[1. "Cosmos," vol. i, p. 131.
2. Ibid., vol. i, p. 129.]
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I think the reader will agree with me that the theory of the glacialists, that a world-infolding ice-sheet produced them, is impossible; to reiterate, they are found, (on the equator,) where the ice-sheet could not have been without ending all terrestrial life; and they are not found where the ice must have been, in Siberia and Northwestern America, if ice was anywhere.
If neither ice nor water ground up the earth-surface into the Drift, then we must conclude that the comet so ground it up, or brought the materials with it already ground up.
The probability is, that both of these suppositions are in part true; the comet brought down upon the earth the clay-dust and part of the gravel and bowlders; while the awful force it exerted, meeting the earth while moving at the rate of a million miles an hour, smashed the surface-rocks, tore them to pieces, ground them up and mixed the material with its own, and deposited all together on the heated surface of the earth, where the lower part was baked by the heat into "till" or "hardpan," while the rushing cyclones deposited the other material in partly stratified masses or drifts above it; and part of this in time was rearranged by the great floods which followed the condensation of the cloud-masses into rain and snow, in the period of the River or Champlain Drift.
Nothing can be clearer than that the inhabitants of the earth believed that the stones fell from heaven--to wit, from the comet. But it would be unsafe to base a theory upon such a belief, inasmuch as stones, and even fish and toads, taken up by hurricanes, have often fallen again in showers; and they would appear to an uncritical population to have fallen from heaven. But it is, at least, clear that the fall of the stones and the clay are associated in
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the legends with the time of the great catastrophe; they are part of the same terrible event.
I shall briefly recapitulate some of the evidence.