half huge serpent, and with Typhaon she bore the Chimera, three-headed, breathing fire. Typhon, or Typhoeus, had a hundred serpent heads, fire from the eyes, and voices of a bull, a lion, whelps, and a hiss. Olympus trembled. Earth, heaven, and sea were boiling. Jove smote him. The monster fell, lamed, and the earth melted. Pindar is added: the head reached the stars, the hands from east to west, serpents about the middle, a hundred snakes for fingers, and Jupiter buried him under Etna. Donnelly’s reading is two or three comets, fire, earthquake, and the broken monster burning in the mountains. No Atlantis name.

Part III, Chapter IV. Ragnarok

The Scandinavian record, he says, has been translated and criticized and never understood. It has been taken for a rhapsody, or for a prophecy. He takes it as history.

According to Professor Anderson's etymology of the word, it means "the darkness of the gods"; from regin, gods, and rokr, darkness; but it may, more properly, be derived from the Icelandic, Danish, and Swedish regn, a rain, and rok, smoke, or dust; and it may mean the rain of dust, for the clay came first as dust; it is described in some Indian legends as ashes.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 141

First, as in the Druid tradition, an age of crime. The Vala, in the Elder Edda, sees murderers, perjurers, and seducers wading in heavy streams. Brothers slay brothers. There are sword-ages, axe-ages, storm-ages, murder-ages. There are three winters, or years, of great wars. Then a wolf devours the sun, which he reads as the comet striking the sun or seeming to, and another wolf devours the moon, because comets come in couples or triplets. The stars hurled from heaven are the blazing debris. The earth shakes, trees are torn up, mountains topple. The Fenris-wolf gets loose: one comet. The Midgard-serpent writhes and the sea rushes over the earth: another comet. The ship Naglfar, made of the nails of dead men, floats in the flood, steered by the giant Hrym. He thinks the nail-ship is a later interpolation, and so is the later note about shoe-leather for Vidar’s shoe. The wolf’s upper jaw reaches heaven and the lower jaw is on the earth: the comet from earth to sun, and the tail beyond the earth. Fire flashes from his eyes and nostrils. The Midgard-serpent vomits venom and stands side by side with the wolf: poison gas, and two comets moving like Biela’s fragments.

The sons of Muspelheim ride through a rent in the heavens. Anderson’s Muspelheim is an abode of fire, a day of judgment. Surt rides first, with flames burning before and after, and a sword brighter than the sun. Donnelly takes Surt for the blazing nucleus, and compares him to the Egyptian Set, who destroys the sun. They ride over Bifrost and it breaks. Here he defines Bifrost, still without pressing the name Atlantis: a prolongation of land westward from Europe, connecting the British Islands with the island-home of the gods, or the godlike race. He cites Thomas Butler Gunn on Lyonnesse and Cornish stories of household relics at low tide, and Tennyson’s lines on a land upheaven from the abyss. The Edda may mean, he says, that the comet strikes west of Europe and crushes that bridge.

The battle is on the plain Vigrid, one hundred miles, or rasts, on each side. Fenris-wolf, Midgard-serpent, Loke, Hrym, the Frost giants, and the friends of Hel, the goddess of death, possess the plain. He thinks the legends were afterward dispersed from this civilized center. Heimdal, guardian of the bridge, blows the Gjallar-horn. Odin rides to Mimer’s well. The ash Ygdrasil quivers. He glosses Ygdrasil as the tree of life, the tree on the pyramid in the island-birthplace of the Aztec race, and the tree of the Hindoo legends. Odin, in a golden helmet, with the spear Gungner, goes against the Fenris-wolf. Thor fights the Midgard-serpent, slays it, and dies of the venom. Frey falls to Surt because he lacks the sword he gave Skirner. The dog Garm, another comet, loosed from the Gnipa-cave, kills Tyr and is killed. The wolf swallows Odin. Vidar rends the wolf. Loke and Heimdal kill each other. Surt flings fire over the earth and burns up all the world.

The Elder Edda adds the eagle tearing corpses, mountains dashing together, the sun growing dark, the earth sinking into the sea, the stars vanishing, and fire against heaven. Ice and cold follow, though the Edda narrates the winters first. The Fimbul winter is the mighty, the great, the iron winter: snow from all quarters, severe frosts, keen winds, no joy in the sun, three such winters in succession without an intervening summer. He calls these three years the Glacial period which followed the Drift. The Fenris-wolf stains the seats of the gods with red blood, which he reads as iron-stained red clay, and the waters running from it the color of blood. The Younger Edda describes the venomous yeast hardening like dross, then rime, one layer of ice on another, out into Ginungagap. An eleventh-century Northmen’s name for the ocean between Greenland and Vinland, or America, is given for Ginungagap, and he says it originally meant the whole Atlantic. The north part filled with ice. The south was lighted by sparks from Muspelheim, which he takes for Africa, still too hot for clouds.

Lif and Lifthraser lie hid in Hodmimer’s hold, or holt. The morning dew is their food. From them the races are descended. Holt may be a grove or a cave. He insists this is history, not a day of judgment still to come. Vidar and Vale also escape, and dwell on the plains of Ida, where Asgard was. The sons of Thor, Mode and Magne, bring Mjolner, Thor’s hammer, which he reads as the works of the old civilization. Balder, the sun, and Hoder, the night, return from Hel. The Vala sees the earth rise a second time from the sea, completely green. The gods on Ida’s plains talk of the Midgard-serpent, the Fenris-wolf, and the ancient runes of Odin. The golden tablets are found in the grass. He reads them as inscribed tablets, the survival of writing, confirmed by the runic letters. Then the fields unsown yield their growth, ills cease, and Balder and Hoder dwell in Odin’s halls. Ragnarok is past. The Atlantis name is still withheld in this chapter. The island-home, the bridge, Asgard, and the Aztec tree are the claims I would set beside it.

Part III, Chapter V. The Conflagration of Phaeton

The Latin mythology is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, book ii. Phaeton, son of Phoebus, drives the sun’s chariot, cannot hold the horses, sets the earth on fire, and is killed by Jove, as Jove killed Typhon. Donnelly calls this a civilized mind explaining a myth and decorating it. Phoebus says that even Jupiter cannot guide the chariot, that the road is steep, and that the heavens are carried round with a constant rotation which he is carried against. Donnelly sees a glimpse of older learning mixed with the astronomy of Ovid’s day. The horses are Pyroeis, Eous, Aethon, and Phlegon. Phaeton leaves the track, the cold Triones grow warm, the Serpent by the icy pole regains its rage, and Bootes is hurried. The path, past the Great Serpent and Bootes and close to the venomous Scorpion, is compared with the orbit of Donati’s comet in 1858. The comet came from the north, which agrees with the Drift markings.

The moon wonders that her brother’s horses run lower than her own. Each high region is caught by the flames and cleft. Grass pales, trees burn, cities and nations become ashes. He lists the mountains Ovid names, from Athos, Taurus, Tmolus, Oeta, Ida, Helicon, Haemus, and Etna, through Parnassus, Eryx, Cynthus, Othrys, Rhodope, Mimas, Dindyma, Mycale, and Cithaeron, to Scythia, Caucasus, Ossa, Pindus, Olympus, the Alps, and the Apennines. The Ethiopians contract their black hue. Libya, which he glosses as possibly the Sahara, is dried. The rivers smoke or burn: Tanais, Peneus, Caicus, Ismenus, Euphrates, Orontes, Thermodon, Ganges, Phasis, Ister, Alpheus, Spercheus, Tagus, Cayster, and the Nile, which flees and hides his head, his seven mouths empty. The European rivers follow: the Rhine, the Rhone, the Po, and the Tiber. The ground bursts, and light penetrates into Tartarus. He ties that to the fiords, and says a Central American legend, given in the next chapter, has the red rocks boiling up. The ocean contracts. What was sea is parched sand. Mountains that the sea had covered start up and increase the Cyclades. Fish sink. Sea-calves float dead. Nereus, Doris, and their daughters hide in heated caverns. Neptune three times tries to lift his arms from the water and cannot bear the heat. Donnelly reads that as men retreating into the deep and lifting their heads to breathe.

The Earth, surrounded by the sea, sinks down a little. This is the first place he uses the name.

Here we are reminded of the bridge Bifrost, spoken of in the last chapter, which, as I have shown, was probably a prolongation of land reaching from Atlantis to Europe, and which the Norse legends tell us sank down under the feet of the forces of Muspelheim, in the day of Ragnarok.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 161

The Earth complains of ashes over her eyes, which he glosses as the Drift-deposits, of the plow and the harrow, of leaves for the cattle, corn for mankind, and frankincense for the gods. She asks why the seas decrease. Atlas can hardly bear the glowing heavens. Jove has neither clouds he could draw over the earth nor showers he could pour down, because the heat will not yet let clouds or rain form. He hurls the lightning, kills Phaeton, and breaks the chariot. Phaeton, flames consuming his yellow hair, is hurled headlong, as a star is seen to fall, and the great Eridanus receives him far from his country. The Hesperian Naiads bury him. One day passes without the sun. The flames of the earthly fires afford light. Donnelly says that one day, with no sun to mark time, was probably of long duration, and may have endured for years. Cycnus, king of Liguria, grieves until he becomes a swan, and haunts pools because he abhors the fire. Donnelly compares a Central American legend, still to come, that all men were turned into goslings or geese, and reads both as people who saved themselves in the water. The Sun, like a man in eclipse, refuses to go on, until the deities entreat him not to bring darkness over the world. Jupiter then examines the earth and the works of man, with especial care for his own Arcadia, restores springs and rivers, gives grass to the earth and leaves to the trees, and orders the forests to be green.

