[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 152.
2. Ibid., p. 155.
3. Ibid., p. 155.
4. Ibid., p. 157.]
{p. 433}
it was accompanied or followed, as in the Drift Age, by tremendous floods of water; the evaporated seas returned to the earth in wasting storms:
"The waters commenced the work of denudation, which has been continued to the present time."[1]
Is not all this a striking confirmation of my theory?
Here we find that, long before the age of man, a fearful catastrophe happened to the earth. Its rocks were melted--not merely decomposed, as in the Drift Age,--but actually melted and metamorphosed; the heat, as in the Drift Age, sucked up the waters of the seas, to cast them down again in great floods; it wiped out nearly all the life of the planet, even as the Drift Age exterminated the great mammals; whatever drift then fell probably melted with the burning rocks.
Here are phenomena which no ice-sheet, though it were a thousand miles thick, can explain; here is heat, not ice; combustion, not cold; and yet all these phenomena are but the results which we have seen would naturally follow the contact of the earth with a comet.