Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel

I am not inclined to conclude that man had no existence at all before the epoch of the great revolutions of the earth. He might have inhabited certain districts of no great extent, whence, after these terrible events, he repeopled the world. Perhaps, also, the spots where he abode were swallowed up, and the bones lie buried under the beds of the present seas. --CUVIER.
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THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE DRIFT.
PART I. THE DRIFT.
PART II. THE COMET.
PART III. THE LEGENDS.
PART IV. CONCLUSIONS.
READER,--Let us reason together:--
What do we dwell on? The earth. What part of the earth? The latest formations, of course. We live upon the top of a mighty series of stratified rocks, laid down in the water of ancient seas and lakes, during incalculable ages, said, by geologists, to be from ten to twenty miles in thickness .
Think of that! Rock piled over rock, from the primeval granite upward, to a height four times greater than our highest mountains , and every rock stratified like the leaves of a book; and every leaf containing the records of an intensely interesting history, illustrated with engravings, in the shape of fossils, of all forms of life, from the primordial cell up to the bones of man and his implements.
But it is not with the pages of this sublime volume
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