Donnelly's "Drift"

[Voyageur]

When Immanuel Velikovsky discussed our “Cultural Amnesia” in ‘The Submergence of Terrifying Events in the Racial Memory and Their Later Emergence’, this seems so as one reviews our mythology and peoples old beliefs from all over the world handed down from generation to generation and the uncanny symmetry of what was seen at some point in our historical tomb. Of the earth being pummeled from out there is supported from many different studies and basic observations of our fractured mantles, piled up bones, archeological findings and distributions of geological detritus to name just a few.

As to what happened exactly, don’t know; Venus, Mars, comet strikes or tails or vast focused explosions from out there? Perhaps the theorized sun's twin wandered through causing general astronomical chaos and the earth, being as but a speck of dust, took a big dose of the configurations. What seems clear, whatever happened and likely many times in variation and severity, is that the extreme speed of which this fragile piece of spinning rock mantel with its liquefied core was hit is freighting beyond belief. Whatever happened, with impact speeds in the > 300 miles per second range, it is really unfathomable to realize the effects of particles of matter being slammed together like this on a planetary scale. In conjunction with this aspect, one can be drawn to the incredible width and breath of the comet tails themselves (as we measure distances), stretching millions of miles.

Have read many books suggested here in the forum on these matters, but not all, sometimes just snippets or well summarized writings in Laura’s various works and articles. Being that as it may, decided to go back and read early writings and in this case just finished Ignatius Donnelly’s book ‘Ragnarok’ which purposes a comet strike to the earth in whole or in part with the tail. The book focuses on the “Drift” of debris that litters our planet in various unstratified, unfossilized layers. The book recounts continental mythology and unpacks his version of religious texts as has been done by many others. He discusses in simple words the historization of events, especially when used by directed pens as rewrites to redirect humanity to what can only be called our religious control dogma. As such, the intent here is not to describe what he says or by others, but to touch on a couple of noted items as written back in 1883. Does Donnelly get close, perhaps in many aspects, yet his knowledge of geological results of the “Drift” would have had some limiting factors back in 1883 as the survey was in its known infancy. However, based on the time of his writing and general knowledge of said times, he does a good job stimulating thinking that could only be built on by others further along. Was there human life under the “Drift”? This seems so, remembering that the deposits in some places are between a few feet to 800 feet +/-. Sweeping off the debris of known finds and cross referencing with books such as ‘Forbidden Archeology’, one can only conclude that things of humankind are buried under this very possibly foreign stratum of materials - human history goes back likely a long long time.

Of the science of the time, he makes a decent presentation for comets not being dirty snowballs. Donnelly seems to scratch the surface of electrical and magnetism, both of our atmosphere and comets themselves and here are a few snippets in quotes:

Electrical:

It has been shown that, of our forty-five miles of atmosphere, one fifth, or a stratum of nine miles in thickness, is oxygen. A shock, or an electrical or other convulsion, which would even partially disarrange or decompose this combination, and send an increased quantity of oxygen, the heavier gas, to the earth, would wrap everything in flames. Or the same effects might follow from any great change in the constitution of the water of the world. Water is composed of eight parts of oxygen and one part of hydrogen.

But gradually the heat begins to dissipate. This is a signal for tremendous electrical action. Condensation commences.

There is also some allusion to the sandstones scattered about; and we have another reference to the great breaks in the earth’s crust, caused either by the shock of contact with the comet, or the electrical disturbances of the time; and we are told that the trap-rocks, and rocks of vermilion color, boiled up to the surface with great tumult.

They wander, breathing a foul and sickening atmosphere, under the shadow of an awful darkness, a darkness which knows no morning, no stars, no moon; a darkness palpable and visible, lighted only by electrical discharges from the abyss of clouds, with such roars of thunder as we, in this day of harmonious nature, can form no conception of. It is, indeed, ”chaos and ancient night.” All the forces of nature are there, but disorderly, destructive, battling against each other, and multiplied a thousand-fold in power; the winds are cyclones, magnetism is gigantic, electricity is appalling. This signifies that the comet, breathing fire and smoke, so rarefied the air that the clouds disappeared and there followed an age of awful heat. Hercules smites the monster with his lightnings, and electrical phenomena on a vast scale accompany the recondensation of the moisture and the return of the clouds.

The answer is plain. We know the power of the ordinary hurricanes of the earth. ”The largest trees are uprooted, or have their trunks snapped in two; and few if any of the most massive buildings stand uninjured.” If we will remember the excessive heat and the electrical derangements that must have accompanied the Drift Age, we can realize the tremendous winds spoken of in many of the legends.

Of the Comet

We shall see, as we proceed, that the legends of mankind, in describing the comet that struck the earth, represent it as party-colored; it is ”speckled” in one legend; spotted like a tiger in another; sometimes it is a white boar in the heavens; sometimes a blue snake; sometimes it is red with the blood of the millions that are to perish. Doubtless these separate formations, ground out of the granite, from the mica, hornblende, or feldspar, respectively, may, as I have said, under great laws, acted upon by magnetism or electricity, have arranged themselves in separate lines or sheets, in the tail of the comet, and hence we find that the clays of one region are of one color, while those of another are of a different hue. We are told that it burns with a yellow flame when subjected to great heat, and some of the legends, we will see hereafter, speak of the ”yellow hair” of the comet that struck the earth. And we are further told that, ”when it, carbureted hydrogen, is mixed in due proportion with oxygen or atmospheric air, a compound is produced which explodes with the electric spark or the approach of flame.” Another form of carbureted hydrogen, olefiant gas, is deadly to life, burns with a white light, and when mixed with three or four volumes of oxygen, or ten or twelve of air, it explodes with terrific violence.

Magnetic:

The particles ground out of feldspar are finer than those derived from mica and hornblende, and we can readily understand how the great forces of gravity, acting upon the dust of the comet’s tail, might separate one from the other; or how magnetic waves passing through the comet might arrange all the particles containing iron by themselves, and thus produce that marvelous separation of the constituents of the granite which we have found to exist in the Drift clays. If the destroyed world possessed no sedimentary rocks, then the entire material of the comet would consist of granitic stones and dust such as constitutes clays.