Donnelly’s stripped list is: something high in the heavens, rushing through particular constellations, with yellow hair, associated with great heat, setting the world on fire, drying the seas, its remains scattered, covering the earth with ashes, the sun ceasing to appear, then returning, and verdure with him. Man hides in the waters or in caverns. He says this accords in order with the Scandinavian legend. The oldest nation, the Egyptians, believed the Phaeton legend really represented contact with a comet. When Solon visited Egypt, six hundred years before the Christian era, he talked with the priests of Sais about the Deluge of Deucalion. Donnelly quotes Plato, Dialogues, xi, 517, Timaeus. The old priest tells Solon that the Hellenes are children. There have been and will be again many destructions of mankind. The story they preserve, of Phaethon burning the earth and dying by a thunder-bolt, has the form of a myth but signifies a declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, recurring at long intervals. Those on the mountains and in dry lofty places die more readily than those by rivers or on the sea-shore. That quotation is the close of the chapter. The Atlantis sentence in it is the Bifrost sentence on p. 161. The Sais speech is about Phaeton and repeated conflagrations, not yet about the island.

Part III, Chapter VI. Other Legends of the Conflagration

The first is written, not only told. The Codex Chimalpopoca, a sacred book of the Toltecs, in The North Americans of Antiquity, p. 499:

The third sun (or era) is called Quia-Tonatiuh, sun of rain, because there fell a rain of fire; all which existed burned; and there fell a rain of gravel.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 166

The sandstone now scattered about, and the tetzontli, which he glosses as amygdaloid, trap or basaltic rock, boiled with great tumult, and rocks of vermilion color rose. He reads the trap and the red rocks as bursting through cracks. The year is Ce Tecpatl, One Flint. The day is Nahui-Quiahuitl, Fourth Rain. Men, lost in a rain of fire, were transformed into goslings. The sun itself was on fire, and the houses were consumed. He takes the rain of gravel as the Drift falling from the comet, and the goslings as people who plunged into seas and lakes.

The Tahoe legend is next, from the Indians of California and Nevada, in Bancroft. The tribe once possessed the whole earth, then a stronger people enslaved them. The Great Spirit sent an immense wave across the continent from the sea. The remnant raised a great temple so the ruling caste would have a refuge, and worshiped a column of perpetual fire on top. This is where he separates this flood from the destruction he had assigned to Atlantis elsewhere.

It would be natural to suppose that this was the great deluge to which all the legends of mankind refer, and which I have supposed, elsewhere, to refer to the destruction of "Atlantis"; but it must be remembered that both east and west of the Atlantic the traditions of mankind refer to several deluges, to a series of catastrophes, occurring at times far apart.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 167

The Tower of Babel may be far earlier than Noah or Deucalion, or the chronology of this legend may have been inverted. Half a moon later the earth convulses. The masters shut themselves in the tower. The slaves flee to the Humboldt River in canoes. The land tosses and casts up fire, smoke, and ashes. Flames melt stars, which rain molten metal and form the ore white men seek. The Sierra is mounded up. The temple site sinks, leaving the dome above Lake Tahoe. The Great Spirit throws the oppressors into the Spirit Lodge, a cavern on the east side of the lake, until the last great volcanic burning. Donnelly keeps the tossing earth, the falling fire and debris, the flight to rivers, and the people closed in caves, and says the legend has fitted itself to local geography.

The Aztec creation-myths, taken down by Fray Andres de Olmos: the sun has risen with cruel fire and will not move until he has destroyed the gods. Citli shoots three arrows. The sun returns the last and pierces Citli’s forehead. The gods agree to die. Xolotl kills them and then himself. The sun begins to move. Tecuzistecatl, who had retired into a cave when Nanahuatzin leaped into the fire, emerges as the moon. Another version slings a rabbit into the moon’s face. Donnelly lines Citli up with Odin, Thor, Frey, Tyr, and Heimdal, and with Jove smiting Typhaon. The three arrows are the three comets, the Fenris-wolf, the Midgard-serpent, and Surt or Garm. The first missed. The second and third struck. The sun launched the last back at the earth.

The Avesta: Ahura Mazda made a warm and fertile country. Ahriman created Azhidahaka, the biting snake of winter, with triple jaws, three heads, six eyes, and the strength of a thousand beings. Thraetaona kills the snake. In the Shah-Nameh, Feridun kills the serpent-king Zohak, from whose shoulder, kissed by the demon Iblis, two serpents grew, fed daily on the brains of two children. Zohak is Azhidahaka, and also Python, Typhaon, the Fenris-wolf, and the Midgard-serpent. Persian fire-worship, he says, grows out of the Age of Darkness.

The Hindoo fight of Rama, the sun-god, whose name he ties to Ra, and Ravana, who carries off Sita. Her name signifies a furrow, agriculture, the furrowed earth. Hanuman the monkey-god helps build a stone bridge sixty miles long to the Island of Lanka. The stones that crop out through southern India are said to have been dropped by the monkey builders. The army crosses as the forces of Muspelheim crossed Bifrost. Ravana has ten heads. Rama fires the arrow of Brahma. The body is burned. Sita goes through the ordeal of fire. Rama and Sita are separated fourteen years. She is hid in the dark jungle. Then they are married again. He reads the fourteen years as the earth and the sun not seeing each other.

Apollo’s fight, in Byron’s lines and in the Greek legend, is the battle with Python, who was stealing the springs and fountains, which Donnelly reads as the heat drying the water-courses.

Among the Algonquin, Manibozho, or the Great Hare Nana, the White One, the light, the sun, has for his foe the glittering prince of serpents. Father Brebeuf, among the Hurons in 1626, gives the Iroquois twins Ioskeha and Tawiscara, the White One and the Dark One, born of a virgin mother who died bearing them. Their grandmother is the moon, At-aeusic, “she bathes herself,” from the word for water. They fight, one with the horns of a stag, one with the wild rose. The weaker flees, and his blood turns into flint-stones. The victor goes to the borders of the great ocean in the far east, whence the sun comes, becomes the father of mankind and guardian of the Iroquois, destroys the gigantic frog which had swallowed all the waters, guides the torrents into streams and lakes, stocks the woods, and learns from the great tortoise how to make fire. Donnelly reads the younger brother as another luminary, the comet, the red blood as the red clay, the flint as the fallen stones, the frog as the ice, and the tortoise as an island. The fathers of mankind dwelt in the east, on the Atlantic. The serpent holding a globe, on temple walls and in earth-mounds on both sides of the ocean, is the comet swallowing the sun, and the origin of serpent-worship.

The Tupi of Brazil, from an account of a Brazilian feast celebrated at Rouen in 1550: Monau sends tata, the divine fire. He sweeps the fire so that in places he raises mountains and in others digs valleys. Irin Mage alone is carried into heaven, and asks that the garniture of the heavens be spared. Monau pours a deluging rain, which quenches the fire and forms the ocean, the parana, the great waters. Donnelly notes that tata, fire from the supreme father, sits beside Egyptian ta-ta or pta-pta, father, and Hebrew ya-ya, from which he derives the root of Jah, Jehovah, and also da-da and daddy. He uses Jehovah there as his own derivation from ya-ya. The book of Job, later, is where the text itself prints Jehovah.

The Tacullies of British Columbia: a musk-rat dives into the universal sea and spits up the land, first an island, then the whole earth. After the earth was peopled, a fierce fire of several days’ duration destroyed all life except one man and one woman in a deep cave in a mountain, and from them the world was repeopled. He says this cannot be blamed on missionaries, because missionaries did not teach a destruction by fire and a remnant in a cave, though he will find such a legend hidden in the Bible.

The Ute, in the Popular Science Monthly for October 1879: Ta-vi, the sun, roamed the earth, scorching people when he came near and leaving them cold when he hid in his cave. Ta-wats, the hare-god, shoots arrows until the magical last arrow shivers the sun into a thousand fragments, which fall and cause a general conflagration. Ta-wats is burned away until only his head bowls across the land, his eyes burst, and the tears flood the earth and put out the fire. A council of the gods then fixes the days, nights, seasons, and years, and condemns the sun to one trail. Again the last arrow is the one that destroys the sun.

Peru: before sun and moon were made, Viracocha, the White One, rose from Lake Titicaca and presided over cities whose history is lost. The creatures he made attack him. He hurls lightning and consumes the forests. One name is At-achuchu. He came from the east and disappeared in the Western Ocean. Four civilizers, white men, also called Viracochas, emerged from the cave Pacarin Tampu, the House of Birth. In the fuller legend the first mortal, Guamansuri, seduces the sister of the Guachemines, the rayless ones or Darklings, and they destroy him. She dies giving birth to two eggs, the sun and moon, from which come Apocatequil and Piguerao. Apocatequil slays the Darklings and, directed by At-achuchu, releases the Indians from the soil with a golden spade, which Donnelly reads as digging them from a cave. Thunder and lightning are stones hurled with his sling. The thunder-bolts that fall are small, round, smooth stones, kept in the villages for fertility and protection from lightning.

The Takahlis of the North Pacific, the Yurucares of the Bolivian Cordilleras, and the Mbocobi of Paraguay each attribute the destruction of the world to a general conflagration, everything living consumed except a few who took refuge in a deep cave. The Botocudos of Brazil believed the world was once destroyed by the moon falling upon it.

The Ojibway boy, his bird-skin coat spoiled by the sun, catches the sun in a noose of his sister’s hair so that it does not rise. The animals have no light. The dormouse, then the largest animal in the world, which Donnelly glosses as possibly the mastodon, undertakes to cut the cord. He does not finish every American variant in a single list, but the chapter’s method is the same from here: a battle of light and a monster, fire from the sky, stones or blood falling, a cave or a water-refuge, and the sun restored. The Atlantis sentences in this chapter are the one that refuses to make the Tahoe wave the Atlantis deluge, and the comparison of Rama’s bridge with Bifrost, which does not yet say the word Atlantis.

Part III, Chapter VII. Legends of the Cave-Life

Man escaped the fire, the gases, and the falling stones and clay-dust only in the water or in deep caves, and so the races say they came up out of the earth. The Toltecs and Aztecs trace themselves to the seven caves. The Peruvians emerge from Pacarin-Tampu. Nanahuatzin took refuge in a cave. The Yurucares, the Takahlis, and the Mbocobi hid from the conflagration in a cave. The Tahoe tyrants were buried in one. The Bungogees and Pankhoos, hill tribes of Chittagong, say their ancestors came out of a cave under a chief named Tlandrokpah. A Toltec legend has a hurricane that carried away trees, mounds, and horses. The people hid in caves, and after a few days found the earth populated with monkeys, still in darkness, without sun or moon. A branch of the Tinneh say the earth began in chaos with one woman in a cave, living on berries, who met an animal like a dog, transformed into a young man, and they became the parents of a giant race. Ovid is quoted that men then first entered houses, and those houses were caverns, thick shrubs, and twigs fastened with bark.

