154 THE UNIVERSE 



This material descended as a thin covering of uni- 

 form thickness. And this blanket was the dust 

 precipitated by the electrical vibration still warm 

 from crystallization. Had it been otherwise there 

 would have been about one hundred million tons 

 of frozen mud falling in the neighborhood. 



"What Pere Mary saw was the cloud of decom- 

 posed matter caused by the electric discharges. It 

 is as absurd to speak of all this coming out of the 

 volcano as it would be to say that the smoke and 

 stifling gases in a fire caused by an electric wire 

 came from the power house. As a fuse burned 

 out in the circuit, Pelee simply sparked. 



"It set fire to everything between its summit and 

 the sea, and the surface of the water itself was made 

 warm. Now you see how mastodons are found, 

 with hair and flesh intact, imbedded in Siberian ice. 

 If the uprush of an air current would disturb the 

 cold stratum above a chimney, what would be the 

 effect of the upheaval of a mountain mass with or 

 without a volcano? It is unnecessary to suppose 

 that the axis of the earth has changed. 



"The ice crop of the Antarctic is much larger than 

 that of the North Pole, but the volcanoes of Erebus 

 and Terror are in violent activity. There are scores 

 of terrestrial and celestial phenomena, from the 

 double tide to the cold moon, that can be explained 

 only by the electrical theory" 



Thus I could fill a book with the recent proofs 

 and statements of scientists which sustain the elec- 

 tric theory. 



The dropping of an icicle into a barrel of un- 

 slaked lime once caused a great disaster in one 

 of our cities. The slaking of the lime caused a 



