Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. 405

States, further investigations may prove that it was on the North American Continent civilization was first born, and that it was thence moved eastward over the bridgelike ridges to Atlantis.

And it is, in this connection, remarkable that the Bible tells us (Genesis, chap. il, v. 8) :

“And the Lord God planted a garden eastward, in Fiden ; and there he put the man that he had formed.”

He had first (v. 7) “formed man of the dust of the ground,” and then he moves him eastward to Eden, to the garden.

And, as I have shown, when the fall of man came, when the Drift destroyed the lovely Tertiary conditions, man was again moved eastward ; he was driven out of Eden, and the cherubims guarded the eastern extremity of the garden, to prevent man’s return from (we will say) the shores of Atlantis. In other words, the present habitat of men is, as I have shown, according to the Bible, cast of their former dwelling-place.

In the age of man’s declension he moved eastward. In the age of his redemption he moves westward.

Hence, if the Bible is to be relied on, before man reached the garden of Eden, he had been created in some region west of the garden, to wit, in America; and here he may have first developed the civilization of which we find traces in Illinois, showing a metal-working race sufliciently advanced to have an alphabet and a currency.

But in all this we do not touch upon the question of where man was first formed by God.

The original birthplace of the human race who shall tell? It was possibly in some region now under the ocean, as Professor Winchell has suggested ; there he was evolved during the mild, equable, gentle, plentiful,