We shall see, as we proceed, that the legends of mankind, in describing the comet that struck the earth, represent it as party-colored; it is ”speckled” in one legend; spotted like a tiger in another; sometimes it is a white boar in the heavens; sometimes a blue snake; sometimes it is red with the blood of the millions that are to perish. Doubtless these separate formations, ground out of the granite, from the mica, hornblende, or feldspar, respectively, may, as I have said, under great laws, acted upon by magnetism or electricity, have arranged themselves in separate lines or sheets, in the tail of the comet, and hence we find that the clays of one region are of one color, while those of another are of a different hue.

Again, we shall see that the legends represent the monster as ”winding,” undulating, writhing, twisting, fold over fold, precisely as the telescopes show us the comets do to-day.

The very fact that these waves of motion run through the tail of the comet, and that it is capable of expanding and contracting on an immense scale, is conclusive proof that it is composed of small, adjustable particles. The writer from whom I have already quoted, speaking of the extraordinary comet of 1843, says:

”As the comet moves past the great luminary, it sweeps round its tail as a sword may be conceived to be held out at arm’s-length, and then waved round the head, from one side to the opposite. But a sword with a blade one hundred and fifty millions of miles long must be a somewhat awkward weapon to brandish round after this fashion. Its point would have to sweep through a curve stretching out more than six hundred millions of miles; and, even with an allowance of two hours for the accomplishment of the movement, the flash of the weapon would be of such terrific velocity that it is not an easy task to conceive how any blade of connected material substance could bear the strain of the stroke. Even with a blade that possessed the coherence and tenacity of iron or steel, the case would be one that it would be difficult for molecular cohesion to deal with. But that difficulty is almost infinitely increased when it is a substance of much lower cohesive tenacity than either iron or steel that has to be subjected to the strain.

Suns Twin?

Can it be that there wanders through immeasurable space, upon an orbit of such size that millions of years are required to complete it, some monstrous luminary, so vast that when it returns to us it fills a large part of the orbit which the earth describes around the sun, and showers down upon us deluges of d´ebris , while it fills the world with flame? And are these recurring strata of stones and clay and bowlders, written upon these widely separated pages of the geologic volume, the record of its oft and regularly recurring visitations?

Surly he was talking about a luminous comet, maybe like Velikovsky’s Venus, but could not help thinking about the Sun’s Twin rolling around into our planetary domain.

The case of Comet Biela’s

This has been well reviewed by Laura also in ‘Comet Biela and Mrs. O'Leary's Cow’ http://www.sott.net/articles/show/148414-Comet-Biela-and-Mrs-O-Leary-s-Cow that offers further examples and photos; would urge this be read. As a recapitulation, here is how it was written in this book (some passages not included):

Discovered 1826 – with an elliptical orbit of 6.75 year cycle. Came close to earth in 1832 – missed by a month – then again cycled around in 1839, and in 1846 it seemed to have split in two or there was now two comets.

And it returned in like fashion in 1839 and 1846. But here a surprising thing occurred. Its proximity to the earth had split it in two ; each half had a head and tail of its own; each had set up a separate government for itself; and they were whirling through space, side by side, like a couple of race-horses, about sixteen thousand miles apart, or about twice as wide apart as the diameter of the earth.

“In 1852, 1859, and 1866, the comet SHOULD have returned, but it did not. It was lost. It was dissipated. Its material was banging around the earth in fragments somewhere. ” I quote from a writer in a recent issue of the ”Edinburgh Review”:

“The puzzled astronomers were left in a state of tantalizing uncertainty as to what had become of it. At the beginning of the year 1866 this feeling of bewilderment gained expression in the Annual Report of the Council of the Royal Astronomical Society. The matter continued, nevertheless, in the same state of provoking uncertainty for another six years. The third period of the perihelion passage had then passed, and nothing had been seen of the missing luminary. But on the night of November 27, 1872, night-watchers were startled by a sudden and a very magnificent display of falling stars or meteors, of which there had been no previous forecast, and Professor Klinkerflues, of Berlin, having carefully noted the common radiant point in space from which this star-shower was discharged into the earth’s atmosphere, with the intuition of ready genius jumped at once to the startling inference that here at last were traces of the missing luminary….

This goes on to discuss new observations of it (them) being found again minus their tails.

Now, we have seen that Biela’s comets lost their tails. What became of them? There is no evidence to show whether they lost them in 1852, 1859, 1866, or 1872. The probabilities are that the demoralization took place before 1852, as otherwise the comets would have been seen, tails and all, in that and subsequent years. It is true that the earth came near enough in 1872 to attract some of the wandering gravel-stones toward itself, and that they fell, blazing and consuming themselves with the friction of our atmosphere, and reached the surface of our planet, if at all, as cosmic dust. But where were the rest of the assets of these bankrupt comets? They were probably scattered around in space, disjecta membra , floating hither and thither, in one place a stream of stones, in another a volume of gas; while the two heads had fled away, like the fugitive presidents of a couple of broken banks, to the Canadian refuge of ” Theta Centauri ”–shorn of their splendors and reduced to first principles.

Impact?

Did anything out of the usual order occur on the face of the earth about this time?

It is interesting to note the author lived and felt the sensations from his location - here is the description of events as noted by the author and as matters of historical facts:

Yes. In the year 1871, on Sunday, the 8th of October, at half past nine o’clock in the evening, events occurred which attracted the attention of the whole world, which caused the death of hundreds of human beings, and the destruction of millions of property, and which involved three different States of the Union in the wildest alarm and terror.

The summer of 1871 had been excessively dry; the moisture seemed to be evaporated out of the air; and on the Sunday above named the atmospheric conditions all through the Northwest were of the most peculiar character. The writer was living at the time in Minnesota, hundreds of miles from the scene of the disasters, and he can never forget the condition of things. There was a parched, combustible, inflammable, furnace-like feeling in the air, that was really alarming. It felt as if there were needed but a match, a spark, to cause a world-wide explosion. It was weird and unnatural. I have never seen nor felt anything like it before or since. Those who experienced it will bear me out in these statements.

At that hour, half past nine o’clock in the evening, at apparently the same moment, at points hundreds of miles apart, in three different States, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, fires of the most peculiar and devastating kind broke out, so far as we know, by spontaneous combustion.

In Wisconsin, on its eastern borders, in a heavily timbered country, near Lake Michigan, a region embracing four hundred square miles , extending north from Brown County, and containing Peshtigo, Manistee, Holland, and numerous villages on the shores of Green Bay, was swept bare by an absolute whirlwind of flame. There were seven hundred and fifty people killed outright , besides great numbers of the wounded, maimed, and burned, who died afterward. More than three million dollars’ worth of property was destroyed.

