The deluge and its cause : being an explanation of the annular theory of the formation of the earth, with special reference to the flood and the legends and folk lore of ancient races

Introduction

HAVING been requested to write a few lines of introduction for The Deluge and Its Cause I take pleasure in saying briefly, that I have read the works so far published by Prof. Vail dealing w^ith his Annular Theory of the earth's formation — a subject to which he has devoted nearly thirty-five years of patient, diligent, scientific research, and I am convinced he has rendered a great service to science and humanity.

The Annular Theory accounts for many strange facts in nature and mythology, and is a distinct service to those who hold that the Mosaic account of creation is a true account. In the present volume, which deals more especially with the deluge, the author has shown the great similarity that exists between the early legends and the advent of man. He has shown also that the narrative in Genesis is neither mythical nor allegorical, but a statement of events as they appeared to those who witnessed them; that the reason why the Mosaic account is not better understood now is because we of today are in ignorance of the strange physical conditions of

I3S the heavens and earth that presented themselves to primitive man, but which passed away in accordance with the laws of world evolution. The theory of a watery canopy or annular vapor formation surrounding the earth makes the account in Genesis perfectly clear, and this theory finds confirmation .in the mythological (?) lore of all ancient races and in the ''fossil thought" of widely distributed tribes.

The Deluge, then, was undoubtedly a real thing. Water did fall from heaven in unprecedented quantities and the source of so great a quantity of super-aerial waters has forever passed away. The first rainbow did appear after the deluge and there will never be another deluge.

All these points are so clearly set forth in The Deluge and Its Cause and Prof. Vail's other writings that none can deny or dispute. His logic is unassailed; all facts support his deductions, and proof is found in the rocks and geologic records as well as in the biblical legends and race thoughts of forgotten peoples.

I commend this book to the thoughtful reader, with the positive belief that all who have patience to follow the author carefully to the end will agree with me that the Annular Theory solves problems that have long baffled bible scholars as well as scientists.

In the present volume the author has merely given us enough of his theory to make us anxious to follow him further. As the result of his many years of research and his personal investigation of many of this earth's physical phenomena, he has gathered enough information of interest to fill a half hundred large volumes, and I am sure that every student of the Annular Theory will pray earnestly that Prof. Vail may be spared many years more to continue his investigations and see the results of his research given to the scientific world in printed form. His first large volume The Waters Above the Firmament (400 pages), a wonderful book, was published two years ago and will be followed by other volumes as the number of students of the An- 7iiilar Theory increases, and I predict that the interest that will be awakened by The Deluge AND Its Cause will encourage the author to proceed with their immediate publication.

Editor Suggestion.

4020 Drexel Boulevard, Chicago, 111.

The Waters Above the Earth.

This cut shows the earth as it existed before the flood surrounded by a vapor canopy which caused perpetual summer; there was no rain, no sun, no moon, no rainbow, no storms or winds; no seasons, and man Hved far longer than now.

When this canopy fell as the Deluge, the physical condition of the earth changed, and man's environment was greatly modified.

Index

The Deluge

The Molten Earth .

The Testimony

The Canopy i6

Its Naturalness

Geologic Canopies .

Change of Oceans

Old Tropic Conditions

The Glacial Epochs

Arctic Mammals

Witnesses from Beds of Fossil Thought

The Antidiluvian Heavens

• 33

Japanese Testimony ...

• 33

The Vedas of Ancient India

The Ancient Greek Heaven

The Roman Heaven . . .

Scandinavian Thought

The Serpent or Dragon

.

The Inevitable Result

.

Oceanic Augmentation

.

The Hebrew Skies .

The Shamayim of Heaven

Waters Above the Firman lent

He Made the Stars Also

The Great Lights

The Polar Sky Opening

The Eden Earth

A Rainless World

Change of Deity Names

Man's Great Longevity

. 72

The Grand Intent

• 75

The Great Deep

Some Other Deep

. 82

After the Flood

The Rainbow .

