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PSYCHISM Analysis of Things Existing ESSAYS BY PAUL GIBIER, M. D. Director of the New York Pasteur Institute.

We are aware that certain scientists hold that each earthly period of twenty-five thousand and some hundred years, periods which are determined by the astronomical phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes, witnesses the most fearful cataclysms. They base their belief partly upon the shape of the earth and oceans, as well as upon certain traditions of engulfed continents. These occurrences, as we may see in our soarings through space, interest only the races inhabiting this earth, for we well understand they are totally unperceived by even our nearest planetary neighbors, the inhabitants of Mars, unless indeed their knowledge of optical science is more advanced than ours. The manner in which these - cataclysms are supposed to occur is as follows: by reason of the change of inclination of the polar axis, the earth presents itself before its great magnet, the Sun, so as to displace its own center of attraction, which then passes from one side of the terrestrial equator to the other hemisphere. This results in the disturbance of waters which, by reason of their fluidity, have a natural tendency to run towards the point to which they are most strongly attracted, in an all overpowering tidal wave.

If this were all there might not follow such terrible devastation. As the level of the waters diminishes at the uplifted pole as well as elsewhere, the huge ice-cap which covers it is rent, being no longer upheld by the waters.

These accumulations of ice at either the arctic or antarctic pole, which may tower miles in height, are overthrown owing to the withdrawal of the waters, and a stupendous breaking up follows; blocks of ice as large as empires, as colossal as so many Himalayas, tumble over each other, fall and drive away the waters rushing with them, tearing away continents, and carrying along masses of boulders which man later on calls erratic. The salt sea submerges everything except, perhaps, a few lofty summits and plateaux. And after, when the great silence has become established over ancient continents, buried at the bottom of the briny seas with all that they bear, new lands spring up, muddy, covered with a salty ooze and foreign weeds, like unto hideous marine monsters, which suddenly emerge from the bosom of troubled floods and show themselves in full sight of the awe-stricken skies.

Thus these new lands present themselves to those who have survived the general fate, the memory of which will be traditional and handed down, through stories of deluges that one may find in all sacred books of ancient religions.

Cast your eye upon the earthly globe, say the partisans of this dilurian theory, and behold how greatly the southern differs from the northern hemisphere. In the latter you see nought but lands, while toward the south waters are predominant; they are accumulated thither. High plateaux and mountain tops under the form of islands are seen there in numbers. Moreover, all the continents, both Americas, Africa and the great Indo-Chinese peninsulas end in a point toward the south pole to which the waters have retired. And the Atlantis, which Plato illustrated, the remembrance of which has been carried along through ages, what has become of it if it has not, like other continents, been swallowed up by the sea?

What, add they, do these alternating and superposed layers of marine and telluric fossils which we find in our fields and even on the mountain tops prove if not that the sun once shone at the same point in successive aeons upon life-teeming ocean and continent?