IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY: "1895 and 1950: The Time was Ripe for a Heresy" (ADDRESS TO PRINCETON GRADUATE SCHOOL, 1953)

IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY

HIS FIRST ICONOCLASTIC BOOK

GEO-HISTORY

HISTORY OF 'CIVILIZATION'

THE HUMAN CONDITION

EVENTS OUR ANCESTORS WITNESSED

CHANGES OF KEY FOR 'THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES'

SOURCE OF GRAVITATIONAL DISRUPTION

COMETS HAVE VISITED MOTHER EARTH OFTEN

NOTE FROM JEFF:  Immanuel Velikovsky was to me not only one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century but of all of modern history. A psychoanalyst by profession, who studied under Freud, he began to notice recurrent patterns in diverse cosmologies and mythologies; his quest for understanding the common themes led him into archaeology, geology and astronomy, and parallels the work of Carl Jung in that Velikovsky examined archetypes of catastrophe. Psychoanalysis, however, applied at the level of all of humanity, led him to some startling revelations. A true iconoclast, Velikovsky challenged the aeonically-entrenched dogmas of Newton and Darwin, bequeathing to us an immense and prophetic legacy based on true interdisciplinary inquiry whose message is more important now than ever.

AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE GRADUATE COLLEGE FORUM OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ON OCTOBER 14, 1953

"1895 and 1950: The Time was Ripe for a Heresy"

ONE HUNDRED and eighty years ago, in 1773, Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749-1827), then twenty-three years old, stood before the Academic des Sciences in Paris and read a paper in which he proved the stability of the solar system: all deflections of the planets from their paths are only periodic oscillations from their mean courses; and the celestial mechanism is wound up to go on forever.

Laplace's contemporary, Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744- 1829), set out to demonstrate in a series of works that this earth has ever been an abode of peaceful evolution, free from spasmodic disturbances, in opposition to the dominant views of his day.

These ideas of harmony or stability in the celestial and terrestrial spheres gained ground in the nineteenth century and became the foundation of scientific thought. In 1846 Leverrier, by announcing the existence of the planet Neptune, which was immediately thereafter discovered in the part of the sky indicated by him, proved the gravitational theory of Newton and the orderly universe of Laplace to be correct. However, in the same year, by detecting the anomaly in the revolution of Mercury, always accumulating in one and the same direction, he threw the first doubt on the infallibility of these very laws.

The theory of uniformity, as understood by Lamarck and Hutton and developed by Lyell, became the cornerstone of the Darwinian theory, and Darwin went so far as to say that anybody who was unconvinced by Lyell's teaching should refrain from reading the Origin of Species. The principle of uniformity, or the explanation of all past events in the history of the globe in terms of the processes in action in our own age, or the denial of catastrophic crises in the past, gave Darwin what he needed most for his idea of the origin of species: almost unlimited time. In order that from the struggle for existence, or competition, new forms should evolve, and that an animal like the spider with its many legs and human beings should have had a common ancestor, untold eons were necessary. By the end of the nineteenth century the war between the theory of evolution and the theory of creation in six days, less than six thousand years ago, was concluded, with victory to the theory of evolution. The only difficulty left was, in the view of Thomas Huxley, that no really new species had appeared on the world scene since the scientific observations were made, not even in breeding experiments. The geological record, however, spoke unequivocally of the fact: in the past lived animal forms that do not live any longer, and of the forms that live in our age, many were not present in the geological past.

Laplace's theory of the origin of the solar system from a rotating nebula was replaced, by the end of the century, with a theory of a catastrophic beginning in a near-collision of the sun with another star, with debris forming the planets. But it was stressed by the authors of this new theory that the universe is orderly, and this beginning in a cataclysm was an unusually rare occurrence in the cosmos, and that the solar system is governed by the principle of stability, as annunciated by Laplace, and the earth by the law of uniformity, and the animals and plants by the law of evolution through continuity.

It appeared that, basic principles having been established, science had before it only the work of refinement in observation and in the addition of details for the perfection of knowledge; but the time of basic discoveries was over.

This was the outlook in 1895. In April of that year Fridtjof Nansen, in an attempt to discover the North Pole, reached a point less than four degrees from it. The scientific world looked upon the discovery of the North Pole as the most coveted goal still left to be attained by science.

But before Nansen, drifting from latitude 86 14', reached his home in Norway, the scene changed. Konrad Roentgen of Wurzberg discovered the x-rays or cathode rays that pass through opaque bodies. In the same year of 1895 twenty-year-old Marconi, working at the home of his father near Bologna, made the first successful experiment with wireless transmission. That year, too, Sigmund Freud published his first paper (together with Joseph Breuer), which led to a new understanding of the realm known as the subconscious; and at the same time Pavlov made his contribution to the psychology of the reflexes.

The next year, and still before Nansen had landed on the Norwegian coast, Henri Becquerel, working on uranium, discovered the phenomenon of radioactivity. Two years later he was followed by the Curies, who discovered radium. In 1897 J. J. Thomson announced that the atom is divisible and is actually a microcosm, and he was followed by Rutherford. In 1900 Planck presented the theory of quanta, or energies dispatched in bundles or shots, and not in a continuous stream. And in the field of the origin of species, in 1900, Van Vries announced mutations in plants, observed for the first time: a process of spontaneous changes in living nature fundamentally different from the process of evolution through continuity as postulated by Darwin.

Thus in a few years, in a spectacular series of discoveries, the entire world matter and energy and living species and the human soul opened new horizons and everything appeared to be in incessant vibration, collisions, and transformation: the macrocosm, the microcosm, and even the subtle world of the mind, all alike.

And in 1905 Albert Einstein, then twenty-six years old, offered his understanding of the physical world, an understanding that required a new mental approach, as a testimonial that the age of basic discoveries had not ended with the victory of Darwin over the Book of Genesis.

Since then another fifty years have passed. Once more, as before the end of the nineteenth century, we are told that the fundamentals are all known; the age of basic discoveries is definitely terminated, this time for certain; and present and future generations will have to satisfy themselves with detecting details, accumulating data, and adding decimals. And though the exciting decade of 1895 to 1905 threw light on processes in matter, life, and soul, processes that are certainly not inert and are marked by spontaneity and conflict, science in its various branches adjusted the new discoveries and ideas to the framework of the old great principle reigning equally in lifeless and living nature: the law of harmony and unperturbed stability. The time was ripe for heresy.

In 1950, a book, Worlds in Collision, created an out-burst of emotions almost unprecedented in science. In the Preface to the book I wrote: "Harmony or stability in the celestial and terrestrial spheres is the point of departure of the present-day concept of the world as expressed in the celestial mechanics of Newton and the theory of evolution of Darwin. If these two men of science are sacrosanct, this book is a heresy."