The fullest account is the Navajo. All the nations, Navajos, Pueblos, Coyoteros, and white people, lived together underground, in the heart of a mountain near the river San Juan. Their food was meat. All kinds of game were closed up with them. The light was dim and lasted only a few hours a day. Two dumb flute-players enlivened the dark. One struck the roof and brought a hollow sound. The Raccoon was sent up a flute set against the roof and could not dig out. The Moth-worm bored through and found himself surrounded by water. Donnelly reads the animal actors as men of totemic septs. Four great white Swans, from the four corners, each with two arrows, pierce him and say he is of their race. Toward the four directions, four great arroyos drain the water and leave only mud. The Raccoon sinks mid-leg in the mud. Wind dries it. The people come up over several days. First the Navajos, then the others. He uses this chapter to fix the cave as a worldwide memory of the same refuge, not as a separate origin-story for each tribe. The white people in the Navajo cave, and the white civilizers elsewhere, are the thread he will pull toward the Atlantic island. The name Atlantis is not in the chapter.

Part III, Chapter VIII. Legends of the Age of Darkness

All the cosmogonies, he says, begin with a damp, cold, rainy time. Hesiod: first Chaos, then Erebus and black Night, then Aether and Day. Aristophanes, in the Aves: Chaos and Night and black Erebus and wide Tartarus first existed. Orpheus: gloomy night enveloped all things under the ether, the earth was invisible, then the light broke through the ether. Sanchoniathon, before the Trojan war, on the Phoenicians: the beginning was a condensed windy air, a chaos turbid and black as Erebus. Out of it was generated Mot, which some call Ilus, mud, and others the putrefaction of a watery mixture. When the air began to send forth light, winds, clouds, and very great torrents of the heavenly waters were produced. Donnelly asks whether the thick air was comet-dust, and the mud the clay that followed. Berosus, from the temple of Belus at Babylon: nothing but darkness and an abyss of waters, wherein resided most hideous beings. He asks whether those beings were the comets. The Laws of Menu and a text of the Vedas: the Supreme Being alone existed, afterward universal darkness, next the watery ocean. The Chinese annals begin with Pwan-ku, or the Reign of Chaos. P’an-ku came forth in the midst of the great chaotic void, knew the rationale of heaven and earth, and comprehended the changes of the Darkness and the Light. He existed before the shining of the Light. After the chaos cleared away, heaven appeared first.

The Chinese annals go on with the Ten Stems and the Twelve Branches. At Wu, the Sixth Stem, the Darkness and the Light unite with injurious effects, all things become solid, and the Darkness destroys growth. At Kung, the Seventh, the Darkness nips all things. At Jin, the Ninth, the Light begins to nourish what is hidden below. At Tsze, things germinate. The first Branch, K’wun-tun, is the cold midnight of chaos. Ch’i-fun-yoh brings light and heat. Sheh-ti-kuh is where he thinks the stars and the sun appear, because the calendar begins there. Chi-shii is the torpid world coming forth. Heen-hia is the present order, the effects of the catastrophe largely past. The kings before the Drift are the Rulers of heaven and earth. Those after are the Rulers of man. Cheu Ching-huen says the atmosphere then gradually cleared. Day and night had not yet been divided, and afterward they were. He reads the caves, the raw flesh, and the blood as the life of the survivors while the air was still thick.

The philosopher of Oraibi says the people climbed a magical tree from the lower world and found the firmament low upon the earth. Machito raised it. There was still no sun, no moon, and no stars, and the people murmured at the darkness and the cold. Seven maidens wove cotton into the moon. The leftover cotton became the stars. Seven buffalo-robes became the sun. Machito then appointed times and seasons.

Among the Thlinkeets of British Columbia, Yehl, the Great Crow or Raven, brooded over a dark, damp chaos, and the dry land appeared. His uncle called a deluge. Yehl put on his bird-skin, stuck his beak into a cloud, and stayed until the waters fell. Donnelly sets this beside the Thessalian Cerambos, who escaped a flood on wings given by the nymphs.

The Miztecs, from a book in a convent at Cuilapa, taken down by Fray Gregoria Garcia: in the year and the day of obscurity and darkness, before the days or the years, the earth was mud and slime. A god appeared, the Deer, surnamed the Lion-snake, and a goddess, the Deer, surnamed the Tiger-snake. He reads the two snakes as two comets, seen before the light returned. They had only one little garden, and they prayed that the waters be gathered so the earth might appear. A later deluge killed many of the children of the gods, and the race and the kingdom were restored.

Father Duran, in a manuscript history of New Spain dated 1585, opens the Cholula legend before the light of the sun had been created, the land in obscurity and void. In the Toltec legends a hurricane carried away trees, mounds, houses, and the largest edifices. People escaped, principally in caves. After a few days they found the earth populated with monkeys, and all that time they were in darkness, without the sun or the moon.

The Aztec return of the sun, from Mendieta through Fray Andres de Olmos: there had been no sun for many years. The gods gathered at Teotihuacan, six leagues from Mexico, around a great fire, and said that whoever cast himself in first would become the sun. Nanahuatzin flung himself in. They peered through the gloom and bet on the quarter where he would rise, and not one of them had fixed upon the east. Donnelly reads that as the loss of the cardinal points.

The Popul Vuh, the book of the Quiches, gives ages of the world. The man of the first age was made of clay and was consumed in the water. A higher race forgot the Heart of Heaven and was destroyed by fire and pitch from heaven, with earthquakes, and only a few escaped. Then all was dark except the white light of the morning-star, which he reads as probably a volcano. In Tulan they kindled fires because the climate was colder, and rains and hail-storms put the fires out. Several times they made fires, and several times the storms extinguished them. Tulan was a much colder climate than the happy eastern land they had left. The language of the families was confused, so he allows many years, and possibly centuries, under the sunless sky. The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg’s further text has their joy at the morning-star, then the sun. The animals rose from the water-courses and stood on the mountain-tops. Before the sun appeared, the ground was muddy and wet. The sun’s heat had no strength. He remained like an image in a mirror, and they say in the stories that it is not the same sun that appears now.

Yehl, in the same Thlinkeet legends, later wrenches the lids from three boxes and lets out the sun, the moon, and the stars. People who saw the blazing light hid in the mountains, the forests, and the water, and were changed into the animals of those places. Geikie is quoted that long ages were needed to melt the sheet of frost and to bring the warmth to its climax. Donnelly calls the interval the age of the great primeval rain, because the moisture the comet had lifted had to fall, and fall again, before the sun could come through. He sets Humboldt’s Andean mist, months with no planets and a rayless disk of the sun, and Croll’s fogs over snow, beside those legends, with Cook’s account of South Georgia, between 54 and 55 degrees, still covered with frozen snow in the height of summer. The Gallinomeros of Central California remember a thick darkness, the Hawk and the Coyote, a ball of tules lit with flint and left whirling as the sun, and a damper ball as the moon. The Algonquins tell of an earth before this one, without light or human inhabitants, and a lake that burst and submerged it, which he ties back to the Welsh lake Llion.

He then sets the old cycles beside the same darkness. The Cycles of the Stoics, the great Days of Brahm, and the cataclysms and ekpyroses of the universe. Some thought all things perished. Some thought a few survived. Epictetus, as Brinton reports him, has human beings and even the gods annihilated at the solstices of the great year. Macrobius explains the antiquity of Egyptian civilization by a land placed between the pole and the equator so as to escape both the deluge and the conflagration of the cycle.

The Babylonian Fifth Tablet, which he takes from Proctor, has a god arrange the stars in figures of animals, twelve months or signs in three rows, and mark the wandering stars so they may not do injury. The word in the tablet is Nibir. George Smith, he says, holds that Nibir does not mean planets, and Donnelly reads it as comets, because the stars have already been arranged. Bel and Hea open the great gates in the darkness. The moon, Uru, rises out of a boiling in the lower chaos, so that the month can be counted again. On the seventh day Shamas, the sun, begins to swell to a circle, and at last his orbit is perfected on the eastern horizon.

Byron’s poem “Darkness” is the picture he uses for what the legends then narrate: morning that brings no day, forests burned for light, famine, and war over food. His own scene, once the stones and the fire have stopped, is mud and gravel, lost rivers and hills, a darkness with no morning, hunger, and people drawn to volcanoes. The morning-star of the legends may, he says, have been a volcano in the east. He prints an Aztec prayer to Tezcatlipoca, the flying serpent, asking whether the sun will never shine again, and asking that the smoke and fog be ended and the small birds begin to sing. A second prayer to the same god describes nakedness, cold, and people who find little heat even by a fire, which he thinks remarkable in a country as tropical as Mexico. The priest tells the god to search below the dung-hills and in the mountains. Donnelly reads the dung-hills as the hills of slime and refuse that covered the dead. The Toltecs, after the fire from heaven, came out of the seven caves and wandered one hundred and four years, suffering nakedness, hunger, and cold, over many lands and across expanses of sea. He says he will find something very much like that prayer in the book of Job. The chapter names no Atlantis. Its claim is that the opening darkness of the old cosmogonies is the comet’s cloud-bank, and that the sun which returned was, for a long time, not the sun they had known.

Part III, Chapter IX. The Triumph of the Sun

A great solar myth, he says, underlies the ancient mythologies: the death and resurrection of the sun, the light destroyed by the clouds and eventually returned. The Syrian Adonis, the Hebrew Tamheur, and the Assyrian Du-Zu suffered a sudden and violent death, disappeared, and were raised. He prints Tamheur, not another spelling. This is the primeval form of the resurrection. In the Gothic legends it is the battle of the Light with the Darkness.

The Saxon Beowulf gives him three monsters again. Grendel comes to the hall at midnight, drags out the sleepers, and sucks their blood. Beowulf kills him. Grendel’s mother, the devil’s dam, comes and is slain. A third dragon is killed, and its breath stifles Beowulf, who rejoices that the dragon has brought a treasure of gold. Donnelly lines these three with the wolf, the snake, and the dog of Ragnarok, the three American arrows, and the three monsters of Hesiod.