. 91

Man's New Environment

• 95

A Nightless Age

• 97

Telescopic View of Vapor Canopy on Jupiter 109

The Post Deluvian Wind

• no

Appendix

Human Longevity Reduced The Conclusion Note ....

The Earth's Annular System

115 119 126 127

THE DELUGE.

A Solution that Solves a Thousand Problems. — A Catastrophe seen from THE Standpoint of Law.

I have been deeply interested in the recent discussion of the Deluge problem, from the perilous standpoint of miraculous intervention, as taken by one of the most competent advocates of that school, who has presented some quieting assurances that in very modern geologic times, a terrific sv^eep of waves has involved all the northern and northwestern slopes of the Asiatic continent. As the years go by the Deluge asserts its immortality, as an old-time memorial. In consideration of the fact that it has been discussed from almost every conceivable standpoint, I will venture to offer something new on the subject.

As far back as the summer of 1874 I published a little volume, the first edition of this, to show that the Deluge occurred as a philosophic necessity, arising from a world-condition that no longer obtains. In that work it was maintained that a vast cloud-canopy of primitive earth-vapors, such as now envelop the planets Jupiter and

Saturn, lingered as a revolving deluge-source, in the skies of antediluvian man, — a source of primeval rains, snows and hail, competent to produce all the floods, and all the Glacial Epochs the earth ever saw, and that this last fall of those primordial waters deepened the oceans many fathoms.

More than a quarter of a^ century has passed since this canopy theory was launched upon the sea of uncertainty, and it has been a source of deep satisfaction to find that to-day such men as the younger Winchell can say that the "Earth's vapors must have lingered on high much later than has been supposed," and that he *'has no objection to their presence even down to recent geologic times." (I have not asked Professor Wincheirs permission to make this statement of his public.)

In this attempt I w^ant to reaffirm the certainty that primitive man saw the last remnants of the Earth's Annular System revolving over him as a great world-roof of watery vapors, and that it involved him in a world-environment necessarily Edenic in character, and catastrophic in its close, and that the narrative of the flood is a simple and truthful account of the fall of that ''upper Deep" of waters, as the memory of surviving humanity deposed.

When we turn our telescopes to the skies we find two giant planets, and perhaps others, still involved in aqueous clouds, adequate to deluge , a world like ours from pole to pole ; and all I ask is that thinkers admit that our world closed its Neptunic career in accord with inexorable law thousands of years after man came upon the scene. There certainly can be no philosophic objection to lingering canopies of tellurio-cosmic waters, as such a world-roof is absolutely essential to make an Eden on Earth, as a birth place and kindergarten for the infant race of men. If such a claim be conceded, then we will have to admit that the Earth had a Saturn-like anmdar system, or at least a Jupiter-like canopy , all through geo' logic time, as a most competent world-builder and desolator.

The remarkable persistency with which the memorials of a flood have lived in human thought, as the ages have rolled on, is a fact of momentous import. Not alone have the echoes of a terrible world-catastrophe been preserved and transmitted to us through the ancient Semitic races, in substantial and circumstantial detail. Hundreds of years, it may be hundreds of centuries, before the historic birth of the Hebrew people, a record of that sweeping cataclysm was made on clay tablets, and kept in imperishable

II stone, in the childlike simplicity of a primitive tongue, and buried for more than four thousand years from the gaze of man. Even before they were hidden by the dust of centuries, the nature of that visitation had become so clouded by the mists of time that these annals of a hoary past show by their very diction that the theme of the Deluge was then old, and of oblivious import.

There is, however, a citadel of testimony to be found in the deluge narratives in the true interpretation of statements that have, as I think, been altogether misunderstood because we are not familiar with those world-conditions which made a deluge not only a possible, but a necessary thing. I say necessary because we all know that all our oceans had to fall from the skies. For, every drop of the mighty waters that now wash the world's trembling coasts was sent as high as the inveterate heat of the igneous earth could urge them, and it now devolves upon the thinker to tell how, and when, they came back.

