Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. 403

through twenty feet of yellow clay until you reach a thin layer of gravel, about an inch thick, and then pass at once, without any gradual transition, into a bed of blue clay fifty feet thick ; and under this, again, you reach grayel. What separated these various deposits? The glacialists answer us that the yellow clay was deposited in fresh water, and the blue clay in salt water, and hence the difference in the color. But how did the water change instantly from salt to fresh? Why was there no interval of brackish water, during which the blue and yellow clays would have gradually shaded into each other? The transition from the yellow clay to the blue is as immediate and marked as if you were to lay a piece of yellow cloth across a piece of blue cloth. You can not take the salt out of a vast ocean, big enough to cover half a continent, in a day, a month, a year, or a century. And where were the bowl-like ridges of land that inclosed the continent, and kept out the salt water during the ages that elapsed while the yellow clay was being laid down in fresh water? And, above all, why are no such clays, blue, yellow, or red, now being formed anywhere on earth, under sheetice, glaciers, icebergs, or anything else ? And how about the people who built cisterns, and used coins and iron implements before this silt was accumulated in the seas, 2 million years ago, for it must have taken that long to create these vast deposits if they were deposited as silt in the bottom of seas and lakes. It may be asked :

“What relation, in order of time, do you suppose the Drift Age to hold to the Deluge of Noah and Deucalion?”

The latter was infinitely later. The geologists, as I have shown, suppose the Drift to have come upon the earth—hbasing their calculations upon the recession of the