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Friedrich von Schlegel
Complete Edition (Vol. 1&2)
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Thus to explain the fact that the habitable earth has not, as originally, so warm a temperature as the north, we need not have recourse to any supposition of a central fire suddenly extinguished, like an oven that becomes cold, or to any other violent hypothesis of the same kind; for this fact may be sufficiently accounted for by the last great revolution of Nature—the general deluge, which as may be assumed with great probability, produced a change in the heretofore much purer, balmier, and more genial atmosphere. That, towards the equator, the position of the earth's axis has undergone a change, and that thereby this great revolution in the earth's climate was occasioned, is indeed a bare possibility; but until further proof, this must be regarded as a purely gratuitous hypothesis. But without subscribing to these fanciful suppositions, and mathematical theories, and without wishing to penetrate, with some geologists, into the hidden depths of the earth in quest of an imagined central fire, we shall find on the inhabited surface of the globe, or very near it, many proofs and indications of the once superior energy of the principle of fire—a principle whereof volcanoes whether subsisting or extinct, and the kindred phenomena of earthquakes, may be considered the last feeble, surviving effects; for not basalt only, but porphyry, granite, and in general all the primary rocks, and those which, according to the classifications of geologists, are more immediately akin to them, can be proved to be of a volcanic nature with as much certainty, as we can trace, in the horizontal secondary formations, the destructive influence and operation of the element of water. Hence this layer of subterraneous, though now in general slumbering fire, with all its volcanic arteries and veins of earthquakes, may once have been as widely diffused over the surface of the globe as the element of water, now occupying so large a portion of that surface. As volcanic rocks exist in the ocean, or rather at its bottom, and as their eruptions burst through the body of waters up to the surface of the sea; as their volcanic agency gives birth to earthquakes, and not unfrequently raises and heaves up new islands from the depths of the ocean; naturalists have concluded, with reason from these various facts, that the volcanic basis of the earth's surface though tolerably near, must still be somewhat deeper than the bottom of the sea. And without stopping to examine the hypothesis relative to the immeasurable depth of the ocean, the opinion which fixes the earth's basis at about 30,000 feet, or one geographical mile and a half below the surface of the sea, does not exceed the modest limits of a well-considered probability. In the present period of the globe, water is the predominant element on the earth's surface. But if that volcanic power which lies deeper in the bosom of the earth, and the kindred principle of fire, had at an earlier epoch of nature, the same influence and operation on the earth, as water afterwards had; we can well imagine such an influence to have materially affected the lower atmosphere, and to have rendered the climate of the earth, even in the North, totally different from what it is at present.
The strata of bones formed by the old flood, and the buried remains of a former race of animals, call forth a remark, which is not without importance in respect to the primitive history of man:—it is, that among the many bones of other large and small land animals, which form of themselves a rich and varied collection of the subterraneous products of nature, the fossile remains of man are scarcely any where to be found. It has sometimes happened that what were at first considered the bones of human giants have been afterwards proved to have been those of animals. It is so very rare an instance to meet in fossile remains with a real human bone, skull, jaw-bone or entire human skeleton (as in one particular instance was found enclosed in a lime-stone, mixed with some few utensils and instruments of the primitive world, such as a stone-knife, a copper axe, an iron club, and a dagger of a very ancient form, together with some human bones); that the very rareness of the exception serves only to confirm the general rule. Were we from this fact immediately to draw the conclusion that during all those revolutions of nature mankind had not yet existence, such an hypothesis would be rash, groundless, completely at variance with history—one to which many even physical objections, too long to detail here, might be opposed. That so very few, and indeed scarcely any human bones are to be found among the fossile remains of the primitive world, may possibly be owing to the circumstance that by the very artificial, hot, and highly seasoned food of men, their bones, from their chemical nature and qualities, are more liable to destruction than those of other animals. I may here repeat what I have already had occasion to remark, and what is here of especial importance, as applying particularly to the history and circumstances of the primitive world;—namely, that all things are not susceptible of an entire, satisfactory, and absolutely certain explanation; and that yet we may form a tolerably correct conception of general facts; though many of the particulars may remain for a time unexplained, or at least not capable of a full explanation. So on the other hand, it would be premature, and little conformable to the grave circumspection of the historian, to reduce all those natural catastrophes (the vouching monuments and mysterious inscriptions of which are now daily disclosed to the eye of Science as she explores the deep sepulchres of the earth)—to reduce, I say, all those natural catastrophes exclusively to the one nearest to the historical times, and which indeed is attested by the clear, unanimous tradition of all, or at least of most ancient nations; for several mighty and violent, revolutions of nature, of various kinds, though of a less general extent, may possibly have happened, and very probably did really happen simultaneously with, or subsequently, or even previously to the last general flood.
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