The Molten It is not necessary for me to

Earth go into the world's high court

to prove that this planet was once in a state of igneous fusion. The physicist, and even the ordinary man of thought, know very well that if any question in physics has been settled by the logic of inductive science, it is the fact that our planet was once in a molten state. There was a time when the earth shone out as a scintillating star. The only clouds that then floated were fireborn mineral and metallic sublimations, from oceans of tossing lava and leaping flame. Where were our oceans of water then? I need not bring testimony to prove to any intelligent audience that those waters floated as a measureless ocean of vapors on the very outskirts of the molten sphere. When the geologist finds a ''lost rock" — a great boulder lying far out on the plain, he knows that by some transporting medium it has been carried from its original home, and it is possible to follow the track of the wanderer back to its native site. And he is not miuch of a geologist who does not know that not only rocks, but vast beds, of continental dimensions have been built by materials carried from afar; but how many of us reiflect when we see a pond, a lake, a sea, or an ocean, that every drop of it was formed in the world's great laboratory of implacable flames and driven to the lofty skies? Here is something also brought from afar ; and as intelligent investigators we must trace the waters back to their original home. They have come from the telluric heavens and we want to know how they came back. We now have to admit that during an immeasurable lapse of time the young earth was surrounded by a vast ocean of watery vapors, which were competent in their fall to deluge the earth a hundred times ; yes, a thousand times.

Is it an impossible thought, then, that some of that vast primordial ocean lingered on high and fell after man inhabited the earth? I know it is said that when the earth cooled down the waters fell, and thus far we can all agree and stand on th( same rock foundation of admitted fact. Here, too, is the prolific source of variant thought. Geologists generally have maintained that this great world-fund of waters fell back to the earth immediately after it cooled down, and that even the oceans rolled over the solid planet as -they do today when it was yet hot and seething, and that they were driven back to the skies again and again.

I must say that I cannot view it in that way, and am forced to part company here with the great school of geological scholars. I believe it is mathematically and mechanically demonstrable that a very small portion of the earth's fire-formed waters came back in that early age. The logic of eloquent facts crowding to testify before the world's great jury shows that the watery vapors driven out from the world furnace were eventually made to revolve about as a Saturn-like ring system. This being true, those vapors could not fall except in a progressive decline, lasting through immeasurable ages. Scientific men affirm that our moon is falling to the earth, but that the final collapse is in the wind-up of unknown ages to come. Rings cannot fall directly to the earth, so long as they have a revolving movement, any more than its moon, but must linger as great cloud belts or bands such as we see to-day in the firmament of the planet Jupiter.

Here is a first class opportunity for the formation of very opposite schools of thought. The old school sees the vapors return as hot and steaming waters to the earth, and begin their eternal round of destructive and constructive processes. The new school of annular students sees a vast amount of the primitive vapors in a ring system, and drops them in the fullness of time, as great Jupiter-like clouds upon the earth. The old school sees a vast down-rush of waters in archsean time. The new school carries that fund of waters away down the flood of time and drops them in grand installments all along the ''ages/' In fact, each grand installment is credited with the task of making one of the ages, and the Deluge of Noah is made the last installment. Each installment brought down from the lofty skies an addition to the ocean ; and with a vast amount of other tellurio-cosmic matter, made large additions to the earth's strata.

It is willingly left to the world's jury to compare the two views, and this brings me at once to the task of showing the annular side of the problem.

yj^g It is difficult for any one to

Testimony find a competent cause in the

formation of Ages if we do not delegate the office to annular installments. What closed the Cambrian age and made the broad outlines of the Huronian? What closed the Huronian and ushered, in succession, a new environment stamped in unmistakable characters in the Silurian ? Refuse to give ring installments the credit, by giving additions to the oceans,- and the old school is compelled to doubt the existence of ''geologic ages/' I have never yet heard of an attempt to explain why ages ''came and went." Why, in the roll of ages, earth leaped again and again from a lower to a higher plane ? I state it as the conviction from a life of close study, that if the waters had all fallen immediately after the earth cooled down, there could have been but one age after that; and that this succession of ages is evidence of the consecutive fall of rings.