It was no ordinary fire. I quote:

At sundown there was a lull in the wind and comparative stillness. For two hours there were no signs of danger; but at a few minutes after nine o’clock, and by a singular coincidence, precisely the time at which the Chicago fire commenced[, the people of the village heard a terrible roar. It was that of a tornado, crushing through the forests. Instantly the heavens were illuminated with a terrible glare . The sky , which had been so dark a moment before, burst into clouds of flame . A spectator of the terrible scene says the fire did not come upon them gradually from burning trees and other objects to the windward, but the first notice they had of it was a whirlwind of flame in great clouds from above the tops of the trees , which fell upon and entirely enveloped everything. The poor people inhaled it, or the intensely hot air, and fell down dead. This is verified by the appearance of many of the corpses. They were found dead in the roads and open spaces, where there were no visible marks of fire near by, with not a trace of burning upon their bodies or clothing. At the Sugar Bush, which is an extended clearing, in some places four miles in width, corpses were found in the open road, between fences only slightly burned. No mark of fire was upon them; they lay there as if asleep . This phenomenon seems to explain the fact that so many were killed in compact masses. They seemed to have huddled together, in what were evidently regarded at the moment as the safest places, far away from buildings, trees, or other inflammable material, and there to have died together.

Another spectator says:

”Much has been said of the intense heat of the fires which destroyed Peshtigo, Menekaune, Williamsonville, etc., but all that has been said can give the stranger but a faint conception of the reality. The heat has been compared to that engendered by a flame concentrated on an object by a blow-pipe; but even that would not account for some of the phenomena. For instance, we have in our possession a copper cent taken from the pocket of a dead man in the Peshtigo Sugar Bush, which will illustrate our point. This cent has been partially fused , but still retains its round form, and the inscription upon it is legible.

Others, in the same pocket, were partially melted, and yet the clothing and the body of the man were not even singed . We do not know in what way to account for this, unless, as is asserted by some, the tornado and fire were accompanied by electrical phenomena.”

”It is the universal testimony that the prevailing idea among the people was, that the last day had come. Accustomed as they were to fire, nothing like this had ever been known. They could give no other interpretation to this ominous roar, this bursting of the sky with fame, and this dropping down of fire out of the very heavens, consuming instantly everything it touched.

”No two give a like description of the great tornado as it smote and devoured the village. It seemed as if ’the fiery fiends of hell had been loosened,’ says one. ’It came in great sheeted flames from heaven,’ says another. ’There was a pitiless rain of fire and SAND.’ ’The atmosphere was all afire.’Some speak of ’great balls of fire unrolling and shooting forth, in streams .’ The fire leaped over roofs and trees, and ignited whole streets at once. No one could stand before the blast. It was a race with death, above, behind, and before them.”

A civil engineer, doing business in Peshtigo, says

The heat increased so rapidly, as things got well afire, that, when about four hundred feet from the bridge and the nearest building , I was obliged to lie down behind a log that was aground in about two feet of water, and by going under water now and then, and holding my head close to the water behind the log, I managed to breathe. There were a dozen others behind the same log. If I had succeeded in crossing the river and gone among the buildings on the other side, probably I should have been lost, as many were.”

James B. Clark, of Detroit, who was at Uniontown, Wisconsin, writes:

”The fire suddenly made a rush, like the flash of a train of gunpowder, and swept in the shape of a crescent around the settlement. It is almost impossible to conceive the frightful rapidity of the advance of the flames . The rushing fire seemed to eat up and annihilate the trees.”

They saw a black mass coming toward them from the wall of flame:

”It was a stampede of cattle and horses thundering toward us, bellowing moaning, and neighing as they galloped on; rushing with fearful speed, their eyeballs dilated and glaring with terror, and every motion betokening delirium of fright. Some had been badly burned, and must have plunged through a long space of flame in the desperate effort to escape. Following considerably behind came a solitary horse, panting and snorting and nearly exhausted. He was saddled and bridled, and, as we first thought, had a bag lashed to his back. As he came up we were startled at the sight of a young lad lying fallen over the animal’s neck, the bridle wound around his hands, and the mane being clinched by the fingers. Little effort was needed to stop the jaded horse, and at once release the helpless boy. He was taken into the house, and all that we could do was done; but he had inhaled the smoke, and was seemingly dying. Some time elapsed and he revived enough to speak. He told his name–Patrick Byrnes–and said: ’Father and mother and the children got into the wagon. I don’t know what became of them. Everything is burned up. I am dying. Oh! is hell any worse than this?’”

When we leave Wisconsin and pass about two hundred and fifty miles eastward, over Lake Michigan and across the whole width of the State of Michigan, we find much the same condition of things, but not so terrible in the loss of human life. Fully fifteen thousand people were rendered homeless by the fires ; and their food, clothing, crops, horses, and cattle were destroyed. Of these five to six thousand were burned out the same night that the fires broke out in Chicago and Wisconsin. The total destruction of property exceeded one million dollars; not only villages and cities, but whole townships, were swept bare.

But it is to Chicago we must turn for the most extraordinary results of this atmospheric disturbance. It is needless to tell the story in detail. The world knows it by heart:

Blackened and bleeding, helpless, panting, prone, On the charred fragments of her shattered throne, Lies she who stood but yesterday alone.”

I have only space to refer to one or two points. The fire was spontaneous. The story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow having started the conflagration by kicking over a lantern was proved to be false. It was the access of gas from the tail of Biela’s comet that burned up Chicago!

The fire-marshal testified:

”I felt it in my bones that we were going to have a burn.”

He says, speaking of O’Leary’s barn:

”We got the fire under control, and it would not have gone a foot farther; but the next thing I knew they came and told me that St. Paul’s church, about two squares north, was on fire.”

They checked the church-fire, but– ”The next thing I knew the fire was in Bateham’s planing-mill.”

A writer in the New York ”Evening Post” says he saw in Chicago ”buildings far beyond the line of fire, and in no contact with it, burst into flames from the interior .”

