luxurious vegetation developed by the heat of a burning climate, the
boundless pastures on which herds of great elephants, the active
horse, the robust hippopotamus, and great carnivorous animals grazed
and roamed, became covered with a mantle of ice and snow."[3]

M. Ch. Martins says:

"The most violent convulsions of the solid and liquid elements appear
to have been themselves only the effects due to a cause much more
powerful than the mere expansion of the pyrosphere; and it is
necessary to recur, in order to explain them, to some new and bolder
hypothesis than has Yet been hazarded. Some philosophers have belief

[1. American Cyclopædia," vol. vi, p. 114.

2. Ibid., vol. vi, p. 111.

3. "The World before the Deluge," p. 435.]

{p. 47}

in an astronomical revolution which may have overtaken our globe in
the first age of its formation, and have modified its position in
relation to the sun. They admit _that the poles have not always been
as they are now_, and that _some terrible shock displaced them_,
changing at the same time the inclination of the axis of the rotation
of the earth."[1]

Louis Figuier says: