The bodies of
sea-calves float lifeless on their backs on
{p. 160}
the top of the water. The story, too, is that even Nereus himself and
Doris and their daughters _lay hid in the heated caverns_."
All this could scarcely have been imagined, and yet it agrees
precisely with what we can not but believe to have been the facts.
Here we have an explanation of how that vast body of vapor which
afterward constituted great snow-banks and ice-sheets and
river-torrents rose into the air. Science tells us that to make a
world-wrapping ice-sheet two miles thick, all the waters of the ocean
must have been evaporated;[1] to make one a mile thick would take one
half the waters of the globe; and here we find this Roman poet, who
is repeating the legends of his race, and who knew nothing about a
Drift age or an Ice age, telling us that the water _boiled_ in the
streams; that the bottom of the Mediterranean lay exposed, a bed of
dry sand; that the fish floated dead on the surface, or fled away to
the great depths of the ocean; and that even the sea-gods "hid in the
heated caverns.
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