It must not be forgotten that the fall of 1871 was marked by extraordinary conflagrations in regions widely separated. On the 8th. of October, the same day the Wisconsin, Michigan, and Chicago fires broke out, the States of Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, and Illinois were severely devastated by prairie-fires; while terrible fires raged on the Alleghanies, the Sierras of the Pacific coast, and the Rocky Mountains, and in the region of the Red River of the North. ”The Annual Record of Science and Industry” for 1876, page 84, says:

”For weeks before and after the great fire in Chicago in 1872, great areas of forest and prairie-land, both in the United States and the British Provinces, were on fire.” The flames that consumed a great part of Chicago were of an unusual character and produced extraordinary effects. They absolutely melted the hardest building-stone, which had previously been considered fire-proof. Iron, glass, granite, were fused and run together into grotesque conglomerates, as if they had been put through a blast-furnace. No kind of material could stand its breath for a moment.

I quote again from Sheahan & Upton’s Work:

”The huge stone and brick structures melted before the fierceness of the flames as a snow-flake melts and disappears in water, and almost as quickly. Six-story buildings would take fire and disappear for ever from sight in five minutes by the watch . . . . The fire also doubled on its track at the great Union Depot and burned half a mile southward in the very teeth of the gale –a gale which blew a perfect tornado, and in which no vessel could have lived on the lake.

. . . Strange, fantastic fires of blue, red, and green played along the cornices of buildings .

Hon. William B. Ogden wrote at the time:

”The fire was accompanied by the fiercest tornado of wind ever known to blow here.” ”The most striking peculiarity of the fire was its intense heat. Nothing exposed to it escaped. Amid the hundreds of acres left bare there is not to be found a piece of wood of any description, and, unlike most fires, it left nothing half burned . . . . The fire swept the streets of all the ordinary dust and rubbish, consuming it instantly.”

The Athens marble burned like coal!

”The intensity of the heat may be judged, and the thorough combustion of everything wooden may be understood, when we state that in the yard of one of the large agricultural-implement factories was stacked some hundreds of tons of pig-iron. This iron was two hundred feet from any building. To the south of it was the river, one hundred and fifty feet wide. No large building but the factory was in the immediate vicinity of the fire. Yet, so great was the heat, that this pile of iron melted and run, and is now in one large and nearly solid mass .

The amount of property destroyed was estimated by Mayor Medill at one hundred and fifty million dollars; and the number of people rendered houseless, at one hundred and twenty-five thousand. Several hundred lives were lost. All this brings before our eyes vividly the condition of things when the comet struck the earth; when conflagrations spread over wide areas; when human beings were consumed by the million; when their works were obliterated, and the remnants of the multitude fled before the rushing flames, filled with unutterable consternation;

Who shall say how often the characteristics of our atmosphere have been affected by accessions from extraterrestrial sources, resulting in conflagrations or pestilences, in failures of crops, and in famines? Who shall say how far great revolutions and wars and other perturbations of humanity have been due to similar modifications?

There is a world of philosophy in that curious story, ”Dr. Ox’s Hobby,” wherein we are told how he changed the mental traits of a village of Hollanders by increasing the amount of oxygen in the air
they breathed.

Of course the descriptions of these fires are known, yet in the context of some of the extreme effects and Comet Biela’s changes, one indeed wonders if heavy gases went skipping along into these states and ignited – perhaps at the time also in other isolated parts of the world similar things went un reported?

 

[treesparrow]

A free on line text of Ignatius Donnelly’s book Ragnarok is available here -http://www.sacred-texts.com/atl/rag/index.htm

I've also just finished this book, it was written at roughly the same time that Darwin's theory of Evolution and the uniformitarian and gradualist school of geology were in ascendancy and (biblical) catastrophism was going out of fashion. It's amazing how things have changed very little as regards the academic responses to the myths and legands of past catastrophic events induced by - to use a simplifying term - space rocks. This is the extract that caught my attention -

THE NATURE OF MYTHS.

IN a primitive people the mind of one generation precisely repeats the minds of all former generations; the construction of the intellectual nature varies no more, from age to age, than the form of the body or the color of the skin; the generations feel the same emotions, and think the same thoughts, and use the same expressions. And this is to be expected, for the brain is as much a part of the inheritable, material organization as the color of the eyes or the shape of the nose.

The minds of men move automatically: no man thinks because he intends to think; he thinks, as he hungers and thirsts, under a great primal necessity; his thoughts come out from the inner depths of his being as the flower is developed by forces rising through the roots of the plant.

The female bird says to herself, "The time is propitious, and now, of my own free will, and under the operation of my individual judgment, I will lay a nestful of eggs and batch a brood of children." But it is unconscious that it is moved by a physical necessity, which has constrained all its ancestors from the beginning of time,

and which will constrain all its posterity to the end of time; that its will is nothing more than an expression of age, development, sunlight, food, and "the skyey influences." If it were otherwise it would be in the power of a generation to arrest the life of a race.

All great thoughts are inspirations of God. They are part of the mechanism by which he advances the race; they are new varieties created out of old genera.

There come bursts of creative force in history, when great thoughts are born, and then again Brahma, as the Hindoos say, goes to sleep for ages.

But, when the fever of creation comes, the poet, the inventor, or the philosopher can no more arrest the development of his own thoughts than the female bird, by her will-power, can stop the growth of the ova within her, or arrest the fever in the blood which forces her to incubation.

The man who wrote the Shakespeare plays recognized this involuntary operation of even his own transcendent intellect, when he said:

"Our poesy is a gum which oozes
From whence 'tis nourished."

It came as the Arabian tree distilled its "medicinal gum"; it was the mere expression of an internal force, as much beyond his control as the production of the gum was beyond the control of the tree.

But in primitive races mind repeats mind for thousands of years. If a tale is told at a million hearth-fires, the probabilities are small, indeed, that any innovation at one hearth-fire, however ingenious, will work its way into and modify the narration at all the rest. There is no printing-press to make the thoughts of one man the thoughts of thousands. While the innovator is modifying

the tale, to his own satisfaction, to his immediate circle of hearers, the narrative is being repeated in its unchanged form at all the rest. The doctrine of chances is against innovation. The majority rules.

When, however, a marvelous tale is told to the new generation--to the little ones sitting around with open eyes and gaping mouths--they naturally ask, "Where did all this occur?" The narrator must satisfy this curiosity, and so he replies, "On yonder mountain-top," or "In yonder cave."

The story has come down without its geography, and a new geography is given it.

