The legends coincide only in these facts:--the monster in the air; the heat; the fire; the cave-life; the darkness; the return of the light.
In everything else they differ.
Surely, a falsehood, springing out of one mind, would have been more consistent in its parts than this.
The legends seem to represent the diverging memories which separating races carried down to posterity of the same awful and impressive events: they remembered them in fragments and sections, and described them as the four blind men in the Hindoo story described the elephant;--to one it was a tail, to another a trunk, to another a leg, to another a body;--it needs to put all their stories together to make a consistent whole. We can not understand
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the conflagration without the comet; or the cave-life without both; or the age of darkness without something that filled the heavens with clouds; or the victory of the sun without the clouds, and the previous obscuration of the sun.
If the reader takes the other alternative, that these legends are not fragments of a colossal falsehood, then he must concede that the earth, since man inhabited it, encountered a comet. No other cause or event could produce such a series of gigantic consequences as is here narrated.
But one other question remains: Did the Drift material come from the comet?
It could have resulted from the comet in two ways: either it was a part of the comet's substance falling upon our planet at the moment of contact; or it may have been torn from the earth itself by the force of the comet, precisely as it has been supposed that it was produced by the ice.
The final solution of this question can only be reached when close and extensive examination of the Drift deposits have been made to ascertain how far they are of earth-origin.