A New Theory of the Earth the flood. He asserted that the Earth was originally a comet, which God formed from its initial "chaos and void" into a habitable planet. He also argued that the flood itself was caused when the Earth passed through the tail of a comet, which, it was known by that time, are composed largely of water. His analysis was very detailed, and similar ideas were promoted in the 1960s by other creationists postulating causes for the global flood, along with similarity to the ideas of Immanuel Velikovsky. However, many of them are in direct conflict with contemporary scientific understandings; and comets
Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening them is Dalí's first use of an elephant with long flamingo legs, found in his later compositions such as "The Temptation of St. Anthony". The elephant carries on its back an obelisk, inspired by Bernini’s "Elephant and Obelisk" in Rome's Piazza Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The bayonet, as a symbol of the stinging bee, may represent the woman's abrupt awakening from her otherwise peaceful dream. This is an example of Sigmund Freud's influence on surrealist art and Dalí's attempts to explore the world of dreams in a dreamscape. The elephant is a distorted version of the Piazza della Minerva sculpture