Again, an ancient word or name may have a signification in the language in which the story is told different from that which it possessed in the original dialect, and, in the effort to make the old fact and the new language harmonize, the story-teller is forced, gradually, to modify the narrative; and, as this lingual difficulty occurs at every fireside, at every telling, an ingenious explanation comes at last to be generally accepted, and the ancient myth remains dressed in a new suit of linguistic clothes.

But, as a rule, simple races repeat; they do not invent.

One hundred years ago the highest faith was placed in written history, while the utmost contempt was felt for all legends. Whatever had been written down was regarded as certainly true; whatever had not been written down was necessarily false.

We are reminded of that intellectual old brute, Dr. Samuel Johnson, trampling poor Macpherson under foot, like an enraged elephant, for daring to say that he had collected from the mountaineers of wild Scotland the poems of Ossian, and that they had been transmitted, from mouth to mouth, through ages. But the great epic of the son of Fingal will survive, part of the widening

heritage of humanity, while Johnson is remembered only as a coarse-souled, ill-mannered incident in the development of the great English people.

But as time rolled on it was seen that the greater part of history was simply recorded legends, while all the rest represented the passions of factions, the hates of sects, or the servility and venality of historians. Men perceived that the common belief of antiquity, as expressed in universal tradition, was much more likely to be true than the written opinions of a few prejudiced individuals.

And then grave and able men,--philosophers, scientists,--were seen with note-books and pencils, going out into Hindoo villages, into German cottages, into Highland huts, into Indian tepees, in short, into all lands, taking down with the utmost care, accuracy, and respect, the fairy-stories, myths, and legends of the people;--as repeated by old peasant-women, "the knitters in the sun," or by "gray-haired warriors, famousèd for fights."

And, when they came to put these narratives in due form, and, as it were, in parallel columns, it became apparent that they threw great floods of light upon the history of the world, and especially upon the question of the unity of the race. They proved that all the nations were repeating the same stories, in some cases in almost identical words, just as their ancestors had heard them, in some most ancient land, in "the dark background and abysm of time," when the progenitors of the German, Gaul, Gael, Greek, Roman, Hindoo, Persian, Egyptian, Arabian, and the red-people of America, dwelt together under the same roof-tree and used the same language.

But, above all, these legends prove the absolute fidelity of the memory of the races.

We are told that the bridge-piles driven by the Romans, two thousand years ago, in the rivers of Europe,

from which the surrounding waters have excluded the decaying atmosphere, have remained altogether unchanged in their condition. If this has been the case for two thousand years, why would they not remain unchanged for ten thousand, for a hundred thousand years? If the ice in which that Siberian mammoth was incased had preserved it intact for a hundred years, or a thousand years, why might it not have preserved it for ten thousand, for a hundred thousand years?

Place a universal legend in the minds of a race, let them repeat it from generation to generation, and time ceases to be an element in the problem.

Legend has one great foe to its perpetuation--civilization.

Civilization brings with it a contempt for everything which it can not understand; skepticism becomes the synonym for intelligence; men no longer repeat; they doubt; they dissect; they sneer; they reject; they invent. If the myth survives this treatment, the poets take it up and make it their stock in trade: they decorate it in a masquerade of frippery and finery, feathers and furbelows, like a clown dressed for a fancy ball; and the poor barbarian legend survives at last, if it survives at all, like the Conflagration in Ovid or King Arthur in Tennyson--a hippopotamus smothered in flowers, jewels, and laces.

Hence we find the legends of the primitive American Indians adhering quite closely to the events of the past, while the myths that survive at all among the civilized nations of Europe are found in garbled forms, and. only among the peasantry of remote districts.

In the future more and more attention will be given to the myths of primitive races; they will be accounted as more reliable, and as reaching farther back in time than many things which we call history. Thoughtful men will

analyze them, despising nothing; like a chemist who resolves some compound object into its original elements--the very combination constituting a history of the object.

H. H. Bancroft describes myths as--

"A mass of fragmentary truth and fiction, not open to rationalistic criticism; a partition wall of allegories, built of dead facts cemented with wild fancies; it looms ever between the immeasurable and the measurable past."

But he adds:

"Never was there a time in the history of philosophy when the character, customs, and beliefs of aboriginal man, and everything appertaining to him, were held in such high esteem by scholars as at present."

"It is now a recognized principle of philosophy that no religious belief, however crude, nor any historical tradition, however absurd, can be held by the majority of a people for any considerable time as true, without having had in the beginning some foundation in fact."[1]

An universal myth points to two conclusions:

First, that it is based on some fact.

Secondly, that it dates back, in all probability, to the time when the ancestors of the races possessing it had not yet separated.

A myth should be analyzed carefully; the fungi that have attached themselves to it should be brushed off; the core of fact should be separated from the decorations and errors of tradition.

But above all, it must be remembered that we can not depend upon either the geography or the chronology of a myth. As I have shown, there is a universal tendency to give the old story a new habitat, and hence we have Ararats and Olympuses all over the world. In the same

[1. "The Native Races of America," vol. iii, p. 14.]

way the myth is always brought down and attached to more recent events:

"All over Europe-in Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland, England, Scotland, Ireland--the exploits of the oldest mythological heroes, figuring in the Sagas, Eddas, and Nibelungen Lied, have been ascribed, in the folk-lore and ballads of the people, to Barbarossa, Charlemagne, Boabdil, Charles V, William Tell, Arthur, Robin Hood, Wallace, and St. Patrick."[1]

In the next place, we must remember how impossible it is for the mind to invent an entirely new fact.

What dramatist or novelist has ever yet made a plot which did not consist of events that had already transpired somewhere on earth? He might intensify events, concentrate and combine them, or amplify them; but that is all. Men in all ages have suffered from jealousy,--like Othello; have committed murders,--like Macbeth; have yielded to the sway of morbid minds,--like Hamlet; have stolen, lied, and debauched,--like Falstaff;--there are Oliver Twists, Bill Sykeses, and Nancies; Micawbers, Pickwicks, and Pecksniffs in every great city.

There is nothing in the mind of man that has not preexisted in nature. Can we imagine a person, who never saw or heard of an elephant, drawing a picture of such a two-tailed creature? It was thought at one time that man had made the flying-dragon out of his own imagination; but we now know that the image of the pterodactyl had simply descended from generation to generation. Sindbad's great bird, the roc, was considered a flight of the Oriental fancy, until science revealed the bones of the dinornis. All the winged beasts breathing fire are simply a recollection of the comet.