I came upon the idea that traditions and legends and memories of generic origin can be treated in the same way in which we treat in psychoanalysis the early memories of a single individual. I spent ten years on this work. I found that the collective memory of humankind spoke of a series of global catastrophes that occurred in historical times. I believed that I could even identify the exact tunes and the very agents of the great upheavals of the more recent past. The conclusions at which I arrived compelled me to cross the frontiers into various fields of science - archaeology, geology, and astronomy. The result was a book, a prolegomenon. In its concluding pages I conceded that more problems were raised than had been solved, and I promised, always reckoning with the limitations of the individual scholar, to pursue my study into these fields too. But already the implications of the fact of great global catastrophes on the earth, one of the celestial bodies, in a tune so recent, had caused my critics to assert, in the words of a Harvard astronomer, that here was the "most amazing example of a shattering of accepted concepts on record."

In the heat of the debate in the press the book was pronounced "one of the most significant books written since the invention of printing," and also "the worst book since the invention of movable characters."

Believing that an emotional atmosphere is not well suited to fruitful debate, I have entered only infrequently into the controversy. I have made short factual corrections of statements by the Royal Astronomer and by J. B. S. Haldane appearing in their reviews of my book, and I participated in a debate with your professor of astronomy, J. Q. Stewart, in the pages of Harper's Magazine

(June 1951). I appeared before the American Philosophical Society, which at its annual meeting in April 1952 held a symposium on "Some Unorthodoxies of Modern Science," my unorthodoxy being the chief subject on the agenda. Otherwise I have kept myself out of the verbal conflict.

Now more than three and a half years have passed since the publication of the book, and I appreciate the opportunity offered me by your invitation to present a dispassionate review of recent finds in the three fields named in the title of my address.

Worlds in Collision and Recent Finds in Archaeology

In my book I described the great natural catastrophes of the second and first millennia before the present era. Prominent place is given to the description of the natural upheaval that occurred in the closing hours of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt. I synchronized this event with the Exodus, when sea, land, and sky were in uproar. The collective human memory retained an inexhaustible array of recollections of the time when the world was in conflagration, when sea engulfed land, earth trembled, celestial bodies were disturbed in their motion, and meteorites fell. My narrative is based on historical texts of many peoples around the globe, on classical literature, on epics of northern races, on sacred books of the Orient and Occident, on traditions and folklore of primitive peoples.

The question that arose was: Where is the archaeological evidence? In later chapters of my book I gave such evidence: water clocks and sundials that show a different length of the day or altered latitudes; change in the orientation of ancient temples which originally faced toward the east but do so no longer. I also closely examined in my book the calendars of the civilized peoples of an- tiquity, from Mexico and Peru to Greece, Iran, Israel, Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, India, and China, and the calendar reforms that were made. All this material gave strong support to the literary evidence. Working independently of me, Professor Claude Schaeffer, whose earlier excavations at Ras Shamra (Ugarit) caused a complete revolution in biblical exegesis, published a volume, Stratigraphie compares et chronologie de I'Asie Occidental (III* and //' millenaires), printed by the Oxford University Press.(1) In this very detailed and technical work, comprising, together with tables, almost a thousand pages, Schaeffer demonstrates that on several occasions, each marking the end of an epoch, the entire ancient East was shaken and devastated. Modern annals of seismology know nothing comparable in severity and extent. The most devastating of these upheavals took place at exactly the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt* causing its downfall as claimed in Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos.

Cities were overturned; epidemics left the dead piled in common graves; the pursuit of arts and commerce came to an abrupt end; empires ceased to exist; strata of earth, dust, and ashes yards thick covered the ruined cities. In many places the population was annihilated, in others it was decimated; settled living was replaced by nomadic existence. Climate changed.

Claude Schaeffer analyzed the archaeological finds of every place excavated from Troy at the Dardanelles over all Asia Minor, Armenia, the Caucasus, Persia, Syria, Cyprus, and Palestine to Egypt in Africa; he summarizes his extensive volume thus:

"Our inquiry has demonstrated that these repeated crises which opened and closed the principal periods of the third and second millennia v/ere not caused by the action of man. Far from it, because compared with the vastness of these all-embracing crises and their profound effects, the exploits of conquerors . . . would appear only insignificant."

Schaeffer's work sheds a new light on the conclusions at which Sir Arthur Evans arrived after many years of archaeological work on Crete: the island was shattered in violent catastrophes that were accompanied by fire, and in these upheavals the cultural and political ages of the Minoan kingdom went down, at the same time that corresponding Egyptian ages were terminated. Troy III was destroyed and its fifty feet thick fortress wall fell when the Middle Kingdom in Egypt fell; the volcano on the island of Thera exploded with almost unimaginable fury; recent archaeological work in the Indus Valley showed, too, that about 1500, and in advance of the Arian invasion, cities with great walls were destroyed and a flourishing civilization came to a sudden end.

The synchronization of the Exodus with the end of the Middle Kingdom was also the starting point of a reconstruction of ancient history from that point on to the advent of Alexander the Great, which took the form of a two-volume work, Ages in Chaos, the first volume of which was published in the spring of 1952. The problem of the time of the Exodus in Egyptian history had never been solved. In the Papyrus Ipuwer and the Naos of El Arish I found descriptions of a natural upheaval very similar, sometimes identical, with the description in the Book of Exodus: following plagues, when the river was blood-colored, amid a hurricane and darkness of seven days' duration, the pharaoh and his host were drowned in a whirlpool at Pi-ha-Kiroth, the same place where the pharaoh of the Exodus was drowned. These parallels compelled me to fix an unorthodox date for the Exodus. Collating the historical texts of following generations for twelve hundred years, I could establish numerous correlations between the histories of Egypt and of Israel which could not be accidental; my reconstruction demonstrated that Egyptian history and the histories of the nations which are written in harmony with it are out of line with the historical past by about six to seven hundred years.

Thus both my works have their starting point in the recognition that the Middle Kingdom in Egypt went down in a great natural catastrophe. 

The recent excavation hi Jericho has confirmed the fact that the great walls of the city fell a few decades after the end of the Middle Kingdom. But at the time in which conventional chronology places the arrival of the Israelites under Joshua in Canaan, there was no city at Jericho and no walls to fall. According to Ages in Chaos, how- ever, the Israelites came to the walls of Jericho one generation after the end of the Middle Kingdom, and the enigmatic hiatus of six hundred years proves not to be real.