Egypt built its religion, he says, on the ages of fire and ice and the victory of the sun-god. Mariette-Bey: originally Osiris is the nocturnal sun, the primordial night of chaos, anterior to Ra, the Sun of Day. Miller, citing Mariette: the first rising of Osiris as Ra symbolized the birth of humanity in the first man. Chabas: the forms are the same god at different hours, and the triumph of Horus over Set is the cosmical victory which determined the first rising of the sun. Wilkinson: the suffering and death of Osiris were the great mystery of the Egyptian religion. Donnelly’s own step is that Osiris had a war with Seb, or Typho, or Typhon. Isis learns of his death. She is the wife of the dead sun and the mother of Horus. He treats the daily myth and the cosmical myth as the same story told twice, once for each dawn and once for the return after the Age of Darkness. The chapter adds the resurrection of the sun to the series. It does not name Atlantis.

Part III, Chapter X. The Fall of the Clay and Gravel

He gathers the legends so far. Before the Polynesians, the red men, the Europeans, and the Asiatics had separated, or been developed as varieties out of one family, the earth met a catastrophe. Parts of the surface burned. Mankind took refuge in caves, then wandered in poverty through a darkness, and at last the sun shone again. Either this is a primeval lie, or it describes an event. A single invented lie, he says, would have been more consistent. Instead the cause of the fire is the sun in one legend, a demon in another, the moon in another, Phaeton driving the sun out of its course, or a noose around the sun. Caves are a refuge in some stories and the birthplace of the race in others. Darkness is clouds, or the death of the sun. Tropical myths stress heat and stolen clouds. Northern myths stress ice. The comet is a god, a demon, a serpent, a feathered serpent, a dragon, a giant, a bird, a wolf, a dog, or a boar. The legends coincide only in the monster in the air, the heat, the fire, the cave-life, the darkness, and the return of the light. If that is granted, he says, the earth, since man inhabited it, encountered a comet. No other cause would produce the series.

He then ties the gravel to the same event. If ice and water did not grind the surface, the comet brought the clay-dust and part of the gravel and bowlders, and also smashed the surface-rocks while moving, in his figure, at a million miles an hour. The lower part baked into till on the heated ground. Cyclones laid the upper drifts. Later floods rearranged part of it into the River or Champlain Drift. The peoples believed the stones fell from heaven. He admits that hurricanes have dropped stones, fish, and toads, so a belief in stones from heaven is not by itself enough. What he claims is that the legends put the stones and the clay in the time of the catastrophe.

The Mattoles of northern California: a Big Man made the naked earth, silent and bleak, with one hungry Indian. A whirlwind came, the air dark and thick with dust and drifting sand. Then a calm, and the earth was green and peopled. Donnelly says the order has been reversed in the telling. The dust and sand left the world naked, and only afterward did it become populous. In Peru, Apocatequil produces lightning by hurling stones with his sling, and the thunder-bolts are small, round, smooth stones. Stone-worship, he says, comes from the belief that many stones fell from heaven. Dr. Schwarz of Berlin associated lightning with the serpent, and flint-stones with the scattered thunderbolts. In Europe the bowlders were called devil-stones. The Tahoe stars rain molten metal. Rama’s monkeys drop the stones that crop out in southern India. The Tupi god raises mountains and digs valleys with the fire. Deuteronomy 28 is read as the same event: extreme burning, a heaven of brass and an earth of iron, the rain of the land turned to powder and dust from heaven, and men groping at noonday as the blind grope in darkness. He then takes up the standing still of the sun as part of that same memory. The chapter’s Atlantis material is by reference: Lanka and the monkey bridge are already on the table. He does not add a new Atlantis sentence in the gravel argument itself.

Part III, Chapter XI. The Arabian Myths

The Arabian tales match Hindoo and Slavonic legends closely enough, he says, to date from when Aryan and Semitic were one people. Abou Mohammed the Lazy sees a tawny serpent overcoming a white one, kills the tawny with a rock, and the white serpent, which Donnelly reads as the sun, departs, is absent for a while, and returns. The tawny serpent is torn to pieces and scattered, and nothing remains but her head.

The City of Brass, or bronze, is “an ancient age and period in the olden time.” The caliph Abdelmelik, son of Marwan, wants the bottles in which Solomon imprisoned genii. Talib, son of Sahl, tells of a voyage toward Sicily blown “to one of the lands of God” in the black darkness of night. The people were black, lived in caves, were naked, and spoke strangely. They brought up a brass bottle. A genie came out as blue smoke and cried repentance to the prophet of God. The land was in the west. The journey was two years and some months each way. They reach the deserted palace of Kosh, son of Sheddad, son of Ad, the greater, and an inscription on a people wept over for their lost dominion, lords collected in the dust. Farther on, a mighty creature is sunk to his armpits in a pillar of black stone, with two wings, four arms, hair like horses’ tails, two eyes like burning coals, and a third eye in his forehead throwing sparks. This is Dahish, son of Elamash, an Afrite, guardian of an idol of red carnelian worshiped by a king of the sea who led a million warriors of the genii. Donnelly reads him as the imprisoned comet-monster. Solomon demands that the island-race give up the idol. Dahish, through the idol, tells the king that Solomon can do nothing while the king is in the midst of the great sea. A battle follows in the air. Dahish challenges Dimiriat, whom Donnelly reads as the sun, the bright one. Dimiriat comes like a great mountain, fires flaming and smoke ascending, and his arrow prevails. The battle lasts, in the tale, for a period of two days, and calamity falls on the third. Birds fight in the air and wild beasts in the dust.

He uses this chapter for three findings I would keep. The battle is the same battle as Ragnarok and Phaeton. The scene is an island in the west, reached by a journey of two years and some months, and he will later call it the land of bronze. The name Ad, in “Sheddad the son of Ad,” is the name he will join to Nod, Od, and Atlantis. He does not write the word Atlantis in the chapter. The island and Ad are the claims.

Part III, Chapter XII. The Book of Job

He begins from Job 1:16, fire of God fallen from heaven, burning the sheep and the servants, and 1:18-19, a great wind from the wilderness smiting the four corners of the house and killing the sons and daughters. The fire killed and consumed the seven thousand sheep of Job 1:3, so he says it was not lightning, and it covered a large country. The wind was a cyclone. He asks whether the book originated in the Drift catastrophe.

The book, he believes it is conceded, is not a Hebrew work, was not written by Moses, and far antedates Abraham. George Smith, The Patriarchal Age, is quoted on the disputes over Job’s country, his age, the author, and whether the tale is an allegory. Job lived to be two hundred, or, according to the Septuagint, four hundred. That age relegates him to the era of the antediluvians, or their immediate descendants. C. S. Bryant, in a letter from St. Paul, is quoted that the author uses only Elohim, and that the verses where Jehovah occurs are later interpolations in a very old poem, from a time when the Semitic race had no other name for God but Elohim, before Moses obtained the elements of the new name from Egypt. Donnelly is here reporting Bryant’s Jehovah, the name in those interpolated verses. He is not renaming the god of the poem.

Hale’s chronology is the date I would set beside other tables. The cardinal constellations of spring and autumn in Job’s time were Chima and Chesil, Taurus and Scorpio, the principal stars Aldebaran and Antares. Precession is one degree in seventy-one and a half years.

A careful calculation, based on these principles, has proved that this period was 2338 B. C.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 278

According to the Septuagint, in the opinion of George Smith, Job lived, or the book of Job was written, from 2650 B. C. to 2250 B. C.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 278

Or the events described may have occurred 25,740 years before that date.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 278

He keeps all three. Smith thinks the book was produced soon after the Flood, by an Arabian. Idolatry was already an offense. The Babylonians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Canaanites, Midianites, Ethiopians of Abyssinia, Syrians, and others had sunk into idolatry long before Moses. Then Donnelly adds a sentence of his own about stock: the Arabians were an important branch of the great Atlantean stock, and derived their descent from the people of Add. To this day, he says, the Arabians declare that the father of Job was the founder of the great Arabian people. Job acted as high-priest in his own family. The book never mentions priests, which Smith takes as proof of extreme antiquity, priests being first appointed about the time of Abraham. Magee, with Lowth and Sherlock, is quoted that the book of Job is the oldest in the world now extant.

The people of the poem are, for Donnelly, highly civilized: arts, sciences, animals, vegetables, minerals, the classified stars, an alphabet, books, and engraving. Some have claimed printing, because Job wishes his words were printed in a book. He does not adopt that claim. He does adopt the leviathan, later, as the twisting comet that cast stones into the mire. In chapter 22 he finds “the island of the innocent,” which he will make the refuge, and in chapter 28 a “way” which the flood cut down. He says, in this chapter, that he has shown elsewhere that the home of the dead was beyond the waters, and he footnotes his earlier book, Atlantis, pages 359, 421, and so on. I do not import those pages. What this chapter itself gives me is the fire and the wind, the three dates, the name Jehovah only as Bryant’s word for the interpolated verses, the Atlantean stock and the people of Add, and the island of the innocent as a phrase he will use in Part IV.

Part III, Chapter XIII. Genesis read by the Light of the Comet

He asks how far the opening chapters of Genesis can be read as the comet contact in the Drift age. He says he does not want the argument to lacerate feeling. He honors the hospitals, asylums, and restraints he attributes to Christianity, and he still denies that every line is literally accurate, because the text contradicts itself. Critics say chapter 1 makes the animated creation in six days, while chapter 2, verses 4 and 5, makes the heavens, the earth, and all the vegetation in one day. Light, night, and morning and evening are there on the first three days, grass and fruit-trees before the sun, and the sun, moon, and stars only on the fourth day. Religion, he says, has had no answer.

His answer is that the chapters are a Mosaic work of ancient legends, dovetailed so that the true order was lost. Some verses say Elohim, and others Jehovah Elohim. He compares that to a book which says Jove in one part and Jehovah-Jove in the rest, two minds rather than one faultless author. Jehovah Elohim is the compound the text uses. He proposes to rearrange the verses, following the legends and the geology, and he leaves the reader to judge.

