Did you know if you eat black boiled eggs that are cooked in the sulphuric volcanic springs in the Owakudano Valley of Japan you can add seven years to your life? They exude an unpleasant odor, but what the heck. How do I know this? I just read about it an hour ago. I have also recently reread "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles MacKay. You don't have to always agree but keep on plugging away.

On a recent trip to the splendid aquarium in Charleston, I confirmed the fact that 135 million years ago Orangeburg was under 40 feet of seawater and the Atlantic sea beaches were located around the periphery of what would later be Columbia, S.C.

Shark and alligator ancient ancestors were probably swimming in the Broughton Street area where I now live. As recently as 135 (not millions) years ago, trees in my backyard were filled with twittering Carolina parakeets. I'm serious about what I learned in Charleston.

I have, (as have many of you) flown over the Yucatan Peninsula in N.E. Mexico and seen the miles-wide cup in the earth where the giant meteorite struck millions of years ago and in the ensuing twilight animal life was destroyed leaving only the cockroaches to stroll the surface of this earth of ours.

But to get really serious, let me copy a heading and article from the Wall Street Journal of Oct. 18, this year. "When Worlds Collide, What Will Emerge?" Scientists believe the Earth's continents will collide again in around 250 millions years, but there is no consensus on how the land masses will come together. One thing is clear though: Humans, who will probably be extinct by then, wouldn't want to live in the world that emerges." (End of quotation)

That's a smidgen of my background for current lively writing material about the past and present, about vast gobs of time named by the Greek word "Pangea" (all earth), encomposing hundreds of millions of years -- the Jurassic period, the middle of the Mesozoic Era between 211 million years ago and 140 million. That's 100s of millions of years we're discussing when mankind has existed only 30,000 or 40,000 years. My all-too-human mind can't wrap itself around such concepts. Bear in mind that evolution can be fully consistent with theistic religious faith.

Mankind lives on continents and continents drift. North America is drifting as I sit here -- at about the speed at which your fingernails are growing -- over almost mind-boggling time periods. Continents bunch up, huddle together, then split, then bunch back. In Pangea times, the world was not peopled. Australia, Antarctica and India were probably attached to what became Africa. South America was joined to the then-southwest coast of North America, joined to West Africa and Europe. There was a lot more carbon dioxide in the air, lots of central desert, a great alps mountain range across south Europe and no polar ice caps.

(Al Gore has told us nothing of this.) There were primitive birds, flying reptiles, undersea animals. A large land mass covered the earth. And as it receded (drifted), the Atlantic Ocean expanded. We're midway to the next period of breakup. The Atlantic Ocean will shrink, there'll be stronger hurricanes, but who'll know? The temperature will be livable, but we'll be long gone. This scenario can be fitted so as to accommodate biblical teachings.

I've got a picture of a future huddle of continents hugging each together and over the next hundreds of millions of years getting ready to drift apart and do their new thing. I've simply assembled one version of scie.jpgic surmises from academic think tanks that are actively opposing each other but in some agreement that this is how it probably was and might be. Any change of cause and effect must begin with an uncaused cause. "No matter how far science advances, an explanation of ultimate origins must always remain an unscie.jpgic question."

As Casey Stengel put it, "You could look it up."

Attorney Austin Cunningham has been the president of five business companies and in 1988 was named Outstanding Elder Citizen of the Year for South Carolina.

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