In fact, even with the patterns of nature before it, the

[1. Bancroft, "Native Races," note, vol. iii, p. 17.]

human mind has not greatly exaggerated them: it has never drawn a bird larger than the dinornis or a beast greater than the mammoth.

It is utterly impossible that the races of the whole world, of all the continents and islands, could have preserved traditions from the most remote ages, of a comet having struck the earth, of the great heat, the conflagration, the cave-life, the age of darkness, and the return of the sun, and yet these things have had no basis of fact. It was not possible for the primitive mind to have imagined these things if they had never occurred.

Another extract, a graphic account of the harrowing conditions that the Aztecs lived under during one of these celetial close encounters, given in a prayer -

"O mighty Lord, under whose wing we find defense and shelter, thou art invisible and impalpable, even as night and the air. How can I, that am so mean and worthless, dare to appear before thy majesty? Stuttering

[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 232.]

and with rude lips I speak, ungainly is the manner of my speech as one leaping among furrows, as one advancing unevenly; for all this I fear to raise thine anger, and to provoke instead of appeasing thee; nevertheless, thou wilt do unto me as may please thee. O Lord, thou hast held it good to forsake us in these days, according to the counsel that thou hast as well in heaven as in hades,--alas for us, in that thine anger and indignation has descended upon us in these days; alas in that the many and grievous afflictions of thy wrath have overgone, and swallowed us up, coming down even as stones, spears, and arrows upon the wretches that inhabit the earth!--this is the sore pestilence with which we are afflicted and almost destroyed. O valiant and all-powerful Lord, the common people are almost made an end of and destroyed; a great destruction the ruin and pestilence already make in this nation; and, what is most pitiful of all, the little children, that are innocent and understand nothing, only to play with pebbles and to heap up little mounds of earth, they too die, broken and dashed to pieces as against stones and a wall--a thing very pitiful and grievous to be seen, for there remain of them not even those in the cradles, nor those that could not walk or speak. Ah, Lord, how all things become confounded! of young and old and of men and women there remains neither branch nor root; thy nation, and thy people, and thy wealth, are leveled down and destroyed.

"O our Lord, protector of all, most valiant and most kind, what is this?

"Thine anger and thine indignation, does it glory or delight in hurling the stone, and arrow, and spear? The FIRE of the pestilence, made exceeding hot, is upon thy nation, as a fire in a hut, burning and smoking, leaving nothing upright or sound. The grinders of thy teeth," (the falling stones), "are employed, and thy bitter whips upon the miserable of thy people, who have become lean, and of little substance, even as a hollow green cane.

Yea, what doest thou now, O Lord, most strong, compassionate, invisible, and impalpable, whose will all things obey, upon whose disposal depends the rule of the world, to whom all are subject,--what in thy divine breast

hast thou decreed? Peradventure, hast thou altogether forsaken thy nation and thy people? Hast thou verily determined that it utterly perish, and that there be no more memory of it in the world, that the peopled place become a wooded hill, and A WILDERNESS OF STONES? Peradventure, wilt thou permit that the temples, and the places of prayer, and the altars, built for thy service, be razed and destroyed, and no memory of them left?

"Is it, indeed, possible that thy wrath and punishment and vexed indignation are altogether implacable, and will go on to the end to our destruction? Is it already fixed in thy divine counsel that there is to be no mercy nor pity for us, until the arrows of thy fury are spent to our utter perdition and destruction? Is it possible that this lash and chastisement is not given for our correction and amendment, but only for our total destruction and obliteration; that THE SUN SHALL NEVER MORE SHINE UPON US, but that we must remain in PERPETUAL DARKNESS and silence; that never more wilt thou look upon us with eyes of mercy, neither little nor much?

"Wilt thou after this fashion destroy the wretched sick that can not find rest, nor turn from side to side, whose mouth and teeth are filled with earth and scurf? It is a sore thing to tell how we are all in darkness, having none understanding nor sense to watch for or aid one another. We are all as drunken, and without understanding: without hope of any aid, already the little children perish of hunger, for there is none to give them food, nor drink, nor consolation, nor caress; none to give the breast to them that suck, for their fathers and mothers have died and left them orphans, suffering for the sins of their fathers."

 

[bngenoh]

That was a good refresher, thanks for posting voyageur & treesparrow,

But i don't think that the theorized twin sun would come into the inner solar system, because we wouldn't be here. It makes much more sense at least to me, that there exists a comet cluster that periodically intrudes into the inner solar system causing devastation, then it leaves the earth and its children with the memory of devastation. The 3 brained beings that experienced such destruction, pass on their memory of the events in order to forewarn their descendants, their memories, with varying degrees of distortion, then become the myths and legends of old. The memories are written in our flesh and blood, all we have to do is find and process them, osit.

 

[Voyageur]

That was a good refresher, thanks for posting voyageur & treesparrow,

But i don't think that the theorized twin sun would come into the inner solar system, because we wouldn't be here. It makes much more sense at least to me, that there exists a comet cluster that periodically intrudes into the inner solar system causing devastation, then it leaves the earth and its children with the memory of devastation. The 3 brained beings that experienced such destruction, pass on their memory of the events in order to forewarn their descendants, their memories, with varying degrees of distortion, then become the myths and legends of old. The memories are written in our flesh and blood, all we have to do is find and process them, osit.

Yes agreed, not our inner system, but influential nonetheless. With all the tails of chariots taken for a ride, lassoing suns, whatever came to influence our sphere directly back when, be it Mars, Venus or other wandering body hypotheses - when we today watch the cycling day in and day out of our moon, sun, planets, all in their place, even with the odd comet whisking by, what a lulling condition. When those of ancient times witnessed disorder, heavenly chaos, perhaps an astronomical body so close above passing by, it is not hard to fathom using the words we deem as mythology to describe what they encountered.

 

[Voyageur]

After reading this book, others and the following book by Laura, which if not done so prior is a must read into linking past and present happenings:

New Book by Laura: The Apocalypse: Comets, Asteroids and Cyclical Catastrophes

See this thread: http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,28623.0/topicseen.html

Reading this, got me noodling for a few more comments on some of the points brought up. Rather than interrupt that thread, just placing them here as further reference.

