Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

424 CONCLUSIONS.

CHAPTER YI. THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF OF MANKIND.

THERE are some thoughts and opinions which we seem to take by inheritance ; we imbibe them with our mothers’ milk ; they are in our blood; they are receiyed insensibly in childhood.

We have seen the folk-lore of the nations, passing through the endless and continuous generation of children, unchanged from the remotest ages.

In the same way there is an untaught but universal feeling which makes all mankind regard comets with fear and trembling, and which unites all races of men in a universal belief that some day the world will be destroyed by fire.

There are many things which indicate that a far-distant, prehistoric race existed in the background of Egyptian and Babylonian development, and that from this people, highly civilized and educated, we have derived the arrangement of the heavens into constellations, and our divisions of time into days, weeks, years, and centuries. This people stood much nearer the Drift Age than we do. They understood it better. Their legends and religious beliefs were full of it. The gods carved on Hindoo temples or painted on the walls of Assyrian, Peruvian, or American structures, the flying dragons, the winged gods, the winged animals, Gucumatz, Rama, Siva, Vishnu, Tezcatlipoca, were painted in the very colors of the clays which came from the disintegration of the granite, “red,