I expect new evidence from the Minoan scripts and the so-called Hittite pictographs. Texts in the Minoan (Linear B) script were found years ago on Crete and in Mycenae and in several other places on the Greek mainland. I believe that when the Minoan writings unearthed in Mycenae are deciphered they will be found to be Greek. I also claim that these texts are of a later date than generally believed. "No 'Dark Age' of six centuries' duration intervened in Greece between the Mycenaean age and the Ionian age of the seventh century." (2)

Before long new evidence will come from the so-called Hittite pictographic writings found in Asia Minor, Meso- potamia, and northern Syria. Since the recent discovery in Karatepe in Asia Minor of bilingual inscriptions in ancient Hebrew and in pictographs efforts at decipherment have entered a new stage. Today the Hittite pictographs are already in the process of being read. In my reconstruction I come to the conclusion that they are Chaldean signs, not Hittite. I also expect unequivocal evidence that these signs were used down to the last century before the present era. Owing to the confusion in the conventional chronology, the Chaldean writings of the Neo-Babylonian Empire are ascribed to early centuries and an imaginary empire.

W. F. Libby and his associates at the University of Chicago have developed the radiocarbon method of dating organic matter. Wood from under the foundation of the "Hittite" fortress of Alisar in Asia Minor turned out to be seven to eight hundred years younger than conventional chronology would allow, (3) thus giving full support to my dating. Hittite history, interwoven with Egyptian history of the New Kingdom, cannot be shortened without at the same time shortening the history of Egypt. The age of pieces of wood from the tombs of the Old and Middle Kingdoms in Egypt also proved to be in harmony with my reconstruction. However, for the decisive period that of the New Kingdom no radiocarbon analysis has been made.

I suggest that some objects in the possession of museums, dating from the New Kingdom of Egypt (the dynasty of Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Akhaton, and Tutankhamen, and those of Ramses II and Ramses III), be subjected to the radio-carbon test.

Soon you will be able to judge as right or wrong my unqualified statement that carbon analysis of the wooden sarcophagi of Seti, Ramses II, Merneptah, and Ramses III, or of the furniture and sacred boats of Thutmose III or Tutankhamen, would yield dates five to seven hundred years younger than those assigned by the adherents of the conventional chronology. Then you will know for certain whether the conventional or the revised history of the lands of the ancient East for twelve hundred years is authentic and true.(4)

In recent years, Russian archaeologists have discovered abundant remains of human culture in northeastern Siberia, in the frozen taiga where frozen bodies of mammoths are found and where nobody suspected human abodes in ages past. There was human population in northeastern Siberia in paleolithic time, in neolithic time, and in the bronze time, too.

Paleolithic artifacts were found in Yakutia; rock drawings very similar to the paleolithic drawings on the rocks and in the caverns of France and Spain were found in the valley of the Lena, near the village Shishkino.

"In the neolithic age, about two to three millennia before our era, neolithic races, descendants of earlier inhabitants of Yakutia...spread to the very coast of the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Koluma in the east." (5)

In Worlds in Collision, p. 329, I expressed my belief that human settlements would be discovered "farther to the north on the Kolyma or Lena rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean."

On the lower Lena, north of the confluence with Viliy, inside the polar circle, monuments are found of a characteristic culture; outstanding finds were made near the lake Yolba, not far from Jigansk.

As soon as the archaeologists started a methodic investigation of the area, in Yakutsk itself was found a workshop of an ancient metallurgist in which, at the end of the second millennium before the present era, he made bronze axes similar to the axes manufactured about that time in the Near East and in Europe.

"In the Yakutsk taiga two and a half [or three] thousand years ago, there already lived artisans in metals who were able to extract copper from ore, to melt it and pour it into forms, and to make axes, beautiful bronze tips for the spears, knives and even swords." (6)

These relics of a civilization in the taiga of northeastern Siberia imply that the climate changed there in the age of advanced man. Before the ice froze the region, voracious members of the elephant family roamed there in large herds.

Recent Finds in Geology

Archaeological evidence of continental upheavals in the second millennium having been presented in detail by Schaeffer, the evidence of geology and paleontology called for elucidation. To this I have dedicated a special work, now close to completion, and since it will be published before very long, I shall refer here only briefly to some of this material.

A little over a decade ago it was observed that the gold-digging hydraulic giants in the Fairbanks District in Alaska, sluicing out miles-long cuts, opened great hecatombs of animals. "Their numbers are appalling. They lie frozen in tangled masses, interspersed with uprooted trees. They seem to have been torn apart and dismembered and then consolidated under catastrophic conditions. Skin, ligament, hair, flesh can still be seen.(7)

Then human artifacts were found under the mass of torn animals and splintered trees. These artifacts do not differ much from those used only recently by the Indians of the Tanana Valley in Alaska. Mammoths, mastodons, superbison, lions, horses were found among other animals.

Since then familiar finds of bones and artifacts have been unearthed all over Asia. They bring to mind the finds made long ago in the 'Ivory Islands' of the Arctic Ocean above Siberia. "These islands were full of mammoth bones, and the quantity of tusks and teeth of elephants and rhinoceroses, found in the newly discovered islands of New Siberia, were perfectly amazing...The soil of these isolated islands is absolutely packed full of the bones of elephants and rhinoceroses in astonishing numbers." (8) These bones are mixed with trunks of trees heaped hundreds of feet high, broken and charred.

Hippopotami, animals that live in the marshes of Africa, left their bones in abundance in England and France, and these bones are not yet fossilized. J. Prestwich, professor of geology at Oxford (1874-1888), was early struck by the finds in the fissures of the rocks in England, central and southern France, Gibralter and the islands of the Mediterranean. (9) Bones of animals, living and extinct, in great masses choke these fissures and caves. Some fissures are on top of high hills, and they, too, are filled with bones. The bones are broken into innumerable fragments and are still fresh; artifacts of man are found among them. Prestwich understood that some catastrophe of continental dimensions, with water playing the main role, swept over Europe in the time when the Neolithic Age started there and when the Bronze Age may have been well on its way in the centers of ancient civilization.

Palms were found to have grown in northern Green- land, where now for half a year there is darkness and it is permanently cold. At some time in the remote past corals grew in Spitsbergen, and sequoia forests in Alaska; and it was early understood that the terrestrial axis must have changed its position. Airy, Lord Kelvin, George Darwin, and many others, including Schiaparelli and Simon Newcomb, participated in a long debate on the astronomical and geological possibility of a sudden change in the direction of the terrestrial axis, a de-

bate that was erroneously thought to have been started as a consequence of Worlds in Collision, It was understood that such a change must have taken place unless the strange finds are to be left without explanation. The theory of drifting continents, offered as a substitute, was rejected for many reasons. Jeffreys showed that the mobile force invoked by Wegener is one hundred billion times too small to move the continents. Eddington thought that possibly only the crust, in its entirety, moved, and the axis of the core was left unchanged in direction. But the mobile force he invoked the tidal inequalities of lunar origin would not have moved the latitudes out of their places, the directional pull being east-west.

