How Geologically Ancient Is Man? by George Edward McCready Price

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 6, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 32.

How Geologically Ancient Is Man?

By George Edward McCready Price

That man lived side by side with many of the fossil animals is now everywhere acknowledged. But the momentous question they have been discussing for a score of years or more, is as to how far back in "geological time" he really did live; that is, whether he really lived in "Pliocene" or perhaps even "Miocene times," as many claim. These are their two divisions of the "Tertiary age" or "epoch," which immediately preceded the "Glacial period." As Dawson naively puts it in his "Meeting-place of Geology and History," it is now certain that man witnessed one great submergence or subsidence of the dry land (the "post-glacial"); while, if he actually lived in the "Pliocene period," he must have witnessed two, and if in "Miocene times," three of these submergences or floods; for, according to their science, each of these divisions ended with the continents more or less under water.

With each of these eras, or ages, carrying us back tens or hundreds of thousands of years into the "dark backward and abysm of time," it is not surprising that to people of plain common sense this whole science of geology seems sadly out of joint with this age of hard scientific facts. It seems to savor too much of the astronomy and chemistry of the Middle Ages, when the sun and all the stars revolved each day about the earth, and the chemists kept hunting for that magic substance which would transmute everything into gold. One such "submergence," or flood, there certainly was; but this is sufficient for all the work, and ought to satisfy the geologists, without making the continents go up and down times without end.

GEO. E. MCCREADY PRICE. Tracadie, N. B. (To be continued.)