The rearrangement, as he states it, is not a creation of the world in six ordinary days. It is the restoration after the comet. The subdivisions of a period of reconstruction were called days, as the Chinese called the same period branches or stems. The first subdivision is twilight after total darkness, itself divided into evening and morning, which is why the record says the evening and the morning, not the morning and the evening. The Israelites, he notes, still begin the day at sunset, and the Sabbath on Friday evening. The second subdivision is the floods gathering into the lower lands and leaving the mountains bare, while the light increases. The third is the continents clearing, grass and trees returning, man just out of the cave, the world still mostly empty. The fourth is the sun, moon, and stars appearing, dim in the evening and clearer in the morning. The fifth is fish and birds multiplying. The sixth is man and the animals spreading. Between the catastrophe and the reoccupation of Europe he puts the twelve feet of stalagmite in the caves, and says man did not dwell in Europe for long ages. James Geikie is quoted that since the shelly clays and the last local glaciers there has been no oscillation, only a gradual amelioration of climate. Every snow-storm and every north wind is a reminiscence of Ragnarok. The cosmical catastrophe was substantially over at the close of the sixth day. We are in the seventh. God is resting from restoring the world.

He says the necessity of this reading was plain to Basil, Caesarius, and Origen, who argued that the sun, moon, and stars existed from the beginning and did not appear until the fourth day. Origen asks who that has sense can think the first, second, and third days were without them. Donnelly asks what obscured them if not dense clouds, and what vaporized the water if not tremendous heat, and what the heat was if not a comet. He then stacks the blazing sword at the gate of Eden, the fire on the cities of the plain, the fire on Job’s sheep and camels, and Job clambering by ropes into a narrow-mouthed cave, where the leviathan, the twisted one, cast stones in the mire, made the angels tremble, and made the deep boil like a pot. If Origen is right, the text is transposed, and the second chapter narrates events which occurred before those in the first. The darkness came long after the Beginning in which God made the earth and the heavens. He says that darkness is something which came millions of years after that Beginning. I do not turn the “millions” into his Drift date. The Drift date is the separate Niagara figure in Part IV.

His numbered close is the list he wants compared: the Golden Age, or Paradise; universal moral degeneracy; God’s vengeance; the serpent and the fire from heaven; the cave-life and the darkness; the cold and the struggle to live; the Fall of Man, from virtue to vice, from plenty to poverty, from civilization to barbarism, from the Tertiary to the Drift, from Eden to the gravel; then reconstruction. He does not in this chapter say that Eden was Atlantis. That identification is the next part. What he does say is that a firm place in the midst of the waters, the firmament of Genesis 1:6-7, is necessarily an island, and he carries that sentence forward.

Part IV, Chapter I. Was Pre-glacial Man civilized?

He thinks that before the Drift, in some limited localities, mankind had reached a high civilization, and that pottery, metallurgy, architecture, engraving, carving, money, the domestication of some animals, and an alphabet were known. The rest of the world was more rude and brutal than anything now living. He warns that legends alone would dress the ancestors in the arts of the tellers, so he wants the legends confirmed by things dug up.

If Job is a drama of the Drift, the people overtaken by it knew one God, farmed, kept sheep and camels, built houses, had tamed the horse, mapped the constellations, wrote books, and engraved rocks. He admits the book may have been written long after the event and clothed it in later manners. Ovid’s Earth, wounded by the crooked plow and the harrows, supplying leaves to the cattle, corn to mankind, and frankincense to the gods, is his witness that man was already a farmer, with cereals, domestic cattle, and incense. Phaeton’s chariot means the horse and the wheel. Sita, the furrowed earth, means the same agriculture. The Asas dwelt in stone houses. The Elder Edda, before the catastrophe, has axe-ages and sword-ages, shields cleft, and then Heimdal’s horn, Odin’s golden helmet, horses, and stone doors. Afterward the survivors find the golden tablets and the runes. Loke carried off Iduna and her apples. American legends, immediately after the catastrophe, send a messenger to the happy eastern land, over the sea, by a bridge, for drums. The Miztecs, while the darkness still prevailed, built a palace and set a copper axe, edge uppermost, under the heavens. The Navajo cave had flute-players. The Peruvians were dug out with a golden spade. The Tahoe masters compelled a temple, and the oppressed escaped in canoes. The Navajo come out with water-jars, and the heavens are divided into constellations. The City of Brass people were architects, metallurgists, agriculturists, and machinists, with a written language.

The dug objects follow. Fray Pedro Simon, in the seventeenth century, tells of miners near Callao who met a ship inside a hill, not like our ships. Sir John Clerk, in 1726, describes a canoe found near Edinburgh, thirteen or fourteen feet underground in the washings of the Carron, thirty-six feet long and four and a half broad, of one piece of oak, under loam, clay, shells, moss, sand, and gravel. Boucher de Perthes found human remains thirty to forty feet down. A canal between Stockholm and Gothenburg cut an osar and, about sixty feet down, found a hearth of stones with wood coals. In Ohio, a mastodon tusk and worked flint flakes were found at twenty-seven feet, and a log at twenty-two feet, burned at one end and with an axe-like kerf at the other, and he asks whether the kerf was made with bronze or iron. Burned logs, he says, have repeatedly come out of Drift clay. David A. Curtis, in Harper’s for September 1882, “The Mississippi River Problem,” writes of pavements and cisterns of what look like Roman brick, seventy feet underground. Donnelly says Curtis does not mean a Roman connection, only a resemblance, and that the remains were near Memphis, Tennessee. The details, so far as Donnelly knew, were not yet published.

Is it not more reasonable to suppose that civilized man existed on the American Continent thirty thousand years ago, (the age fixed by geologists for the coming of the Drift,) a comparatively short period of time, and that his works were then covered by the Drift-debris, than to believe that a race of human beings, far enough advanced in civilization to manufacture bricks, and build pavements and cisterns, dwelt in the Mississippi Valley, in a past so inconceivably remote that the slow increase of the soil, by vegetable decay, has covered their works to the depth of seventy feet?

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 354

The object he calls the most singular is from Alexander Winchell, Sparks from a Geologist’s Hammer. A copper relic like a rude coin was taken from an artesian boring at one hundred and fourteen feet, at Lawn Ridge, Marshall County, Illinois. W. H. Wilmot’s letter of 4 December 1871 lists the beds: soil 3 feet (0.91 meters), yellow clay 17, blue clay 44, dark vegetable matter 4, hard purplish clay 18, bright-green clay 8, mottled clay 18, soil 2, then the coin at 114, then more yellow clay, sand and clay, and water rising 60 feet (18.29 meters). The bore was four inches for eighty feet and three inches below, and the upper hole had plastered in until the coin could not have come from less than eighty feet. Three persons saw it at once. It was about the size and thickness of a silver quarter, nearly round, apparently cut, of uniform thickness. The marks looked etched with acid, not stamped or engraved. Each face had a rude human figure. One held an object like a child, the other hand raised as if to strike, and wore a head-dress apparently of quills, with undecipherable hieroglyphics around the border. The other figure stopped at the waist, one hand raised, long tufts like mule’s ears, another border of hieroglyphics, and a rude quadruped. Winchell showed it to the Geological Section of the American Association at Buffalo in 1876. One person thought he saw the zodiac. Another fancied numerals and dates. The figures resemble birch-bark and rock drawings of the American Indians. William E. Dubois, to whom Secretary Henry sent it at the Smithsonian, felt sure it had passed through a rolling-mill, and that the cut edges showed the machine-shop. He would not call it ancient, nor old, nor recent, because the tooth of time was plainly visible. J. P. Lesley thought it an astrological amulet, saw Pisces and Leo, read the date 1572, and said it was placed there as a practical joke, perhaps Hispano-American or French-American. Donnelly rejects the joke: nobody would throw such an object into a hole on the chance of its being seen again. A hundred and fourteen, or a hundred and twenty-five, feet of alluvium since the late seventeenth century is not easy to admit on a level prairie where Peoria Lake is only an expansion of the Illinois River. In Whiteside County, about fifty miles northwest, about 1851, Mr. Moffat reported a large copper ring at one hundred and twenty feet, something compared to a boat-hook, and, at lesser depths, stone pipes, pottery, and a spear-shaped hatchet of iron.

Donnelly’s inference is that the piece is pre-Columbian, older than the red men, because they had no currency or alphabet, and older than the mound-builders, because nothing similar has come from the mounds. It lay in glacial clay. It was engraved with acid, by a method unknown to recorded civilization. The round metallic coin, without the mold or the stamp, means that historical coinage descended from this one, and lost the acid engraving. Copper and iron implements in the same clay mean the people had passed the Stone Age. A coin implies an alphabet, a literature, a government, commerce, and agriculture with a plow and draught animals. He calls it a Pompeii under central and northwestern Illinois or Tennessee, drowned under the clay-flood of the comet, ages before the flood of Noah. Man, he says, crawled backward over a limit of six thousand years, found Egypt, and thought he had reached the beginning, and then the well-buckets brought up the coin. The six thousand years are the limit he says historians had allowed themselves, not his date for the Drift. The Atlantis name is not used for the Illinois find. The thirty thousand years are the geologists’ age for the Drift, which he accepts here and states again on p. 404.

Part IV, Chapter II. The Scene of Man’s Survival

The reader, he says, is not constrained to accept what follows. Many legends point to an island, east of America and west of Europe, in the Atlantic, where man, or at least the white, yellow, and brown races, survived and renewed the pre-glacial civilization, and from which they spread east and west to the plains of Asia and the islands of the Pacific. The negro race probably separated in pre-glacial times and survived in fragments in the land of torrid heats, on some region where the Drift did not fall. Ovid says the heat baked the negro black. Donnelly will not assert that, nor that the white race was bleached by the Age of Darkness. He does cite Hartt that Botocudos who have lived for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years in the dense forests of Brazil are nearly white, while those on the open prairies are not, and he asks what a long time of cloud and darkness in the north would have done. The rude ice-giants of the legends, ancestors of the dominant races of western Europe, were developed there. He quotes a Roman poet of the Viking age on sea-wolves.