W. B. Wright, in his The Quaternary Ice Age (2nd ed., 1937), says that during geological history there occurred many changes in the position of the climatic zones on the surface of the earth which cannot be explained except by a shifting of the axis or a displacement of the pole from its present position.

But what could have brought about a change in the inclination of the terrestrial axis to the plane of the ecliptic? I discussed this question in the closing pages of Worlds in Collision and suggested the entrance of the earth into a strong magnetic field.

The newly developed science of paleomagnetism brought, and daily continues to bring, confirmation of the fact that lavas and igneous rocks in all parts of the world are reversely magnetized. But what is even more startling is to find that the reversely magnetized rocks are a hundred times more strongly magnetized than the earth's magnetic field could have caused them to be. H. Manley, in his review, writes: "It may seem strange that a rock which is made magnetic by the earth's field" should become so strongly magnetized "compared with the generating force. This is one of the most astonishing problems of paleomagnetism." (10)

Manley also refers to the tests made years ago by G. Folgheraiter and P. L. Mercanton on the clay of ancient Etruscan vases. They were found to have been fired when the vases were closer to the south magnetic pole; their position during the firing is known, because of the flow of the glaze; and the magnetic dip or inclination of the clay is found. Manley writes: "This implies that in the sixth century B.C. the earth's magnetic field was reversed in the Central Mediterranean area." He speaks also of a general "reversal in historical times, 2500 years ago," that must be cleared up by additional research.

Knowing from my study of ancient literary sources the proper time of exogenous disturbances in terrestrial rotation, I suspected an inaccuracy in the last sentence of an otherwise well-written article by Manley: the reversal must have occurred in the eighth century and again in the beginning of the seventh century (687). I was gratified to find, in the original publication of Professor Mercanton, to whom I directed my inquiry, that the vases with reversed polarity date from the eighth century. (11) 

I expect that, should the research be extended to vases dating from the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt (circa 3500 years ago), other periods of "unnatural" polarity would be determined in Egypt and elsewhere. Professor R. Daly of Harvard University found that 3500 years ago all over the world the level of the oceans suddenly dropped. He thought it might be due to a sudden sinking of the crust. And in an authoritative work, Marine Geology (1950), Professor P. H. Kuenen of the Netherlands finds that "this recent shift is now well established" on observations in many places of the world, and he, too, assigns this catastrophic drop of the ocean level to 3500 years ago.

The recent expedition of the Oceanographic Institute at Goteborg, under H. Pettersson, which covered the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, found, according to its leader, "evidences of great catastrophes that have altered the face of the earth." He speaks of "climatic catastrophes," and of "tectonic catastrophes [that] raised or lowered the ocean bottom hundreds and even thou- sands of feet, spreading huge tidal waves which destroyed plant and animal life on the coastal plains." At many places "a lava bed of geologically recent origin [was] covered only by a thin veneer of sediment." He discovered that the Pacific and Indian ocean beds consist "largely of volcanic ash that had settled on the bot- tom after great volcanic explosions." He also found a large nickel content in the clay of the ocean bottoms, and decided that this abysmal nickel must have been of meteoric origin. Consequently, he concludes, there were "very heavy showers of meteors." "The principal difficulty of this explanation is that it requires a rate of accretion of meteoric dust several hundred times greater than that which astronomers . . . are presently prepared to admit." (12)

Professor Ewing of Columbia University carried on his investigation in the Atlantic. In 1949 he published his results, and, like Pettersson, he found that lava spread only recently on the bottom of the ocean. He also came upon signs of land deep on the bottom of the ocean and concluded: "Either the land must have sunk two to three miles, or the sea once must have been two or three miles lower than now. Either conclusion is startling."

The pollen analysis, made by various scientists, of the bottom of the North Sea, between Germany, England, Scotland, and Norway, convinced researchers that this sea in its present shape originated only very recently in the Subboreal, the date of 1500 before the present era often being selected. At that time there occurred a Klimavturz. Once there had been a sea; then it was covered by debris carried from the mountains of Norway; later, in a catastrophic advance, the North Sea was formed once more. Human artifacts have been found from the time when the North Sea was land.

The investigation of the delta formation of the Bear River (on the Alaskan border), very carefully made by Hanson, showed that "at the present rate of sedimentation the delta is estimated to be only 3600 years old."

A. de Lapparent, the leading French geologist of the beginning of the century, calculated that, since the time the Rhone glacier started to melt, less than 3000 years have passed. Modern research confirms that many of the alpine glaciers are less than 4000 years old. Professor Flint of Yale refers to the redetermination of the age of the Upper Great Gorge of Niagara Falls and writes (1947): "The age of the Upper Great Gorge is calculated as somewhat more than four thousand years and to obtain even this [low] figure we have to assume that the rate of recession has been constant, although we know that discharge has in fact varied greatly during postglacial times." (13)

Sernander and others demonstrated that in 1500 and again after 800 there occurred climatic catastrophes of global dimensions. These researches, unknown to me when I wrote Worlds in Collision, coincide completely with my conclusions and their dating.

In both these periods the lake dwellings in Switzerland, Germany, northern Italy, and also in Scandinavia were overwhelmed by "high water catastrophes" and abandoned, the first time for four centuries, the second time never to be rebuilt.

H. Gams and R. Nordhagen showed, with very extensive documentation, that at these two time dates the lakes of Europe were tilted, and many of them, like Esssee and Federsee, were emptied of all their water. The Isartal in the Bavarian Alps was "violently torn out" and this "in very recent times"; and in the Inntal in the Tyrol the "many changes of river beds are indicative of ground movements on a great scale." (14)

H. de Terra of the Carnegie Institute and Peterson of Harvard came to the conclusion that the Himalayas, in violent upheavals, reached their present form and height in the age of man, partly even in the time of advanced man. The same conclusion is made concerning the Andes, where, too, the upheaval must have been catastrophic. In the age of man the Andes rose many thousands of feet amid volcanic activity.

In the hills of Montreal and New Hampshire and in Michigan, five and six hundred feet above sea level, bones of whales have been found. In many places on the earth on all continents bones of sea animals and polar land animals and tropical animals have been found in great melees; so also in the Cumberland Cave in Maryland and in the Choukoutien fissure in China, and in Germany and Denmark. Hippopotami and ostriches were found together with seals and reindeer. Wherever we turn our interest from the Arctic to the Antarctic and from sunrise to sunset, in the high mountains and in the deep seas we find innumerable signs of great upheavals, ancient and recent.

A circular meteoric crater (Chubb crater) was discovered in the summer of 1950 in northern Labrador; it covers an area of four square miles. It is much larger than the Arizona crater, which is four fifths of a mile in diameter (two thirds of a square mile in area); whereas the Arizona crater could accommodate two million people in its amphitheater, the Chubb crater could accommodate twelve million people. It must have been created by the impact of an asteroid. According to the published opinion of geological authorities, the asteroid must have fallen about four thousand years ago.

Following, or shortly preceding, the discovery of the Chubb crater, several other large meteoric craters were discovered in Australia, Arabia, and Mexico. The tens of thousands of oval formations on the Atlantic coast of the United States, especially in the Carolinas, some of them attaining a length of a few miles each, were conclusively identified, in a monograph by W. F. Prouty (1952), as having been caused by the fall of large meteorites.(15) And finally, the largest of crater formations, situated in Quebec north of Sept Iles, in Canada, and occupying an area of 680 square miles, is under investigation as to its meteoric origin by a group of Mines Department scientists led by Dr. M. J. S. Innes.

Of the many other new developments in the field of geology, I would stress some of the results obtained by the radiocarbon method. The time of the Ice Age is moved much closer to our time. Instead of 25,000 years as the terminal date of the last glacial period, it is shown that 10,000 or 11,000 years ago the ice was still advancing; and even with this low dating there remain "puzzling exceptions," (16) among them the finding of mastodons and mammoths in strata only 3500 years old. [More- over, organic vestiges in the drift of the last glaciation have been found to be of a radiocarbon age pointing to a time 3500 years ago.(17)

Radiocarbon analysis of oil has also shown that in the deposits of the Gulf of Mexico the age of oil is mea- sured in thousands of years, not millions.(18) This destroys the main argument the geologists have raised against the theory of the exogenous origin of some deposits of oil (Worlds in Collision, pp. 53-58, 369).

Hydrocarbons have been identified in cometary tails by spectral analysis; also carbohydrates (edible products).(19) But here we are already outside the domain of geology and in the realm of astronomy.

Worlds in Collision and Recent Finds in Astronomy

In the years when the manuscript of Worlds in Collision was in the hands of the Macmillan Company, accepted for publication though not yet published (1946-49), and in the years following its publication in 1950 several fundamental observations were made and explanations offered that have a clear bearing on the theory of that book.

The zodiacal light, or the glow seen in the evening sky after sunset, stretching in the path of the sun and other planets (ecliptic), the mysterious origin of which has for a long time occupied the minds of astronomers, has been explained in recent years as the reflection of the solar light from two rings of dust particles, one following the orbit of Venus, the other an orbit between Mars and Jupiter, places where, according to Worlds in Collision, collisions of planets and a comet took place.

The origin of asteroids, or small planets, that circle between Jupiter and Mars, some of which cross the orbit of Mars and even that of the earth, has lately been explained as the result of the explosion of a planet and more recently (1950) as the result of a collision between two planets in an early age (Kuiper). N. T. Bobrovnikoflf of the Perkins Observatory offered anew his own explanation of the origin of the asteroids: they are "remnants of a gigantic prehistoric comet." F. Whipple, upon calculating the orbits of the asteroids, came to the conclusion (1950) that two collisions occurred between these bodies and a comet, once 4700 years ago and the second time 1500 years ago, or within historical times. These dates of collision in the solar system are of the same order as WorIds in Collision, deduced there from historical evidence and testimony. C. Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, explained (1950) the dark areas and the canals of Mars as resulting from collisions of Mars with asteroids. According to Worlds in Collision, Mars was involved in repeated collisions with large cometary masses. 

Actually, in January 1950, an explosion observed on

Mars was interpreted (by Opik) as a collision with an asteroid; clouds of dust of continental dimensions rose and screened surface features of the planet.

O. Struve of Yerkes Observatory, reviewing the achievements of astronomy during 1950, wrote that "by a bizarre coincidence" in that year "a deluge of sound papers" on "collisions within the solar system" followed on the heels of Worlds in Collision.

There are two theories concerning the origin of lunar craters. Their size is enormous; nothing comparable is known on earth. According to one theory, these craters are the result of a collision of the moon with very large meteorites, of the size of asteroids; according to the other theory, they are volcanic formations. Both theories assume very violent events in which the celestial body closest to the earth was involved. In Worlds in Collision I offered the following explanation of the lunar craters, as well as of the seas of lava and the rifts on the lunar surface: During the great catastrophes, when the moon together with the terrestrial globe passed through the fabric of a great comet and again when, in the eighth century before the present era, the earth and the moon were strongly perturbed by Mars, "the moon's surface flowed with lava and bubbled into great circular formations, which rapidly cooled off in the long lunar night, unprotected by an atmosphere from the coolness of cosmic spaces. In these cosmic collisions and near contacts the surface of the moon was also marked by clefts and rifts."

If the circular formations on the moon are these bubbles which collapsed, then probably there are smaller bubbles on the moon that have not yet burst. Dr. H. Percy Wilkins, the English selenographer, actually found over forty unexploded bubbles or domes on the moon, several of which lie to the northeast of Copernicus crater; the largest of these is found within Darwin crater and is twenty miles hi diameter, according to an article by F. Benario in Vega (1953).

I have expressed my opinion that many comets are of recent origin, and I have supported this view by reference to the frequency and luminosity of comets in the days of imperial Rome in comparison to the number of comets visible to the unaided eye in the last centuries.

This notion received vigorous confirmation in the extensive work on comets done in Soviet Russia by a leading authority on the subject, Professor S. K. Vsehsviatsky. His research reveals that periodic comets, as observed during recent decades, are losing their luminosity and their matter at a rate so rapid that fifty or sixty revolutions suffice to disintegrate a comet completely. Thus the Halley comet can hardly go back beyond 3500 years, or the year 1500 before the present era. In the last century several comets with short periods have failed to return, having apparently lost all their matter, and a few others actually fell apart before the eyes of observers.

The rapid decay of comets excludes the possibility that they have belonged to our solar system from the beginning, or from the time the planets were formed.

The theory that sees in comets bodies that arrived from other solar systems has been generally abandoned. Vsehsviatsky also shows why we must reject a theory of the capture of comets from a cloud of dust and gases through which our solar system presumably passed sometime in the past. He comes to the conclusion that the comets were born in eruptions from planets, even from satellites like our moon, where circular formations indicate violent events in the past: but the main activity must have taken place on Jupiter and Saturn. the major planets, as the form of the orbits of the short-period comets suggests. This is a revival of the theory of R. Proctor, who seventy years ago ascribed the origin of the so-called Jovian family of comets comprising the majority of comets of short periods to eruptions from Jupiter.

