lO CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE 



or any other so-called cataclysmal operation of the crust of our 

 planet. We intend to mean that the surface of solid Earth has 

 been by turns so blasted with fire, devastated by ice, and deluged 

 with water, that for long periods of time and large continental 

 areas life ot most sorts was out of the question. 



Our orthodox friends will observe that we have no wish to 

 ignore the flood ; on the contrary, we insist upon several and 

 as many rainbows as called for. 



THE DISAPPEARANCE OF WATER. 



We assert with some confidence that there was once much 

 more water upon the surface of our globe than at present; the 

 oceans were larger, the inland waters and streams of greater 

 volume. Should this position need reinforcement let us admit, 

 as it seems we must, that the earth once nourished no life, either 

 animal or vegetable, and we have at once nameless millions of 

 fluid tons to be somehow accounted for. Nor can it be claimed 

 that the atmosphere then and always held moisture in suspen- 

 sion as now, or that absorption by percolation was a process of 

 the earlier as well as ot the later stages of creation. We are 

 thus brought face to face with a curious problem : Without 

 plants or animals, with an atmosphere totally rejecting it and 

 the earth stubbornly declining to take it in at the pores, what 

 was the status of water and where its abiding place ? 



THE EARTH MAKES STEAM. 



Not to be entirely in the dark or beyond our depth, we may 

 hint at the appearance and concede the existence of steam in 

 the earlier cycles and must give it a place as one of the prime 

 factors in the complicated processes of evolution, and to this 

 day and hour a powerful agent in its still uncompleted opera- 

 tions, to which it is not our present purpose to refer. Our read- 

 ers are expected to comfortably fix upon dates, either as to the 

 appearance or duration of the phenomena described or to be 