The proofs he offers for an Atlantic island are these. Job’s “island of the innocent,” in his reading of Job 22:30, is the place where the humble are delivered. Genesis 1:6-7, the firmament in the midst of the waters, is an island. Eden lay west of the later Jewish land, because the man was driven out and the cherubim were placed at the east of the garden, Genesis 3:24, facing him. Cain also moved east, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.

The land of Nod may have been Od, Ad, Atlantis; and from Od may have come the name of Odin, the king, the god of Ragnarok.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 368

In Ovid the earth is an island-land, the civilized land, the land of the Tritons, of Proteus, Aegaeon, Doris, and Atlas. It is, in his view, Atlantis. The palace of the sun, gold and carbuncle and ivory, reminds him of the temple of Poseidon in Plato’s story. He says the Atlantic was sometimes called the sea of ivory, probably from that temple, and he quotes Croly on hills of ivory. Jove, after the fire, repairs his own Arcadia with especial care. Phaeton was the son of Merops. Theopompus tells us that the people who inhabited Atlantis were the Meropes, the people of Merou. Greek traditions, he says, show that the human race issued from Upa-Merou. The Egyptians claim their ancestors came from the Island of Mero. Among the Hindoos the land of the gods was Meru. He footnotes the Upa-Merou sentence to his earlier book, page 176. I report the sentence he prints here, and I do not open that page. Ovid’s land sank down a little, and the Gothic and Briton legends tell of a prolongation of western Europe that went down at the same time.

Rama and Ravana fight on the Island of Lanka, and the stone bridge is sixty miles long. Asgard lies west of Europe, reached by Bifrost. Gylfe visits Asgard as Herodotus and Solon visited Egypt. He is told that the earth is round, and without it round about lies the deep ocean. Along the outer strand of that sea, lands were given for the giant-races. Donnelly reads those giants as the white, large, blue-eyed races of northern and western Europe. The bronze-using people, he says it has been proved by their remains, advanced into Scandinavia from the southwest, so the island is not in the Indian Seas or the Pacific. There is, he says, no submerged land in that ocean with ridges reaching east and west except the mass of which the Azores are the mountain-tops. On p. 371 the conclusion, in his words, is irresistible: here was Atlantis, here was Lanka, here was the island of the innocent, here was Asgard. Asgard is a land of temples and plowed fields. Gylfe learns Ragnarok from the people of Asgard, just as Solon learned the story of Atlantis from the priests of Sais. Lif and Lifthraser hid there during Surt’s fire.

In the Bagaveda-Gita, as he takes it from Jacolliot, The Bible in India, the earth was covered with flowers and fruit, and Brahma made Adima and Heva on an island which tradition localizes as Ceylon. They lived on fruit and rice. The prince of the Kakchasos, which he glosses as possibly Raknaros, Ragnarok, breaks the paradise. They pass to a boundless country. Trees, flowers, fruits, and birds vanish amid terrific clamor. That is the Drift. When the Navajos come out of the cave, the white race goes east and the red men go west. A turkey-hen flies from the direction of the morning star and shakes out an ear of blue corn, and later the other seeds. The Peruvian civilizers came from the east after the cave-life, and intercourse with the parent-land continued. The Iroquois learned fire from the great tortoise in the east, on the shore of the ocean. Brinton is quoted that the Great Hare was alleged to reside toward the east, and that the medicine-lodge opens that way, where at the edge of the earth he has his house and sends out the luminaries. Donnelly reads that house as an Atlantic island, and the control of sun, moon, and stars as the measuring of time and the mapping of constellations. The Miztec legend, which he points back to p. 214, has the people praying for the waters to be gathered because they have only a little garden in the waste of waters. The Arabian scene is an island west of Arabia, two years and a half of travel away, the land of bronze. Lanka, the Tahoe cave on an island, and the Taculli island are listed again.

After the Indian and American list he states the name again.

This island was Atlantis.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 375

Ovid says it was the land of Neptune, Poseidon.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 375

It is Neptune who cries out for mercy. It is associated with Atlas, the king or god of Atlantis. Those are the sentences of this chapter. The bridge is the next.

Part IV, Chapter III. The Bridge

Deep-sea soundings show the Azores as the mountain-tops of a colossal mass of sunken land. From that center one ridge runs south, then splits, one limb to Africa and one to South America, and he says there are evidences that a third ridge formerly reached north from the Azores to the British Islands. While those crests stood above water they were the migration paths, winding for thousands of miles, expanding into islands or sinking to a strip, from a central civilized land to its connections north, south, east, and west. As they settled they would have looked like the Aleutian chain or the Bahamas, and they remained stepping-stones, as the Azores later helped Columbus. Job 22 asks whether the reader has marked the old way which wicked men have trodden, cut down out of time, whose foundation was overflown with a flood. Job 28:4 is another possible allusion to a way that divideth the flood.

The Quiche manuscript, translated by Brasseur de Bourbourg and quoted from Tylor, tells of a migration from some eastern land in the day of darkness, before the sun was, in the so-called glacial age. They had a long passage to make through the sea, along the shingle and pebbles and drifted sand. The sea was parted for their passage. The abbe adds that it is not clear how they crossed. They passed as though there had been no sea, over scattered rocks rolled on the sands, and they called the place ranged stones and torn-up sands. Donnelly says they probably followed the ridge which the soundings show from Atlantis to the coast of South America. Rama’s sixty-mile bridge, Ovid’s island settling down a little, and Bifrost are the other witnesses.

He refuses the later gloss that Bifrost is only the rainbow. Gylfe, a king of Sweden, called Ganglere, asks in the Younger Edda what the path is from earth to heaven. Donnelly reads earth as the European colonies and heaven as Asgard. Har says the gods made a bridge from earth to heaven called Bifrost, which one may call the rainbow. It has three colors, is very strong, and will break when the sons of Muspel come, and then they will have to swim their horses over great rivers. Donnelly asks what rivers intersect a rainbow. Heat has no effect on rainbows. The Asas ride every day over Bifrost, also called Asa-bridge, to the fountain of Urd. The three chains to the continents are the three roots of Ygdrasil. The Hindoo three-pronged root of the world-mountain has heaven, Olympus, on top, hell below where the Asuras, the comets, dwelt, and between them Meru, Mero, Merou, the land of the Meropes, Atlantis. The Asas were mortal, because they perished in Ragnarok. Thor wades the rivers Kormt and Ormt and the two Kerlaugs every day when he goes to judge near Ygdrasil, because the Asa-bridge burns all ablaze and the holy waters roar. Donnelly reads the rivers as breaks where the ridge had subsided, and the bridge as dotted with volcanoes, like the Atlantic islands now. The red in the rainbow is burning fire. The frost-giants and mountain-giants would go up to heaven if Bifrost were passable for all. He has already said the Asas gave lands to those ice-giants around the outer margin of the ocean. If the bridge were not defended, the Northmen would march from Great Britain and Ireland to the Azores, that is, to Atlantis.

Himinbjorg stands at the end of heaven, where Bifrost is united with heaven. Heimdal dwells there, guarding the bridge. He needs less sleep than a bird, sees a hundred miles by night as well as by day, and his teeth are of gold. Donnelly reads this as a barbarian memory of dentistry and of telescopes or a field-glass. He says gold filling has been found in the teeth of ancient Egyptians and Peruvians, and telescopic lenses in the ruins of Babylon. The bridge was not continuous. Water interrupted it. At the end of the island the people built a castle, as he thinks England would fortify a Dover tunnel, and put Heimdal there to watch the Goths, Gauls, or Gael.

The word Asas is not derived from Asia. Asia is derived from the Asas. The Norse word still in use in Norway is Aas, a ridge of high land. Anderson connects Aas with Atlas. The Asas inhabited a high country at the meeting-point of ridges. Atlas was the king, or god, of Atlantis. In the old time all kings were gods. When Surt and the forces of Muspel ride over Bifrost, it breaks to pieces.

That is to say, in this last great catastrophe of the earth, the ridge of land that led from the British Islands to Atlantis goes down for ever.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 382

Plato’s description, as received by Solon from the Egyptian priests, is then quoted. There was an island, Atlantis, in front of the straits called the Columns of Hercules, larger than Libya and Asia put together, and it was the way to other islands, and from the islands you might pass through the whole of the opposite continent, which Donnelly glosses as America, which surrounds the true ocean. He says this may mean continuous land, not merely boats, because boats could go anywhere.

The Sanskrit legend of Adima and Heva, from the Bagaveda-Gita, continues. At the extremity of the island they behold a smooth and narrow arm of the sea, and beyond it a vast country, which he glosses as possibly Europe, connected with their island by a narrow and rocky pathway arising from the bosom of the waters. As soon as they touch the farther shore, trees, flowers, fruit, and birds vanish amidst terrific clamor. The rocks by which they had crossed sank, a few sharp peaks remaining, to indicate the bridge, destroyed by divine displeasure. He stacks this with the Drift, with Ovid’s earth settling a little, with the Cornish lost land, and with the emigrants cut off among stones, clay, and thistles. The story is localized in Ceylon, as Ararat and Olympus crop out wherever the races carried them. The rocks between India and Ceylon are still called Adam’s Bridge, Palam Adima, and a mountain at the end of it is Adam’s Peak.

From that earthly bridge, he says, the races made a spiritual heaven, and the ridges became the bridges souls must cross. He lists them. The Persian penitent still confesses the bridge Chinvat, and paradise. The Moslem bridge Es-Sirat is finer than a hair and sharper than a sword. The English Lyke-Wake Dirge has the Brig of Dread, no broader than a thread. In Borneo the passage is a long tree, scarcely practicable except to those who have killed a man. The Karens of Burmah tie strings across rivers for ghosts. Java has a bridge to the gods, and the evil-doers fall. The Esquimaux cross an awful gulf on a stretched rope, toward the abode of the great female evil spirit below, or beyond, the sea. The Ojibway bridge is a great snake. The Choctaw bridge is a slippery pine-log. The South American Manacicas cross on wood. Among many American tribes the Milky Way is the bridge. The Polynesians have no bridge. They pass in canoes. The Vedic Yama showed the way to the Aryan fathers. The modern Hindoo hopes to hold the cow’s tail. Guinea negroes cross a river to the land of souls. Some North American tribes paddle a canoe of white stone toward a beautiful island. A storm wrecks the wicked, and their bones are heaped under the water. The good reach the island. The Slav road is both the rainbow and the Milky Way. Boots and coins go into the coffin, for a long walk and a ferry, to a warm fertile island called Buijan. The Northmen set dead heroes afloat in boats, and later raised a mound over boat, warrior, horses, and weapons. Those boats, he says, are being dug up in the north of Europe.

