The earliest geological induction of primeval man is the doctrine of terrestrial catastrophe. This ancient belief has its roots in the actual experience of man, who himself has been witness of certain terrible and destructive exhibitions of sudden, unusual telluric energy. Here in America our own species has seen the vast, massive eruptions of Pliocene basalt, the destructive invasion of northern lands by the slow-marching ice of the glacial period, has struggled with the hardly conceivable floods which marked the recession of the frozen age, has felt the solid earth shudder beneath its feet and the very continent change its configuration. Yet these phenomena are no longer repeated; nothing comparable with them ever now breaks the geological calm.
When complete evidence of the antiquity of man in California and the catastrophes he has survived come to be generally understood, there will cease to be any wonder that a theory of the destructive in nature is an early, deeply rooted archaic belief, most powerful in its effect on the imagination. Catastrophe, speaking historically, is both an awful memory of mankind and a very early piece of pure scientific induction. After it came to be woven into the Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Mohammedan cosmogonies, its perpetuation was a matter of course.
From the believers in catastrophe there is, however, a totally different class of minds, whose dominant characteristic is a positive refusal to look further than the present, or to conceive conditions which their senses have never reported.