Many ingenious theories have been advanced by pseudo-scientists to account for the waters of the Deluge. The Fortean Society is particularly fond of the view of Isaac Newton Vail (1840-1912), of Barnesville, Ohio. His book, The Waters Above the Firmament, 1886 (later revised), is the best source for his theory that each planet passed through a phase in which it had a ring like Saturn. In the earth’s case, this ring was the source of the flood waters. Vail’s work is currently carried on by the Annular World Association, in Azusa, California.
How Carroll would have fumed if he had lived to read a three-volume work by the American Negro writer, J. A. Rogers! It is titled Sex and Race, and was published in 1941-44. Rogers defends the highly questionable thesis, which has a literature all its own, that the original human stock was a light-skinned, Negroid type. A portion of this stock evolved into the white strains, and another portion, in Africa, became darker. All present races are descendants of these two groups, in varying degrees of intermixture. Rogers is not a racist, however, since he does not believe in genetic inferiorities, and his books are good sources for obscure references on extreme racist views.