Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel by Ignatius Donnelly
page 63 of 558 (11%)
page 63 of 558 (11%)
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"We can not doubt, after such testimony, of the existence, in the
frozen north, of the almost entire remains of the mammoth. The animals seem to have _perished suddenly; enveloped in ice at the moment of their death_, their bodies have been preserved from decomposition by the continual action of the cold."[2] Cuvier says, speaking of the bodies of the quadrupeds which the ice had seized, and which have been preserved, with their hair, flesh, and skin, down to our own times: "If they had not been frozen as soon as killed, putrefaction would have decomposed them; and, on the other hand, this eternal frost could not have previously prevailed in the place where they died, for they could not have lived in such a temperature. It was, therefore, _at the same instant when these animals perished that the country they inhabited was rendered glacial_. These events must have been _sudden, instantaneous, and without any gradation_."[3] There is abundant evidence that the Drift fell upon a land covered with forests, and that the trunks of the trees were swept into the mass of clay and gravel, where they are preserved to this day. Mr. Whittlesey gives an account of a log found _forty feet below the surface_, in a bed of blue clay, resting [1. "The World before the Deluge," p. 463. 2. Ibid., p. 396. 3. "Ossements fossiles, Discours sur les Révolutions du Globe."] |
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