On the matters of the Fire of 1871 a couple of things further came up. In reading many web pages, it is interesting that the primary causation, although the theory of comets is described still holds to the fanciful causes stated in various forms. After reading books discussed, it seems beyond belief that the big red dots are not seen for what they are, however, guess like our reality, can’t have people thinking about those things.

During the fire of 1871, there is a description of the fire itself, which got me thinking about the chemical and mineral properties. The sheets (bubbles also) of fire were described as being Red, Green & Blue. To get this, here is a bit of a short list:

[ ]represents - added & bold are mine or separately sourced

Flame colorants
_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_fire

Red Strontium chloride [strontium salts, lithium salts, lithium carbonate, Li2CO3 = red - strontium carbonate, SrCO3 = bright red]

Green Copper(II) sulfate, Boric Acid [barium compounds + chlorine producer, barium chloride, BaCl+ = bright green]

Blue Copper(I) chloride, [arsenic & lead, too] Butane[b/ [type of natural gas] [copper compounds + chlorine producer, copper acetoarsenite (Paris Green), Cu3As2O3Cu(C2H3O2)2 = blue - copper (I) chloride, CuCl = turquoise blue]

To get a powder to burn satisfactorily, both a fuel and oxidizer will probably be needed. Common oxidizers include
• Ammonium perchlorate
• Ammonium nitrate
• Barium nitrate
• Barium chlorate
• Guanine nitrate
• Potassium nitrate (saltpeter)
• Potassium chlorate
• Potassium perchlorate
• Strontium nitrate
• Sodium nitrate

In Meteors:

Sodium particles can produce orange/yellow light, iron will produce yellow, magnesium creates bluish/green[copper], calcium makes violet and silicate meteors produce fiery red colors.

Note: Nickel is greenish.

After said fires, noticed that Urban, Illinois and Windsor Ontario also burned and like O’Leary’s cow, who knows the real cause.

Next thing noticed were references to Small Pox picking up that year and continuing and the development of FMD (foot & moth disease) and in 1872 a reference to the terrible equine influenza.

_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1872

• First case reports in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, of the Great Epizootic of 1872 (equine influenza, or the "horse flu") which will substantially disrupt life in North America by mid-December.

* Alexander Graham Bell wrote his own eye witness account of the fire [Boston fire of 1872] in a letter to the newspaper The Boston Globe. Unimpressed by Bell's prose, the paper did not publish his letter.

Although this was a year apart (18720, thought to see if there were any clues. The “Globe” letter does not seem to be easily found and checked a few personal letters between he and his wife Melville.

October 14th – Library of Congress - Letter from AGB to Alexander Melville Bell _http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/P?magbell:6:./temp/~ammem_332Z::

Also here he is talking about the sick horses and pox – he says “Whole families of trade are at a temporary standstill. “{something} it is an Ill wind that blows nobody any good”.

_http://memory.loc.gov/mss/magbell/004/00400330/0002.jpg

Seems to me that during those years (1871 & 1872) disease developed and spread:

An avian outbreak associated with panzootic equine influenza in 1872: an early example of highly pathogenic avian influenza? Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses 4(6), 373–377.

Further from M&T:

_http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-2659.2010.00181.x/full

Background  An explosive fatal epizootic in poultry, prairie chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese, occurred over much of the populated United States between 15 November and 15 December 1872. To our knowledge the scientific literature contains no mention of the nationwide 1872 poultry outbreak.
An avian outbreak associated with panzootic equine influenza in 1872: an early example of highly pathogenic avian influenza?

1. David M. Morens,
2. Jeffery K. Taubenberger

Abstract:
Objective  To understand avian influenza in a historical context.

Results  The epizootic progressed in temporal-geographic association with a well-reported panzootic of equine influenza that had begun in Canada during the last few days of September 1872 [given dust loading in the stratosphere and the time it takes to filter down?].The 1872 avian epizootic was universally attributed at the time to equine influenza, a disease then of unknown etiology but widely believed to be caused by the same transmissible respiratory agent that caused human influenza.

Conclusions  Another microbial agent could have caused the avian outbreak; however, its strong temporal and geographic association with the equine panzootic, and its clinical and epidemiologic features, are most consistent with highly pathogenic avian influenza. The avian epizootic could thus have been an early instance of highly pathogenic avian influenza.

Perhaps associated with the 1871 event?

Have added this as an aside not realizing how far back this went including the ties with the dates of 1871 +/-:

Why do scientists chalk the eradication of smallpox up to the vaccine..?
_ http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120105130202AANWhXz

when in most major epidemics the majority of the country were vaccinated. For example Germany 1870-1 871, over 1,000,000 people had smallpox of which 120,000 died. 96% of the country were vaccinated.



In England, compulsory vaccination against smallpox was first introduced in 1852. From 1857 - 1859, a smallpox epidemic killed 14,244 people". In 1863 to 1865, a second epidemic claimed 20,059 lives. In 1867, a compulsory vaccination law was passed and those who evaded vaccination were prosecuted. After this the Chief Medical Officer of England announced in May 1871 that 97.5% had been vaccinated.


In the following year, 1872, England experienced its worst ever smallpox epidemic which claimed 44,840 lives. Between 1871-1880, during the period of compulsory vaccination, the death rate from smallpox leapt from 28 to 46 per 100,000 population.


How was the vaccine effective?

I was just curious, despite the glaring deaths from inoculations, the connection to 1871 and the extremes of small pox the following year. Although this was England, the US, as was indicated above, had small pox accelerating at those dates, too.



Here is a map of the event Fire of 1871._http://1heckofaguy.com/2007/08/16/october-8-1871-the-great-michigan-firesoctober-24-1871-the-birth-of-allan-truax/


The direction seems to initiate from NNE to SSE.


There are some additions from Thunderbolt’s David Talbott, Wallace Thornhill.

_http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060209chicagofire.htm

Some additional detail and comments of interest appear in Mel Waskin’s more recent book, Mrs. O’Leary’s Comet (1985). Speaking of the Peshtigo outburst, he writes—

"Accompanying the firestorm and the wind was a rain of red hot sand. It was not clear to those eyewitnesses who survived their ordeal where this sand came from. It must have been raised from the earth by the incredible winds, but from where? There was sand on the beaches, but the beaches lay to the east, and the wind was blowing from the west and the south. There was no sand on the floor of the forest nor on the farmlands of Wisconsin".

