Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

392 CONCLUSIONS.

Set aside my theory as absurd, and how much nearer are you to solving the problem? If neither waves, nor icebergs, nor glaciers, nor ice-sheets, nor comets, produced this world-cloak of débris, where did it come from ?

Remember the essential, the incontrovertible elements of the problem :

Great heat.

- A sudden catastrophe. .

Great evaporation of the seas and waters,

. Great clouds.

An age of floods and snows and ice and torrents, . The human legends.

Find a theory that explains and embraces all these elements, and then, and not until then, throw mine aside.

Another will say :

D BR o we

“But in one place you give us legends about an age of dreadful and long-continued heat, as in the Arabian tale, where no rain is said to have fallen for seven years ; and in another place you tell us of a period of constant rains and snows and cold. Are not these statements incompatible ? ”

Not at all. This isa big globe we live on : the tropics are warmer than the poles. Suppose a tremendons heat to be added to our natural temperature ; it would necessarily make it hotter on the equator than at the poles, although it would be warm everywhere. There can be no clouds without condensation, no condensation without some degree of cooling. Where would the air cool first ? Naturally at the points most remote from the equator, the poles. Hence, while the sun was still blazing in the uncovered heayens of the greater part of the earth, small caps of cloud would form at the north and south poles, and shed their moisture in gentle rain. As the heat brought to the earth by the comet was accidental and