jjjg This annular theory necessa-

Canopy rily leads to the conclusion

that in the gradual and progressive decline of

rings, canopies must result, and ''Deluges" must

i6 result from the gradual collapse of canopies. Rings must decline, of course, into the equatorial atmosphere of a planet. The centrifugal motion of the rotating earth, with its resisting atmosphere, would resist the downward movement of such vapors, which would seek to fall toward the point or points of least resistance. Every one will concede that the poles of the planet are such points. Hence it must be admitted that ring vapors must float from the equatorial to the polar heavens, and owing to the excessive slowness of the fall of all revolving matter, a canopy must become a cloud satellite to its primary world, and it is my care to prove that the infant race of men saw such a canopy of watery vapors move from, the equator to the poles, zMle it revolved about the earth, and iinally saw it break from its celestial fastenings and desolate the planet.

Itg Is there anything unnatural

Naturalness or strained, so far, in this

presentation of a deluge source ? The old school complain bitterly when an effort is itiade to shorten the time they want for the evolution of earth, and why, in this most stupendous contract of world-building, they allow so short a time for the oceans to fall, and hurry them back to the earth, is only one of many incongruities. Here

I must digress far enough to explain that in any 'effort to exploit the canopy origin of the flood we must not divorce it from a competent physical cause, nor from essential world-conditions. The Deluge must be treated from the standpoint of geological causes ; and as one of the grand stepping stones leading from one age to another — out of one world-condition to another. Had the flood of Noah been of such stupendous magnitude and severity as some of those which marked grand world-revolutions of geologic time, such as buried in one vast graveyard the Tertiary dead, we would to-day have seen the result in the immortal impress of a dying world-stage on the pages of time. In this instance it has not left so much of a rock record as it has a record preserved in the fossil beds of thought. The Deluge was a weak and expiring effort of old conditions. Decrepit causes in world evolution were ending their long career. This of course predicates that the last of earth rings, as geologic agents in world-making, had so far descended as to make a universal world-roof over this planet.

Such a vapor roof would be, as any one can see, a universal watery heaven instead of a starry heaven. It forces us to concede that the skies of antediluvian man were preparing for an inevitable world baptism, a desolating flood-plunge in

i8 medial latitudes, and vast snow-avalanches in polar lands. I think we can say with the utmost confidence and sincerity that such a preparation may have been m.ade right in the line of old and decrepit world-causes. This is all we need for the present, and premising this flood cause and source, no man can limit its capacity as an earth desolator. With this much of a running argument we come more directly in contact with primitive Testimony.

Geologic ^-S I have intimated, we must

Canopies now^ take a backward glance

at some of the monumental witnesses left in the grand march of time. I want to note liow something very like a vapor canopy has left its waymarks all up and down the flood of the ''Ages.'' Though it may be difficult to point cut any definite or firm outlines or boundaries separating ages, this does not in the least militate against the well estabhshed fact that an actual record of *'ages" exists, and that they had some all competent differentiating cause.

A vapor roof arching the heavens, as all will admit, must make coincident w^orld-conditions ; and it necessarily follows that in the collapse of such a w^orld-regulator, those conditions would be brought to an end, and other conditions made to succeed them. Do we find this succession of conditions as we trace the geologic record? If we do what was their cause ? Has the old school geologist ever explained them to the inquiring pupil? Now let us see if we cannot show that conditions came and went as canopies came and went.

Change of This supposition is abundant-

Oceans ly fortified by the fact, ad-

mitted on all hands, that those world-conditions changed, as the oceanic waters changed their conditions. The very general changes in ocean life ; — changes in the ocean fauna in all parts of the world on the same geologic horizon, are all the evidence we need to show that the character of the ocean's waters was universally changed, again and again.

This may not be altogether convincing that vast canopy-falls changed the waters, but the unerring finger of philosophic world evolution points that way.

