snow; gigantic snow-beds are formed, which gradually solidify into ice. While no mile-thick ice-sheet descends to the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Mexico, glaciers intrude into all the valleys, and the flora and fauna of the temperate regions become arctic; that is to say, only those varieties of plants and animals survive in those regions that are able to stand the cold, and these we now call arctic.

In the midst of this darkness and cold and snow, the remnants of poor humanity wander over the face of the desolated world; stumbling, awe-struck, but filled with an insatiable hunger which drives them on; living upon the bark of the few trees that have escaped, or on the bodies of the animals that have perished, and even upon one another.

All this we shall find plainly depicted in the legends of mankind, as we proceed.

Steadily, steadily, steadily--for days, weeks, months, years the rains and snows fall; and, as the clouds are drained, they become thinner and thinner, and the light increases.

It has now grown so light that the wanderers can mark the difference between night and day. "And the evening and the morning were the first day."

Day by day it grows lighter and warmer; the piled-up snows begin to melt. It is an age of tremendous floods. All the low-lying parts of the continents are covered with water. Brooks become mighty rivers, and rivers are floods; the Drift débris is eut into by the waters, re-arranged, piled up in what is called the stratified, secondary, or Champlain drift. Enormous river-valleys are cut out of the gravel and clay.

The seeds and roots of trees and grasses, uncovered by the rushing torrents, and catching the increasing

warmth, begin to put forth green leaves. The sad and parti-colored earth, covered with white, red, or blue clays and gravels, once more wears a fringe of green.

The light increases. The warmth lifts up part of the water already cast down, and the outflow of the steaming ice-fields, and pours it down again in prodigious floods. It is an age of storms.

The people who have escaped gather together. They know the sun is coming back. They know this desolation is to pass away. They build great fires and make human sacrifices to bring back the sun. They point and guess where he will appear; for they have lost all knowledge of the cardinal points. And all this is told in the legends.

At last the great, the godlike, the resplendent luminary breaks through the clouds and looks again upon the wrecked earth.

Oh, what joy, beyond all words, comes upon those who see him! They fall upon their faces. They worship him whom the dread events have taught to recognize as the great god of life and light. They burn or cast down their animal gods of the pre-glacial time, and then begins that world-wide worship of the sun which has continued down to our own times.

And all this, too, we shall find told in the legends.

And from that day to this we live under the influence of the effects produced by the comet. The mild, eternal summer of the Tertiary age is gone. The battle between the sun and the ice-sheets continues. Every north wind brings us the breath of the snow; every south wind is part of the sun's contribution to undo the comet's work. A continual amelioration of climate has been going on since the Glacial age; and, if no new catastrophe falls on the earth, our remote posterity will yet see the last snow-bank

of Greenland melted, and the climate of the Eocene reestablished in Spitzbergen.

"It has been suggested that the warmth of the Tertiary climate was simply the effect of the residual heat of a globe cooling from incandescence, but many facts disprove this. For example, the fossil plants found in our Lower Cretaceous rocks in Central North America indicate a temperate climate in latitude 35° to 40° in the Cretaceous age. The coal-flora, too, and the beds of coal, indicate a moist, equable, and warm but not hot climate in the Carboniferous age, millions of years before the Tertiary, and three thousand miles farther south than localities where magnolias, tulip-trees, and deciduous cypresses, grew in the latter age. Some learned and cautious geologists even assert that there have been several Ice periods, one as far back as the Devonian."*

The ice-fields and wild climate of the poles, and the cold which descends annually over Europe and North America, represent the residuum of the refrigeration. caused by the evaporation due to the comet's heat, and the long absence of the sun during the age of darkness. Every visitation of a comet would, therefore, necessarily eventuate in a glacial age, which in time would entirely pass away. And our storms are bred of the conflict between the heat and cold of the different latitudes. Hence, it may be, that the Tertiary climate represented the true climate of the earth, undisturbed by comet catastrophes ; a climate equable, mild, warm, stormless. Think what a world this would be without tempests, cyclones, ice, snow, or cold!

Let us turn now to the evidences that man dwelt on the earth during the Drift, and that he has preserved recollections of the comet to this day in his myths and legends.

*466 Popular Science Monthly," July, 1876, p. 283.

PART III.

The Legends.

CHAPTER I.

THE NATURE OF MYTHS.

In a primitive people the mind of one generation precisely repeats the minds of all former generations; the construction of the intellectual nature varies no more, from age to age, than the form of the body or the color of the skin; the generations feel the same emotions, and think the same thoughts, and use the same expressions. And this is to be expected, for the brain is as much a part of the inheritable, material organization as the color of the eyes or the shape of the nose.

The minds of men move automatically: no man thinks because he intends to think; he thinks, as he hungers and thirsts, under a great primal necessity; his thoughts come out from the inner depths of his being as the flower is developed by forces rising through the roots of the plant.

The female bird says to herself, "The time is propitious, and now, of my own free will, and under the operation of my individual judgment, I will lay a nestful of eggs and hatch a brood of children." But it is unconscious that it is moved by a physical necessity, which has constrained all its ancestors from the beginning of time,

and which will constrain all its posterity to the end of time; that its will is nothing more than an expression of age, development, sunlight, food, and "the skyey influences." If it were otherwise it would be in the power of a generation to arrest the life of a race.

All great thoughts are inspirations of God. They are part of the mechanism by which he advances the race; they are new varieties created out of old genera.

There come bursts of creative force in history, when great thoughts are born, and then again Brahma, as the Hindoos say, goes to sleep for ages.

But, when the fever of creation comes, the poet, the inventor, or the philosopher can no more arrest the development of his own thoughts than the female bird, by her will-power, can stop the growth of the ova within her, or arrest the fever in the blood which forces her to incubation.

The man who wrote the Shakespeare plays recognized this involuntary operation of even his own transcendent intellect, when he said:

"Our poesy is a gum which oozes

From whence 'tis nourished."

It came as the Arabian tree distilled its "medicinal gum"; it was the mere expression of an internal force, as much beyond his control as the production of the gum was beyond the control of the tree.

But in primitive races mind repeats mind for thousands of years. If a tale is told at a million hearth-fires, the probabilities are small, indeed, that any innovation at one hearth-fire, however ingenious, will work its way into and modify the narration at all the rest. There is no printing-press to make the thoughts of one man the thoughts of thousands. While the innovator is modify