(4.) From the widely spread coal beds of Earth. Nothing in geology is better established, than that this is the product of tropical forests. All countries boast of their coal veins. Anthracite coal is often found in the frozen rocks of Greenland. A vein of the best coal, ten feet thick, was found in Nova Zembla, now covered with ice. Good coal is also found in the northern part of Alaska. A genial climate once covered these places.
(5.) From the remains of tropical animals. The evidence is conclusive, that gigantic elephants in countless herds once roamed the arctic regions of Siberia. His remains have been found in all lands, except the Scandinavian peninsula. The mastodon was his near neighbor, and his bones are generally found in the same regions. These animals depended on grass for subsistence. They could not endure a cold winter, nor live where snow lies on the ground for even a short time. We now find their remains where snow now lies from four to eight months in a year, and from two to twenty feet deep. From the region of Russian Siberia alone, more than eighty thousand pounds of their ivory have been sold in a single year. Whence, then, this warm climate, so uniform and general? It cannot be accounted for on internal heat. Heat, sufficient to warm an arctic atmosphere, if coming from the ground, would destroy all animal life, either of water or land. Geologists agree that it has not been affected so much as one degree for the last four thousand years. But we have positive proof that these animals existed down to the period of human existence. They probably have not been exterminated five thousand years. Internal heat cuts no figure in their existence. Only one hypothesis accounts for these tropical phenomena, viz., a land hemisphere, with pole in the center, pointing directly to the sun.
(6.) The sudden change of climate in some past time argues a rapid change in the axillary motion of the earth, preceded by a general rupture of the earth’s crust. It was so sudden, that animals were locked up in arctic ice, and have been preserved to our day, with flesh entire. (See the word Mammoth, W. Dictionary.) The change of pole must have been very sudden, or animals, slain by the convulsion, would have decayed at once.
(7.) The widely spread tropical flowers and fruits sustain this theory. The palm tree flourished in Europe and Central Asia; also in the northern part of North America. The magnolia blossomed at least 80 degrees north. Sir Charles Lyell claims that the earlier vegetation was generally tropical. Grass evidently flourished in all lands, the year round.
7. The nature and condition of the early rock attest the water theory. Had the crust begun upon a ball of lava, at a white heat, the ocean, readily boiling, would be thrown into the air, where it would be condensed, and by gravitation thrown back upon the thin crust. This would often give way, and the whole volume would enter the interior and explode the entire crust into atoms. In such case we should expect to find the under rock a broken mass of displaced lava. But we find the granite to have been so calmly deposited in water, and it retains its place so well, that we split it with the rift of sugar pine. Geologists estimate the earth’s crust from fifty to one hundred miles thick. Upon the Neptunian theory we at least have seventy-five miles without a particle of lava, or so much as the scratch of an iceberg. The early geologies spoke of dykes of lava, injected into granite. The furnace shows these to be water seams. No well attested lava has ever been found there.
8. The period of the great upheavals supports this theory. No grand mountains reared their lofty heads to the clouds, until this side the Carboniferous system of deposits. It is more probable that burning coal must have been the cause of the heat, and the expansion of steam the power, that rent the Earth’s crust; and the eighty miles pressure of waters suddenly liberated would bring up the granite, with all under rock, to the surface. Lava then proceeds from local deposits of melted rock, that had been stratified. If it came from a common center of a primary melted mass, there would be no occasion for ashes. The abundance of these ashes shows the consumption of some burning material, as of coal. The very witnesses which the Plutonic believers have placed upon the stand prove quite the reverse of their theory.
9. Facts show that the substance of all mountain chains was once deposited in the sea. Baron Von Humboldt remarked, “Upon the tallest mountains yet reached by the footsteps of man you may witness the ancient sea bottom.” Conglomerate shells with sand, hardened into rock in the ancient seas, are now found in all lands thousands of feet above the sea.
10. The rise and depressions of the Earth’s crust are proofs of the water theory. Lands having large rivers, carrying more debris or silt into the ocean than the weight of her vegetation, decaying, are rising; as has been demonstrated in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. The terraces left attest the truth of this position.
Lands having more vegetation or ice than the weight of the debris carried into the sea are sinking. Witness Greenland and the Pacific Isles. But these islands could not well sink into a sea of burning lava, without letting in the surrounding ocean; in which case the entire crust would be destroyed.
11. The crowning reason for believing in the Neptunian theory is found in the great glacial drift period. The Neptunian hypothesis of the poles of the Earth is sufficient to account for the ice that constituted the drift. The ancient equator would mark the bound between darkness and light; and would be situated so as to manufacture icebergs the whole length of this largest circle.