How could the present life in the ocean undergo a visible change without a coincident change in the condition of the waters? The ocean fauna has arisen from plane to plane many times. A change in oceanic waters necessitates am. addition of waters; and an addition must come only from on high, and we are simply compelled to concede that the successive changes that show how life was built on life in the geologic ages came by watery additions from vast celestial sources. I say the index hand of Time points to the Earth's Ring System, and the inevitable fall of canopy-waters : Thus the Noachian flood-source appears on the rational horizon. Canopy-waters lingering much later than Archaean time come immediately to the witness stand.

This reciprocal relationship of canopy to oceanlife and world-condition is of supreme importance. If we should critically examine every age ; note the old life forms that have died, and the new conditions and life of the ancient seas, we would see each and every age characterized by augmented waters. If we could detect ten thousand such changes, the canopy of supra-aerial waters would simply testify ten thousand times to their competency as flood makers.

Old Tropic Another well established fact.

Conditions prominently emblazoned on

the pages of the geologic past, is that of tropic or green-Jiouse conditions scattered all along the ages. It is not needful that I should lengthen this discussion by interlopating physical testimony to prove that a vapor canopy must impose tropic or hot-house conditions upon the earth. Any one competent to handle and read the philosopher's scales, knows that such a world-covering and protector would eventually banish every vestige of winter from the earth, and produce one long-continued summer time even up to the poles. How many times the earth of the geologic past has thus entered Edenic conditions we cannot say, but there is one thing we can say positively : that it has passed through green-house conditions again and again ; and that again and again such tropic scenes have ended. We all know that to-day the earth has buried in its rocky bosom the eloquent records of abounding tropic life, and that it is painfully admitted on all hands that in their efforts to fathom this mystery the stoutest scientific minds have been stranded for nearly a century. We must find an adequate physical cause for these great world stages. I know not how many people have attempted to account for them by the inevitable return of the primeval vapors to the earth, in the line of canopy evolution ; but I do know that this most competent explanation has been struggling toward recognition for more than a quarter of a century.

Let us imagine a great ocean of vapors sent to the heavens from the molten earth, and there divided and subdivided into annular sections, each section coming down into the atmosphere in its own fulness of time, and spreading as a vapor canopy from the equator to the poles. Each time, as each instahment reached the atmosphere in its fall, it would simply force the earth into tropic conditions, and keep it in those conditions, it may have been, for millions of years. Could inventive Nature contrive a more efficient scheme for producing those garden scenes that meet our gaze all through the carboniferous age? Look at the interminable jungles of that era. It seems to me we cannot fail to see that the primitive, sooty, carbon-laden vapors which went up in the molten era, had returned to make a carbonaceous world-environment for the installation of that abounding growth of vegetation. We cannot satisfactorily account for the vast deposits of carbonaceous matter, without the innovation of a carbonaceous environment by the return of sooty carbon as vegetable food for the plant-world, by which the air, earth, and seas became charged with the very elements that installed exuberant vegetable life. This primitive carbon element sent up from the molten earth, and the vegetable growth it impelled, under hot house conditions, lie buried to-day in the coal-measures of the world.

The remarkable deposits of this carbon, filled with vegetation more abundant in the regions up toward the poles, where, as I have stated, canopies must decline, and the more remarkable fact of the utter absence so far as we know of vegetable coals in the equatorial earth — the very home of vegetation in all ages, forces the resistless conviction upon me, that canopies and canopy downfalls made the ages, and the Deluge canopy becomes more and more probable.

The Glacial The most puzzling picture of

Epochs the *'ages" is the sudden and

sullen reign of death in the very empire of abundant life — the deadly march of continental glaciers over the ruins of a tropic world. Has the mystery no solution? That periods of tropic growth and abounding animal life have ended in excessive cold is a fact so fully established that no one now attempts to gainsay it, and it is a humiliation to the old school geologists to have to admit that they here have met a stumbling block which they can neither climb over nor circumvent. Then, too, some of those warm periods have so suddenly closed, that summer is actually found in the icy grasp of inveterate winter. It would seem that nature had done all it could do to block the old path, and turn the thinker's eyes toward canopy evolution. Here the lingering canopy assumes stalwart pretensions.

