Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

120 THE LEGENDS.

human mind has not greatly exaggerated them: it has never drawn a bird larger than the dinornis or a beast greater than the mammoth.

It is utterly impossible that the races of the whole world, of all the continents and islands, could have preserved traditions from the most remote ages, of a comet having struck the earth, of the great heat, the conflagration, the cave-life, the age of darkness, and the return of the sun, and yet these things have had no basis of fact. It was not possible for the primitive mind to have imagined these things if they had never occurred.