Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE. AT

lief in an astronomical revolution which may have overtaken our globe in the first age of its formation, and have modified its position in relation to the sun. They admit that the poles have not always been as they are now, and that some terrible shock displaced them, changing at the same time the inclination of the axis of the rotation of the earth.” *

Louis Figuier says :

“We can not doubt, after such testimony, of the existence, in the frozen north, of the almost entire remains of the mammoth. The animals seem to have perished suddenly ; enveloped in ice at the moment of their death, their bodies have been preserved from decomposition by the continual action of the cold.” +

Cuvier says, speaking of the bodies of the quadrupeds which the ice had seized, and which have been preserved, with their hair, flesh, and skin, down to our own times :

“Tf they had not been frozen as soon as killed, putrefaction would have decomposed them ; and, on the other hand, this eternal frost could not have previously prevailed in the place where they died, for they could not have lived in such a temperature. It was, therefore, at the same instant when these animals perished that the country they inhabited was rendered glacial. These events

must have been sudden, instantaneous, and without any gradation.” t

There is abundant evidence that the Drift fell upon a land covered with forests, and that the trunks of the trees were swept into the mass of clay and gravel, where they are preserved to this day.

Mr. Whittlesey gives an account of a log found forty feet below the surface, in a bed of blue clay, resting

* “The World before the Deluge,” p. 463. + Ibid., p. 396. ¢ “ Ossements fossiles, Discours sur les Révolutions du Globe.”