The same vapor world-roof which made a 24 tropic earth from pole to pole swarming with living forms, before the canopy fell, changed those conditions as it fell, and we have an opportunity to estimate its suddenness and efficiency. A canopy of primitive vapors, as before stated, must fall largely in polar lands, and fall there as immeasurable reaches of snow ; and such a fall must have sent the chill of winter and death into the very midst of summer life. It is very plain that if supra-aerial vapors could make a hot-house world, those same vapors in their final collapse must have buried all but the medial latitudes in a snowy grave, and we have the most overtowering testimony that some of those tropic periods ended in the stern rigors of winter.

^yqHq Immediately prior to one of

Mammals the great ice periods the

wooly rhinoceros and hairy mammoth, and their congeners, luxuriated in pastures^ at least semi-tropic, under the arctic circle. To-day they are entombed in ice and frozen earth on the very spot they lived. When we recall the fact that we can place no limit to canopy snows, we can readily understand why these huge quadrupeds are sealed away in the eternal glacier. Glaciers are formed of snows, and the icy piles that contain their dead must have been at one time measureless snow-falls which filled the valleys and overtopped the mountains.

The mammoth has been found in many places in the frozen world in such condition as to leave no doubt that it was suddenly overtaken on its forage ground, and buried in unknown depths of snow on the spot. They certainly floundered to their death in a snowy grave. That the snows that buried these huge animals fell suddenly on a world of pastures, — as all-involving avalanches,, should no longer remain in tne realm of scientific controversy.

Mammoths have been repeatedly found in the ice and frozen soil of Siberia and Alaska, with the food in their stomachs undigested, the flesh preserved and devoured by bears and woK'^.s as they gnawed it from its frozen matrix. Their fat has been rendered and used in lamps. The very pupil of the eye has been preserved and the blood vescicles unaltered. Suddenness is the eloquent epitaph inscribed all over the polar graveyard.

The frozen mammoth found in 1901 in eastern Siberia by Dr. Herz is such an unimpeachable witness of the sudden downrush of vast avalanches of canopy snows, that I will reproduce here an article on the subject written by myself and printed in the Scientific American (May 10, 1902) :

. . . 'T have read with great interest in your 26 issue of April 12, the note on the recent discovery of the body of a mammoth, in cold storage, by Dr. Herz, in the ice-bound region of Eastern Siberia. This, it seems to me, is more than a 'Rosetta Stone' in the path of the geologist. It offers the strongest testimony in support of the claim that all the glacial epochs and all the deluges the earth ever saw, were caused by the progressive and successive decline of primitive earth-vapors, lingering about our planet as the cloud vapors of the planets Jupiter and Saturn linger about those bodies to-day.

''Allow me to suggest to my brother geologists that remnants of the terrestrial watery vapors may have revolved about the earth as a Jupiter-like canopy, even down to very recent geologic times. Such vapors must fall chiefly in polar lands, through the channel of least resistance and greatest attraction, and certainly as vast avalanches of tellurio-cosmic snows. Then, too, such a canopy, or world-roof, must have tempered the climate up to the poles and thus afforded pasturage to the mammoth and his congeners of the Arctic w^orld — making a g'reen-house earth under a green-house roof. If this be admitted, we can place no limits to the magnitude and efficiency of canopy avalanches to desolate a world of exuberant life. It seems that Dr. Herz's mammoth, like many others found buried in glacier ice, with their food undigested in their stomachs, proves that it was suddenly overtaken with a crushing fall of snow. In this case, with grass in its mouth unmasticated, it tells an unerring tale of death in a snowy grave. If this be conceded, we have what may have been an all-competent source of glacial snows, and we may gladly escape the unphilosophic alternative that the earth grew cold in order to get its casement of snow, while, as I see it, it got its snows and then grew cold,