PART I

PREFACE

This book is not written especially for geologists or other scientists as such, though it deals with the question which it discusses from a purely scientific standpoint, and presupposes a good general knowledge of the rocks and of current theories. It is addressed rather to that large class of readers to whom geology is only an incident in larger problems, and who are not quite wholly satisfied with those explanations of the universe which are now commonly accepted on the testimony of biological science. I am free to say that my own conviction of the higher value and surer truth of other data outside of the biological sciences have always been given formative power in my own private opinions, and that in this way I have long held that there must be something wrong with the Evolution Theory, and also that there must be a surer way of gauging the value of that Theory, even from the scientific standpoint, than the long devious processes connected with Darwinism and biology. Some years ago, when compelled to investigate the subject more fully than I had hitherto done, I discovered, somewhat to my own surprise, the phenomenal weakness of the geological argument. The results of that investigation have grown into the present work.

Though mostly critical and analytic, it is not wholly so. But so far as it is constructive there is one virtue which can rightly be claimed for it. It is at least an honest effort to study the foundation facts of geology from the inductive may be standpoint, and whether or not I have succeeded in this, it is, so far as I know, the only work published in the English or any other language which does not treat the science of geology more or less as a cosmogony.

That such a statement is possible is, I think, my chief justification in giving it to the public. It would seem as if the twentieth century could afford at least one book built up from the present, instead of being postulated from the past.

GEORGE McCREADY PRICE.

257 South Hill Street, Los Angeles, California, June, 1906.

CONTENTS

PART I

I The Abstract Idea 11

II History of The Idea 14

III Fact Number One 20

IV Fact Number Two 24

V Turned Upside Down 27

VI Fact Number Four 31

VII Extinct Species 34

VIII Skipping 42

PART II

IX Graveyards 53

X Change of Climate 64

XI Degeneration 70

XII Fossil Men 74

XIII Inductive Methods 81

Appendix 89

INTRODUCTION

A brief outline of the argument which I have used in the following pages will be in order here.

Darwinism, as a part, the chief part, of the general Evolution Theory, rests logically and historically on the succession of life idea as taught by geology. If there has actually been this succession of life on the globe, then some form of genetic connection between these successive types is the intuitive conclusion of every thinking mind. But if there is no positive evidence that certain types are essentially older than others, if this succession of life is not an actual scientific fact, then Darwinism or any other form of evolution has no more scientific value than the vagaries of the old Greeks—in short, from the standpoint of true inductive science it is a most gigantic hoax, historically scarce second to the Ptolemaic astronomy.

In Part One I have examined critically this succession of life theory. It is improper to speak of my argument as destructive, for there never was any real constructive argument to be thus destroyed. It is essentially an exposure, and I am willing to give a thousand dollars to any one who will, in the face of the facts here presented, show me how to prove that one kind of fossil is older than another.

In Part Two I have attempted to build up a true, safe induction in the candid, unprejudiced spirit of a coroner called upon to hold a post mortem. The abnormal character of most of the fossiliferous deposits, the sudden world-wide change of climate they record, the marked degeneration in all organic forms in passing from the older to the modern world, together with the great outstanding fact that human beings, with thousands of other living species of animals and plants have at this great world-crisis left their fossils in the rocks all over the world, prove beyond a possible doubt that our once magnificently stocked world met with a tremendous catastrophe some thousands of years ago, before the dawn of history. As for the origin of the living beings that existed before that event, we can only suppose a direct creation, since modern science knows nothing of the spontaneous generation of life, or of certain types of life having originated before other types, and thus being able to serve as the source of origin of other alleged succeeding types.

With the myth of a life succession dissipated once and for ever, the world stands face to face with creation as the direct act of the Infinite God.