Waskin also mentions incredible "balloons of fire" reported by many people, including one family that lived between Peshtigo and Green Bay. "The onslaught was so sudden that the family could only run to the center of an immense clearing on their farm where nothing combustible stood. They hoped to be safe, several hundreds yards from structures or trees.

"When the fire came, rushing on all sides of them, it did not in fact touch them. But eyewitnesses saw them die. A great balloon of fire dropped on them – father, mother, and four children. They were incinerated in an instant. Almost nothing was left of them".

"Many survivors described these great balls of fire falling from the sky. The whole sky was filled with them; round smoky masses about the size of a large balloon, traveling at unbelievable speed. They fell to the ground and burst". Waskin says that a brilliant blaze of fire erupted from the balloons as they landed, instantly consuming everything they touched.

Also noteworthy were the reports that the flames erupted from the basements of the stores when there was "no sign of fire in any other part of the building". And the basement fires burned with a strange light, "as if whisky or alcohol were burning".

As something of a footnote to this article, we note a contemporary report claiming that “The first (and most startling) piece of evidence is the recent discovery of a 26.5-kilogram carbonaceous chondrite meteorite on the shores of Lake Huron – ‘ground zero’ of the astral bombardment. This report, by Ken Riell, whose claims follow the work of Donnelly and Waskin, suggests the meteor is of the same composition as the incoming object in the Tunguska event in Siberia -- 1908.
[…]
Rain of fire and sand

An electrically charged fragment of a comet nucleus will undergo explosive electrical fragmentation before reaching the Earth's atmosphere. The electrical model of comets envisions these bodies being formed by the same processes that created asteroids. Most, if not all, are as rocky as asteroids. The result of their fragmentation will be a meteoric shower of granulated silicates, or sand [Reds], mixed with flammable gases [Blues] and electric discharge phenomena – a 'biblical' rain of fire and sand.

Descending "balloons" of fire.

It is well established that comets discharge carbon compounds that would be flammable in the Earth's oxygen atmosphere. Gaseous balls of fire would combine with various weird manifestations of megalightning, reaching through the meteoric shower of dust to the ionosphere, almost 100 kilometres above the Earth. The spectacle would be beyond normal experience. In addition, near the Earth, ball lightning could be expected, given the extreme electrical conditions—and the presence of ball lightning is surely the plausible explanation for descending “balloons” with the power to incinerate objects they strike.

Buildings exploding with fire when no fire was yet present

Electrical discharges would take place between metal objects inside buildings, igniting any flammable materials. The same would hold true for the hapless man found with melted coins in his pocket but clothes [this was discussed by Donnelly in his book] intact and no other signs of burning. There is, in fact, no other natural explanation for this enigma.

Colorful flames running along cornices of buildings

This is the usual description of a glow discharge from sharp edges of rooftops, seen in the midst of powerful electrical storms. It is called "St. Elmo's fire". The different colors of the flames are due to the metallic ions sputtered from the surface material.

Fusing of fire-proof building material

Plasma discharges can be used to melt anything. Industrially, plasma torches are used to destroy the most refractory materials.

Basements exploding

"…the basement fires burned with a strange light, "as if whisky or alcohol were burning". Whisky or alcohol burns with a ghostly blue light. Similarly, electrical glow discharges from grounded metallic objects or electrical wiring in the basements of buildings would emit a flickering, eerie blue light. Any trapped flammable gases formed in the basements would be ignited by the discharge, resulting in explosions.

Note about basements here. The blue can also represent natural gases.: A working hypothesis, although no related to comets; or maybe, describes the recent sawmill explosions (northern BC) by the causation of ignited wood dust from some unknown source. This may be so or it may be from released methane gases as the primary source, with the wood dust as a secondary accelerant. Fracking might be involved or natural releases. As these events were in the winter, frozen ground may have directed gas to the basements of these buildings, where in at least one, it was determined to be the epicenter – After one of the mills reopened, it was briefly shut down because of the smell of Methane. Testing did not find source as it was likely then dispersed.

Thunderbolts Cont...

Our purpose here is not to suggest a definitive answer to the “Great Conflagration”. But the cost of ignoring evidence should be obvious. The moment one entertains the electrical vantage point, if only to compare the explanatory power of alternative views, the most incongruous elements of the story become predictable features. And who could deny that this ability to resolve paradoxes is the mark of a hypothesis that deserves consideration?

Noted in the book was a comment about Jesuit’s – can’t seem to find it, so hope i’ve got that right? If and as such, don’t recall this fellow during the Thirty Year War in discussion about the comet(s) of 1618, observed by Johannes Kepler and such. Not sure if anyone has read this book (i've not) from the Jesuit scientist named Johann Baptist Cysat (Swiss Jesuit mathematician and astronomer), who, apparently met and exchanged papers with Kepler on comets – he published:

‘Mathemata astronomica de loco, motu, magnitudine et causis cometae qui sub finem anni 1618 et initium anni 1619 in coelo fulsit. Ingolstadt Ex Typographeo Ederiano 1619 (Ingolstadt, 1619)’

Johann Baptist Cysat-He did important research on comets and the Orion nebula.

Cysat's most important work was on comets, and he observed the comet of 1618. He published a monograph on the comet called Mathemata astronomica de loco, motu, magnitudine et causis cometae qui sub finem anni 1618 et initium anni 1619 in coelo fulsit. Ingolstadt Ex Typographeo Ederiano 1619 (Ingolstadt, 1619).

According to Cysat’s opinion, comets circled around the sun, and he demonstrated at the same time that the orbit of the comet was parabolic, not circular. Cysat’s observations on the comet are characterized by their great detail.

Cysat saw enough detail to be the first to describe cometary nuclei, and was able to track the progression of the nucleus from a solid shape to one filled with starry particles. Cysat’s drawings of cometary nuclei were included on the maps of others. His observations of the comet were so detailed that in 1804, he was still considered one of its excellent observers. This work also includes Cysat’s observations on the Orion Nebula (he is sometimes, probably erroneously, credited with its discovery), which he compared to the nature of the comet.

Cysat’s book is also remarkable due to the fact that it had been printed by a woman, Elizabeth Angermar.[1] During the seventeenth century, regulations laid down by printing guilds sometimes allowed widows and daughters to take over their husbands’ or fathers’ businesses.