The close of the chapter is the sentence I would put beside Plato and beside his own earlier book, because this is the sentence this book is willing to print.

Is not the conclusion very strong that Atlantis was the island-home of the race, in whose cave Job dwelt; on whose shores Phaeton fell; on whose fields Adam lived; on whose plain Sodom and Gomorrah stood, and Odin and Thor and Citli died; from which the Quiches and the Aztecs wandered to America; the center of all the races; the root of all the mythologies?

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 388

Part IV, Chapter IV. Objections considered

He answers objections in the objector’s voice.

The first: he has denied the glacialists’ ice-age and still speaks of cold, ice, and snow. He distinguishes the climate of Scotland, damp and cold, from a continental sheet a mile or two thick from John o’ Groat’s House to the Mediterranean. Oranges grow in Spain within a comparatively short distance of Edinburgh. He cannot believe a tropical plant survived in Africa while a precipice of ice five thousand feet high frowned on Italy, or that life survived an ice-sheet a mile thick, or even ten feet thick, on the equator in South America. He can conceive snow, rain, hail, and wind. He cannot believe the world was once the dead waste of Greenland.

The second: the world agrees that ice produced the Drift. He answers that one man with the truth is a majority, and that truth is born an acorn.

Grooves under living glaciers, he is told, prove that glaciers cut the Drift grooves. He answers that the same grooves lie on plains far from mountains, so finding one thing under another does not prove the upper thing made the lower.

The comet, he is told, is too far out of the usual course of nature. He answers that the Drift is already out of that course, hundreds of feet thick and sudden, and that any rival theory still has to hold six things: great heat, a sudden catastrophe, great evaporation of the seas, great clouds, an age of floods and snows and ice and torrents, and the human legends.

An Arabian tale gives seven years with no rain, and other legends give constant rain, snow, and cold. He says both can stand. Extra heat would still be hottest at the equator. Clouds would form first at the poles and march toward the equator, until about the thirty-fifth degree of north and south latitude lay under rain and snow while the equator still blazed. He reads that split in the Younger Edda. The north of Ginungagap was filled with thick ice and rime. The south, lighted by sparks from Muspelheim, which he glosses as possibly Africa, stayed hot and bright.

He is asked how one or two caverns could stock Africa, Asia, and America. Survival in one place, or in a dozen, is not, he says, essential to the origin of the Drift. It is his opinion, and open to change. If men dwelt in Asia and no Drift fell there, races may have survived in Asia. The negro may have dwelt in India. Some hill-tribes of China and India may have had no connection with Lif and Lifthraser. Then he states the case he prefers.

But if we will suppose that the scene of man's survival was in that Atlantic island, Atlantis, then this would follow:

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 394

The remnant, whether a couple like Lif and Lifthraser, a group like Job and his companions, or a numerous party like the Navajo and Aztec legends, could not stay long in the cave. The distribution of the Drift shows, he says, that it fell within twelve hours, with cyclones for several days after. Outside, the heat had not yet begun to cool, and water was the want, which he ties to Mimer’s well and to legends of a hidden well, and to Hercules and Rama recovering stolen cows. Then the race wandered over a world of stones. Then came the clouds, the rains, the floods, the snows, and the darkness. If the ridges had sunk in the catastrophe, the receded ocean laid them bare, and the race spread to Europe, Africa, and America. How long, he will not fix: days, weeks, months, years, or centuries. The Toltec legends, he says here, have the ancestors wandering more than a hundred years in the darkness. He has already given the Toltec figure of one hundred and four years.

If further study finds the Drift in Siberia and the rest of Asia, and over all the world, that does not, he says, disprove the comet. It means the debris did not strike all at once, but continued to fall during twenty-four hours. A split comet, the Midgard-serpent as well as the Fenris-wolf and the dog Garm, need not have reached the earth at the same time.

An objection he prints asks whether he had supposed, in his earlier book, that ridges radiating from Atlantis shut off the Gulf Stream and so caused the Glacial Age. He answers that those ridges did matter to climate after the Drift, by standing or sinking, but that they do not account for the clay, the gravel, the great heat, or the downfall of water. I leave the earlier book at that sentence. This volume is where he withdraws the ridges as the cause of the Drift itself.

Blocks of many tons, carried hundreds of miles, he assigns to wind. Multiply a West Indian hurricane, or a cyclone of the Mississippi valley, a hundred or a thousand fold, and he says there is power enough to move them.

The Drift, he is told, does not look like the usual iron aerolites. He answers that stones have fallen with no iron in them, not to be told from the stone of the earth, and that the periodical shooting-stars burn out high in the air and are probably lost fragments of comet-tails, not the same thing as the iron that reaches the ground. A writer he cites for 1882 puts Tempel’s comet in the orbit of the November meteors, the second comet of 1862, Swift’s, in the orbit of the August meteors, and the first comet of 1881 with the April meteors. Sorby, as that writer reports him, found the meteoric stuff once fused, as small melted globules condensed from vapor. If the planets and the comets were thrown out from the sun, Donnelly says, the comet is made of the same material as the earth.

A lone aerolite, he says, falls free and burns. A comet holds its own dust and bowlders by its own attraction until the earth gets in their way, so he does not expect a fused crust on the gravel. If the comet’s bulk greatly exceeded the earth’s, the shock may have changed the inclination of the axis. The Esquimaux have a legend that the earth was shaken out of its position. On that question he expresses no opinion.

The tails, he is told, are so thin that the stars show through them. He answers that the clay arrived as dust and packed into clay after it mixed with water. He says here that one such tail was thirteen million miles broad, and he points back to p. 94, where the breadth he gave for the comet of 1811 was nearly fourteen million. A thin dust, on a ride of that length, is enough, in his figure, to bury the traveler. On the scale of the heavens the Drift is a coating. Far from the nucleus the gravel itself is dust in streaks, and the light shines between the particles. The nucleus holds the largest masses hardest. At three hundred and sixty-six miles a second the lighter substances trail farthest behind, lose their hold, and fall away as the showers of meteoroids.

He answers the silt claim in five steps. Laid in water, they would be stratified, and they are not. They would be full of shells, fish, reptiles, whales, and seals, and they are not. They would not be made only of granite, and there is no continent of nothing but granite. The source-lands would have had to reach from pole to pole and fill the Atlantic, and river washings would not make one uniform sheet. The colors change without a transition. In western Minnesota you go through twenty feet of yellow clay, then an inch of gravel, then fifty feet of blue clay, then gravel. The glacialists say yellow was fresh water and blue was salt. He asks how an ocean turned from salt to fresh with no brackish interval, where the bowl-like ridges were that kept the salt out, and why no such clays are forming now under ice. The people who built cisterns and used coins and iron would, on the silt theory, have done so a million years ago, because that is how long such deposits would have taken if they were silt. The million years is his reductio, not his date.

The question of order is the one I would put in a table.

The Deluge of Noah probably occurred somewhere from eight to eleven thousand years ago.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 404

Hence, about twenty thousand years probably intervened between the Drift and the Deluge.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 404

These were the "myriads of years" referred to by Plato, during which mankind dwelt on the great plain of Atlantis.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 404

The sentence just before these says the latter deluge, Noah and Deucalion, was infinitely later, and that the geologists, calculating from the recession of the Falls of Niagara, suppose the Drift to have come upon the earth about thirty thousand years ago, which would nearly accord with the time given in Job when he speaks of the position of certain constellations. I paraphrase that sentence because of the way it is pointed in the print. The three sentences above are the dates he wants remembered, and the Atlantis plain is named in the third.

This order, he says, agrees with the legends. In the Bible a long interval separates the expulsion from paradise and the Deluge of Noah, and in it mankind becomes workers in metals, musicians, and builders of cities. In the Egyptian history preserved by Plato, the Deluge of Deucalion, which many things prove identical with Noah’s, was the last of a series. In the Celtic legends the Deluge of Ogyges preceded the last deluge. In the American legends mankind has been destroyed many times and renewed.

He then faces the question whether he is right that civilization first rose on the Atlantic island. He can conceive the island rebuilding the fragments of pre-glacial civilization and so becoming, to the post-glacial world, the apparent fountain of cultivation. But the glacial clays of the United States may yet prove that civilization was first born on the North American continent and moved eastward over the bridge-like ridges to Atlantis. Genesis 2:8 plants the garden eastward in Eden, after man was formed of the dust, so man was moved east into the garden. At the Drift he was moved east again, out of Eden, and the cherubim at the eastern extremity kept him from returning from, as Donnelly says, the shores of Atlantis. The present home of men is east of their former dwelling-place. In the age of declension man moved east. In the age of redemption he moves west. If the Bible is to be relied on, man was created west of the garden, that is, in America, and there he may first have developed the civilization of which the Illinois traces show a metal-working people with an alphabet and a currency. The original birthplace of the race, as against that later American civilization, he leaves open. It was possibly in some region now under the ocean, as Winchell has suggested, during the Tertiary, when mammalian life went one way into the mammoth and the mastodon and the other way into man. The close of the chapter is a defense of evolution and design together, and a sentence of Bacon’s, that he would rather believe all the fables in the Talmud and the Koran than that this universal frame is without a mind. The Atlantis sentences here are the island of survival on p. 394, the withdrawal of the Gulf Stream ridges as the cause of the Drift, the plain of the myriads of years, the possible eastward move from America to Atlantis, and the shores of Atlantis as the place the cherubim kept man from re-entering.

Part IV, Chapter V. Biela’s Comet

Humboldt says the vapor of comets’ tails probably mingled with the atmosphere in 1819 and 1828. Donnelly believes his own generation passed through the gaseous prolongation of a comet’s tail, and that hundreds of people died, burned and poisoned, on an infinitely smaller scale than the Age of Fire and Gravel.