The gases of Jupiter and Saturn are in violent motion despite their low temperatures: yet the velocity necessary for escape from the major planets is so great (60 kilometers per second from Jupiter) that Vsehsviatsky admits not knowing the mechanism that could in conditions presently prevailing on maior planets impart this velocity to the exploded matter. Nevertheless, Vsehsviatsky insists that in the recent past conditions on these planets must have been such that this was possible, even if these conditions cannot be defined.

He emphasises that, by casting off the exploded matter, planets must have changed their own masses and consequently their orbits. They must also have experienced recoils.

In the Publications of the Kiew Observatory for 1953, Vsehsviatsky says :

"The history of the planetary system was characterized, we assume, by definitely more rapid changes and more active physical processes than appeared when only gravitational interrelations in the solar system were taken into account." (19)

All this is in complete harmony with the conclusions at which I arrived in Worlds in Collision concerning the time (a few thousand years ago) of the birth of comets of short periods and their origin (by eruption from the planets, especially the major planets). There I also explained the forces or conditions that caused the major planets to eject the cometary masses. "The [near] collision between major planets brought about the birth of comets" (p. 355). 

Now my claim, based on historical material, that the composition of the solar system was changed in historical times, is given the support of observation and calculation.

The electromagnetic nature of the universe, deduced in Worlds in Collision from a series of historical phenomena, is supported by another series of recent observations.

At Evans Signal Laboratory of the United States Army Signal Corps, in Belmar, New Jersey, researchers conducting pioneer experiments on the reception of radar echoes from the moon detected noises coming from the sun. These noises point to discharges of strong potentials. 

In the fall of 1947, at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Sir Edward Appleton reported that radio noises coming from the sun coincide with solar flares. 

According to him, "a sunspot is the most powerful ultra-short-wave radio-station known, its power being much greater than a million kilowatts." (20)

In 1948 and 1949 Donald Menzel produced motion pictures of prominences or explosions of matter on the sun; they were made at the Solar Observatory in Climax, Colorado. The exploded matter rose at a very great speed to immense heights, all the time gaining in velocity, and then descended to the sun, not on a curved path as a missile would do, but by retreating on the path it had covered, comparable to a missile reversing its direction and returning to its point of departure. Moreover, the velocity of its descent was without the acceleration expected in a fall, and this too was in violation of gravitational mechanics.

It has been observed that when protuberances or surges of exploded matter on the sun run into one another, both of them recoil violently; such observation was made by McMath and Sawyer, and on another occasion by Lyot. The conclusion drawn by E. Pettit of Mount Wilson Observatory (1951) is that solar protuberances are electrically charged.

Above the protuberances "the coronal structure is often bent into the form of an arch, sometimes into several concentric arches. This is additional evidence of the electrical nature of the prominences [protuberances] and corona." (21)

In the configuration of the cometary nuclei and tails there was found "good evidence that all particles in the comet influence the motion of each other," and the configuration of the streamers in the tails of many comets "strongly indicate a mutual repulsion." Thus wrote Professor N. T. Bobrovnikoff, director of the Perkins Observatory (1951). (22) It was also calculated that the repulsion of the tails of the comets by the sun is twenty thousand times stronger than the gravitational attraction, and the implication is that it cannot be caused by the

pressure of light, as previously thought, and that electrical repulsion must be in action. From spectral analysis it is known that the cometary tails do not shine merely by reflected light, and that their light is not caused by combustion either, but most probably is an electrical effect, comparable to the effect of a Geissler tube. (23)

In order to explain the general magnetic field of the terrestrial globe, Dr. E. C. Bullard, of Great Britain's National Physical Laboratory, assumed (1953) electrical currents in the liquid metal core of the earth.

The polar lights have been explained by various scientists as electrical charges arriving from the sun. Following disturbances on the sun there is an immediate disturbance in the ionosphere and radio-transmission, ground currents, and the magnetic field of the earth; there is also a second retarded but pronounced reaction about twenty-five hours later, and auroral displays.

In 1948 Enrico Fermi explained the enigmatically high charges of the cosmic rays as a result of the positive particles having traveled through magnetic fields in space. In 1951 Richtmyer and Teller, following an earlier idea of Swann, explained these charges as originating in the sun: protons and heavy nuclei could be accelerated to the enormous velocity of cosmic-ray particles by an extended magnetic field of solar origin. Both theories assume the existence of magnetic fields in space. I could add to this that if the earth is a negatively charged body the great

energy with which positive charges the cosmic rays rush toward the earth is not in the least enigmatic: a negatively charged body attracts positive charges.

At Mount Wilson Observatory Harold Babcock determined (1947) that some of the fixed stars possess general magnetic fields of great intensity. (One of the stars was found to reverse its polarity every nine days from plus 7000 gauss to minus 6300 gauss. This may be understood as a sign that the star is rotating, turning another pole to us every nine days. The star shows no Zeeman effect in between, that is, when the observer is in the plane of the equatorial belt of the star, in the same position in which we are permanently in relation to our sun. (24)

By 1952 the Royal Astronomer, Sir Harold Spencer Jones, estimated that magnetic properties were established in more than one hundred stars, and the number of identified magnetic stars is rapidly growing.

Several years ago Dr. J. S. Hall, of the United States Naval Observatory, and Dr. W. Hiltner, of Yerkes Observatory, found that the light from certain stars is strongly polarized. It was surmised that starlight must pass through particles of magnetized interstellar dust. The question raised was why the particles of dust should all be oriented in the same direction as their magnetic axes. However, if these clouds of dust are electrically charged and in motion, the common magnetic orientation of these particles is only natural.

In June 1950 W. Baade of Palomar and L. Spitzer of Princeton offered a theory of colliding galaxies. By November of 1952 it was definitely spoken of as "a titanic collision of two giant star clusters" behind the constellation Cygnus (Swan) of the Milky Way.

The fact of the "big crash" was substantiated by strong evidence the radio noises coming from beyond the Milky Way and sifting through it. Galaxies, each as large as the Milky Way, with numberless stars, were riding one through another, colliding and sending out a terrible S.O.S. through the universe in the form of anguished radio noises. These signals were interpreted by Baade and K. Minkowski as the reverberations of crashes on a galactic scale. After millions of years of traveling with the velocity of light, these signals reached our radio-telescopes as clearly audible noises. They left the place of the catastrophe so long ago, yet, because of the magnitude of galaxies, the collision is possibly still going on. The signals that are emitted today will reach our solar system when our sun may have already turned into a dwarf star and our planet into clouds of dust.

Not only the fact of the collision of galaxies startled the astronomers, but even more the medium through which it became known: the colliding galaxies send electromagnetic signals, thus evidencing the electromagnetic structure of galaxies and of the very space of the universe.