On 27 February 1826, M. Biela, an Austrian officer at Josephstadt in Bohemia, found a comet in Aries, a small round speck. Gambart at Marseilles and Clausen at Altona gave it an elliptical orbit of six years and three quarters. Damoiseau, as Donnelly spells the name in this chapter, calculated that on the next return it would cross the earth’s orbit within twenty thousand miles of the earth’s track, about one month before the earth arrived. It returned on time in 1832, and the earth missed it by one month. It returned in 1839 and 1846, and proximity to the earth had split it in two, the halves about sixteen thousand miles apart, about twice the earth’s diameter. He asks whether the Fenris-wolf, the Midgard-serpent, and the dog Garm looked like that. It should have returned in 1852, 1859, and 1866, and it did not. The material, he says, was hanging around the earth in fragments.

On Sunday, 8 October 1871, at half past nine in the evening, fires broke out, so far as was known by spontaneous combustion, at points hundreds of miles apart in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois. He was living in Minnesota. The summer had been excessively dry. The air felt combustible. In Wisconsin, a region of about four hundred square miles north from Brown County, including Peshtigo, Manistee, Holland, and villages on Green Bay, was swept by a whirlwind of flame. Seven hundred and fifty people were killed outright, and many of the wounded died later. More than three million dollars of property was destroyed, citing Sheahan and Upton, Chicago, 1871. The fire did not come gradually from burning trees. A whirlwind of flame fell from above the tops of the trees. People were found dead in open roads, with no mark of fire on bodies or clothing. A copper cent from the pocket of a dead man in the Peshtigo Sugar Bush was partly fused, the inscription still legible, and other coins in the same pocket partly melted, while the clothing and the body were not singed. Witnesses said the last day had come, that sheeted flames came from heaven, and that there was a pitiless rain of fire and sand. He extends the same night to the Chicago fire, which began, he says, at the same hour, and he treats the dryness, the simultaneous outbreaks, and the deaths without visible burning as the signature of comet gas and comet dust, kin to the old catastrophe and not equal to it. I keep the date, the places, and his claim. I do not add a cause the chapter does not state. This chapter has no Atlantis sentence. Its use for the comparison is the split comet, set beside Fenris, Midgard, and Garm.

Part IV, Chapter VI. The Universal Belief of Mankind

Fear of comets, and the belief that the world will one day be destroyed by fire, are for him an inheritance, like the unchanged folklore. A far-off race, nearer the Drift than we are, arranged the heavens into constellations and divided time into days, weeks, years, and centuries. Their gods, on Hindoo temples and on Assyrian, Peruvian, and American walls, the dragons and winged animals, Gucumatz, Rama, Siva, Vishnu, Tezcatlipoca, were painted in the colors of the clays from granite, red, white, and blue, the colors of the comet. He thinks that race taught that one comet had struck, and that another would end all things in fire.

He lines the future warnings with the past event. Malachi 4: the day that burns as an oven, the proud and the wicked as stubble, left neither root nor branch, and the sun of righteousness with healing in his wings. Revelation 12: a great red dragon, his tail drawing the third part of the stars and casting them to the earth. Revelation 6: earthquake, the sun black as sackcloth of hair, the moon as blood, the stars falling as the figs of a tree in a mighty wind, heaven departing as a scroll, every mountain and island moved, and men hiding in the dens and the rocks. He says this is the story of Job over again, told as a prefiguration. An Ethiopian copy of the book of Enoch, a poem which the author of Nimrod supposes authentic, has the mountains melting like honeycomb, the earth immerged, all things in it perishing, the elect preserved, and the whole earth full of water. Donnelly says this is either history or prophecy.

Second Peter 3 is the Atlantis sentence of the chapter. Verse 5: the earth standing out of the water and in the water, which he reads, as in Ovid and Ragnarok, as an island. Verse 6: the world that then was, overflowed with water, perished.

This seems to refer to the island Atlantis, "overflowed with water," and destroyed, as told by Plato; thereby forming a very distinct connection between the Island of Poseidon and the Deluge of Noah.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 427

Verse 7 reserves the present heavens and earth unto fire. Verse 10: the day of the Lord comes as a thief, the heavens pass with a great noise, the elements melt, and the earth and its works are burned up. The Gothic Surt, with his flaming sword, will come at the end, vanquish the gods, and give the universe to the flames. The Amantas taught the Peruvians that some day the shadow will veil the sun forever, and land, moon, and stars will burn with no regeneration. The Algonquin Michabo will stamp his foot, flames will consume the habitable land, and he will save a pair, or at most those who kept his institutions, for a new world. The Chickasaws, the Mandans of the Missouri, the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, the Muyscas of Bogota, the Botocudos of Brazil, the Araucanians of Chili, and the Winnebagoes have the same presentiment. The Mayas of Yucatan had a prediction which Father Lizana, cure of Itzamal, preserved in Spanish, beginning that at the close of the ages it hath been decreed. The finding I keep is the one connection he states in his own sentence: Poseidon’s island and Noah’s deluge, joined through this verse, and a future fire modeled on the past one.

Part IV, Chapter VII. The Earth struck by Comets many Times

If the Glacial Age was one collision, it was not the only one in the thousands of millions of years the planet has turned and circled. The Palaeozoic, he says after Dana, oscillated at not more than one foot in a century. Then came the Appalachian revolution. Strata were flexed into folds, some a score of miles in span. Fissures opened, like the fiords of the Drift age. Sandstones and shales were crystallized into gneiss and mica-schist, limestone into marble, and bituminous coal into anthracite in Pennsylvania, in places into graphite. The pressure came from the east, from where the Atlantic now is, a lateral push, as of paper or cloth. It was accompanied by great heat. No Carboniferous fossils occur in later rocks. The extermination of life was one of the most extensive in geological history. Floods followed, as the evaporated seas returned. He reads this as a comet contact hotter than the Drift, hot enough to melt rock, so that whatever debris fell was consumed with the surface. Ice, however thick, will not explain heat.

Lesser visits left Drift-like beds without melting everything. Cambrian conglomerates resemble till. In the Lower Silurian of the south of Scotland, blocks and bowlders from one foot to five feet, of gneiss, syenite, and granite, do not belong to the rocks of that neighborhood.

Possibly these bowlders may have come from some ancient Atlantis, transported by ice.

Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), p. 434

That sentence is Geikie’s, which Donnelly prints. I keep it separate from his own Atlantic island. The Old Red Sandstone conglomerates of northern England and Scotland closely resemble a consolidated bowlder drift. Near Victoria, in Australia, a conglomerate was nearly one hundred feet thick. Coarse beds at the bottom of the Carboniferous in Scotland are difficult to believe other than ancient moraine debris, often unstratified, the stones blunted. Ramsay found scratched and blunted stones in a Permian conglomerate. A coarse bowlder-conglomerate is associated with the Jurassic in the north of Scotland. The Cretaceous has yielded great stones. In the Eocene of Switzerland, erratics occur, one of them one hundred and five feet long, ninety feet broad, and forty-five feet high, some of a granite not known in the Alps. Geikie finds ice-carried blocks in the Eocene hard to reconcile with fossils of a somewhat tropical aspect, and ice-transported blocks in the Miocene a sore puzzle, because the fossils speak of tropical and subtropical climates in Central Europe. Donnelly’s point is that these erratics were dropped on the plains of Italy during the same age when a warm climate prevailed in Spitzbergen and north Greenland, and that, like the Drift, many of these beds are unfossiliferous. In the flysch of the Eocene of the Alps, few or no fossils. In the Upper Miocene conglomerates of Turin, not a single organic remain.

He asks whether one monstrous luminary, on an orbit of millions of years, returns and fills a large part of the earth’s path, showering debris and filling the world with flame, and whether the separated beds of stones, clay, and bowlders are its regular visits. He does not claim to have proved that single returning body. He says science will yet compare the composition of the conglomerates. Beyond them, Winchell is cited that the microscope shows the primeval granite itself made of sedimentary rocks, melted in a conflagration that wiped out the life of the planet. Before the granite, then, there were seas, shores, winds, rains, and rivers, possibly animals and man, all melted. He leaves the comet as a question there too. The earth is one great tomb of life. The chapter’s only Atlantis sentence is Geikie’s, about ice-carried bowlders, not about the island of the myths.

Part IV, Chapter VIII. The After-Word

He closes with Bacon’s prayer, that the intellectual light not breed incredulity toward divine mysteries, and with his own fear that a reader who believes the catastrophe will think it denies a God who marks the fall of a sparrow. He answers in the words the book of Job gives to God out of the whirlwind. Who is man, seventy inches long, to instruct the Almighty, or to have been present when the foundations of the earth were laid and the morning stars sang? A second answer is that, so far as the fossils show, nothing worth preserving perished. After every cataclysm the world rose to a higher level. Not a tender tropical plant fit to adorn or sustain man’s life was blotted out. Not an animal valuable for domestication was exterminated. Not even the great inventions of Tertiary man were lost. What died stood in the pathway of development: the monstrous animals, the Neanderthal races, the half-human creatures between man and the brute. The great centers of Europe and America stand on the Drift. The richest soils are the glacial clays. The brain was forced upward by the ordeal. God’s planets can be left in God’s hands.

If axe-ages, sword-ages, wind-ages, and murder-ages return, if sensual sins grow huge, if brother spoils brother, if Sodom and Gomorrah come again, God may bring a rejuvenating comet out of space. The world, he says, tends to a deification of matter. He addresses Dives, who thinks himself insured by companies, governments, doctors, and the church, and who supposes heaven is a larger Wall Street. Dives is told not to count on lands, guns, and parchments. Something may already be coming from beyond Arcturus, or Aldebaran, or Coma Berenices, with glowing countenance and horrid hair and millions of tons of debris. The last appeal is to widen the heart, readjust the values of labor, and increase the productive capacity of nature so that plenty and hope dwell in every heart. The after-word adds no new date, no new myth alignment, and no new Atlantis sentence. It is his answer to the charge that the comet and the gravel leave God out.