By August 1953 the statement was made that another celestial host of stars was charging on a rival galaxy in the direction of the sky where we see the Crab nebula and that still another collision was going on behind the constellation Cassiopeia.

In the March 1951 issue of RCA Review, John H. Nelson of the engineering department of RCA Communications, Inc., announced the results of several years of careful observations on the dependence of regular radio transmission on the position of planets in the solar system. He drew graphs and wrote: "It can be readily seen from these graphs that disturbed conditions show good correlation with planetary configurations ... It is definitely shown that each of the six planets studied is effective in some configurations." 

The press reported: "Evidence of a strange and unexplained correlation between the positions of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars in their orbits around the sun and the presence of violent electrical disturbances in the earth's upper atmosphere . . . seems to indicate [that] the planets and the sun share in a cosmic electrical-balance mechanism that extends a billion miles from the center of our solar system. Such an electrical balance is not accounted for in current astrophysical theories." (25)

Short-wave frequencies are disturbed when Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars line up either in a straight line or at right angles to one another. Nelson emphasized that the phenomenon "is not due to gravitational effect or tidal pulls between planets and the sun." Actually, the phenomenon indicates that the planets are electrically charged bodies.

In this connection, the older theory of a direct but unexplained relation between the revolution of Jupiter and the sunspot cycle is seen in a new light. Also, the observation of Stetson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that the moon affects radio reception it is twice as good when the moon is under the horizon as when it is overhead belongs in the same category as Nelson's observation of planetary influences on the ionosphere. Stetson thought this effect was caused by some radiation emanating from the moon, for a neutral moon could not produce the phenomenon. 

By 1953 the strange fact was established that the solar tides in the earth's atmosphere are sixteen times more powerful than the lunar tides in the atmosphere, a fact in complete conflict with the tidal theory, according to which the action of the moon on oceanic tides is several times more powerful than that of the sun. The fifty-fold discrepancy is still without an acceptable explanation.

These are only a few of the recent discoveries that make a revision of the mechanistic concept of the universe mandatory. 

Exactly because of the accuracy achieved without reckoning with forces that appear to exist, celestial mechanics, a solid work of great mathematical minds for almost three centuries, may seem even more in need of such revision. All this has little direct bearing on the story of Worlds in Collision, which claims only the effect to be expected if a magnetic body like the earth should come very close to another magnetic body. It was my skepticism concerning the infallibility of the celestial mechanics, which assumes the celestial bodies to be electrically and magnetically sterile, that was the real cause of the emotional outburst.

Let us think of a binary or double star; both stars revolve around each other or a common center. A half- revolution period of a few days or only hours is common. Let us assume that the stars of the binary are magnets 7000 gauss strong. It is immediately obvious that even should the electrical component of the electromagnets be disregarded these stars are not moving in a system purely mechanical.

But this is enough to render the purely mechanical celestial system fallible in respect also to single stars and equally so to the sun and its planets. 

In Jupiter and its moons we have a system not unlike the solar family. The planet is cold, yet its gases are in motion. It appears probable to me that it sends out radio noises as do the sun and the stars. I suggest that this be investigated.(26)

Uranus is the only planet about which we know that, for a considerable part of its revolution, it turns one of its poles toward us. If the gases on Uranus are not in turbulent motion, but have a smooth reflecting surface, I would expect the solar light reflected from the polar regions of Uranus to be polarized: as is well known, light reflected from the poles of a magnet is polarized.

[It is generally thought that the magnetic field of the earth does not sensitively reach the moon. But there is a way to find out whether it does or not. The moon makes daily rocking movements librations of latitude, some of which are explained by no theory. I suggest investigating whether these unaccounted librations are synchronized with the daily revolutions of the magnetic poles of the earth around its geographical poles.]

C. Paine-Gaposchkin of Harvard who in the last years has written many long articles against the theory of Worlds in Collision, in which she asserted that the celestial bodies could not possibly possess electrostatic charges enough to produce any of the [observed] effects on mo- tion within the solar system," now makes, in the September 1953 issue of Scientific American, this confession:

"Ten years ago in our hypotheses of cosmic evolution we were thinking hi terms of gravitation and light

pressure...Tomorrow we may contemplate a galaxy that is essentially a gravitating, turbulent electromagnet." 

There will be more concessions as time goes on. Our sun and its planets are not outside a galaxy; they are not unique or an exception in the plan of the universe.

I like to tell this story. Once, in the twilight hour, a visitor came to my study, a distinguished-looking gentleman. He brought me a manuscript dealing with celestial mechanics. After a glance at some of the pages, I had the feeling that this was the work of a mathematical genius. I entered into conversation with my visitor and mentioned the name of James Clerk Maxwell. My guest asked: "Who is he?" Embarrassed, I answered: "You know, the scientist who gave a theoretical explanation of the experiments of Faraday."

"And who is Faraday?" inquired the stranger. 

In growing embarrassment I said "Of course, the man who did the pioneer work in electromagnetism."

"And what is electromagnetism?" asked the gentleman. 

"What is your name?" I inquired. 

He answered: "Isaac Newton." 

I awoke. On my knees was an open volume: Newton's Principia. This story is told to illustrate what I have said before.

Would you listen to anybody discuss the mechanics of the

spheres who does not know the elementary physical forces existing in nature? But this is the position adopted by astronomers who acclaim as infallible a celestial mechanics conceived in the 1660s in which electricity and magnetism play not the slightest role.

In the fields of archaeology, geology, and astronomy the last few years have brought a vast array of facts to corroborate the claim made in Worlds in Collision that there were physical upheavals of a global character in historical times; that these catastrophes were caused by extraterrestrial agents; and that the nature of these agents may be identified. Although I arrived at results in conflict with orthodox beliefs, yet recent years have disclosed new observations and findings, all in support and none in refutation.

What I want to impress upon you is that science today, as in the days of Newton, lies before us as a great uncharted ocean, and we have not yet sailed very far from the coast of ignorance. In the study of the human soul we have learned only a few mechanisms of behavior as directed from the subconscious mind, but we do not know what thinking is or what memory is. And in biology we do not know what life is. The age of basic discoveries is not yet at its end, and you are not latecomers, for whom no fundamentals are left to discover. As I see so many of you today, I visualize some of you, ten or twenty or thirty years from now, as fortunate discoverers, those of you who possess inquisitive and challenging minds, the will to persist, and an urge to store knowledge. Don't be afraid to face facts, and never lose your ability to ask the questions: Why? and How? Be in this like a child.

Don't be afraid of ridicule; think of the history of all great discoveries. I quote Alfred North Whitehead: 

"If you have had your attention directed to the novel-

ties of thought in your own lifetime, you will have ob- served that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced."(27)

Therefore, dare.

And should even the great ones of your age try to discourage you, think of the greatest scientist of antiquity, Archimedes, who jeered at the theory of Aristarchus, twenty-five years his senior, that the earth revolves around the sun. Untruth in science may live for centuries, and you may not see yourself vindicated, but dare.

Don't persist in your idea if the facts are against it; but do persist if you see facts gathering on your side. It may be that even the strongest opposition, that of figures, will crumble before the facts. The greatest mathematician who ever walked on these shores, Simon Newcomb, proved in 1903 that a flying machine carrying a pilot is a mathematical impossibility. In the same year of 1903 the Wright brothers, without mathematics, but by a fact, proved him wrong.

In religion, the great revelations and the great authorities the founding fathers belong to the past, and the older the authority, the greater it is. In science, unlike religion, the great revelations lie in the future; the coming generations are the authorities; and the pupil is greater than the master, if he has the gift to see things anew.

All fruitful ideas have been conceived in the minds of the nonconformists, for whom the known was still unknown, and who often went back to begin where others passed by, sure of their way. The truth of today was the heresy of yesterday.

Imagination coupled with skepticism and an ability to wonder if you possess these, bountiful nature will hand you some of the secrets out of her inexhaustible store. The pleasure you will experience in discovering truth will repay you for your work; don't expect other compensation, because it may not come. Yet, dare.

FOOTNOTES

(1) Schaeffer's book was published in 1948; my attention was drawn to it in 1951 by Dr. W. Federn. My first publication claiming natural catastrophes that overwhelmed the ancient East, the greatest of which caused the downfall of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, was printed in January 1946 as Theses for the Reconstuction of Ancient History, a monograph published in the series Scripta Academia Hiersolymitana. It embodies the entire plan of Ages in Chaos in the form of a summary. As to the causes of the catastrophes, Schaeffer wrote: "Nous ne distinguons encore qu'imperfaitment les causes initiales et replies de certaines de ces grandes crises."

(2) Quoted from my Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History, published as an advance summary of Ages in Chaos, and referred to in the foregoing footnote.

(3) W. F. Libby, Radiocarbon Dating (1951), pp. 71, 102. 

(4) This lecture was delivered on October 14, 1953. In November of the same year the first announcement of the decipherment of Minoan script (Linear B) was made by Michael Ventris, and English architect. Contrary to what had been thought concerning this script, it was found to be in the Greek language. This fact startled the scholarly world, as the texts had been erroneously referred to a time before the twelfth century. It had been generally thought that in the days of Homer, about 700 B.C., the Greeks were illiterate, and that at about that time the first attempts at writing were made in the adopted Phoenician (Hebrew) letters. The decipherment of the Minoan script forced the conclusion that a syllabic alphabet was used in Greece six hundred years before Homer. But amazement still persists, for no literary documents have come down to us from between 1300 B.C. and 700 B.C. A literate people cannot forfeit completely a well-developed literacy. As I indicated in Ages in Chaos and in my lecture, this period of a Dark Age of six centuries between the Mycenaean and Ionian ages results from an erroneous timetable of ancient history.

(5) A.P. Okladnikov, "Excavations in the North" in Po Sledam Dravnikh Kultur (Vestiges of Ancient Cultures), Gosudarstvenoye Isdatelstvo Kulturno-Prosvetitelnoy Literatury, 1951.

(6) Ibid.

(7) K. McGowan, Early Man in the New World (1950), p. 151; cf. F. Rainey, "Archaeological Investigation in Central Alaska", American Antiquity, V, (1940), 305; cf. H.C. Hibben, "Evidence of Early Man in Alaska", American Antiquity, VIII (1943), 256.

(8) D.G. Whitley, Journal of the Philosphical Society of Great Britain, XII (1910), 35.

(9) J. Prestwich, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, XLVIII; Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1893), 1894; also see his On Certain Phenomena...(London, 1895)

(10) "Paleomagnetism," Science News, July 1949.

(11) P.L. Mercanton, in Archives des sciences physiques et naturelles (Quatrieme Periode, Tome XXIII, Geneva 1907)

 (12) H. Pettersson, "Exploring the Ocean Flooor", Scientific American, August 1950

(13)  R. F. Flint, Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch (1947), p. 382.

(14) H. Gams and R. Nordhagen, "Postglaziale Klimaanderungen und Erdkrustenbewegungen in Mitteleuropa," Mitteilungen der Geogra- phlschen Gesellschaft in Miinchen (1923), pp. 13-336.

(15) Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, LXIII (1952).

(16) Frederick Johnson (chairman of the Committee on Carbon 14 for the selection of samples for analysis), "The Significance of the Dates for Archaeology and Geology," In Radiocarbon Dating, ed. W. F. Libby (1952), p. 97.

(17) Suess, Science, September 24, 1954. 

(18) P. V. Smith, Science, October 24, 1952. 18 N. T. Bobrovnikoff (director of Perkins Observatory), "Comets," in Astrophysics, ed. J. A. Hynek (1951), p. 342.

(19)  N.T. Bobrovnikoff (director of Perkins Observatory), "Comets", in Astrophysics, ed. J.A. Hynek (1951), p. 342

(20) S. K. Vsehsviatsky, "New Works Concerning the Origin of Comets and the Theory of Eruption," Publications of Kiew Obtervatory, No. 5 (1953), pp. 3-57.

(21) E. Pettit, "The Sun and Stellar Radiation," in Astrophysics, ed. J. A. Hynek (1951).

 (22) N. T. Bobrovnikoff, "Comets," ibid., pp. 327-28.  

(23) H. Spencer Jones, General Astronomy, pp. 273-74.

(24) The divergent results obtained in the determination of the solar magnetic field may be due to the varying position of the earth in relation to the solar magnetic equator, which does not coincide with the solar equator or with the ecliptic. When the earth is in the plane of the solar magnetic equator, no Zeeman effect is observable and the erroneous conclusion is made that the sun possesses no general magnetic field.

(25) New York Times, April 15, 1951.

(26) On April 5, 1955, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Dr. Bernard F. Burke and Dr. Kenneth L. Franklin, of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution, announced the unexpected discovery of strong radio noises arising from Jupiter. They found it difficult to explain the phenomenon, since no radio noises were expected from planets. The above sentence in the the lecture to the Forum, predicting noises from Jupiter, was in the typescript of the draft of the lecture as deposited in January 1954 with Professor V. Bargmann of Princeton University, and also as edited by the staff of Doubleday & Company in the summer of 1954, eight months before the discovery.

(27) Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1925), Chapter III.