EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY by Geo. McCready Price

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Nov 15, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 46.

EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY

By Geo. McCready Price

HISTORICAL SKETCH.

Life-Succession.

THERE are few methods of investigation which can so show the beauty of a truth or the deformity of a lie as a study of its history and its results. "Ye shall know them by their fruits," said the Greatest of Teachers, long ago; and I know of no better way of studying even a scientific theory, providing of course we can get at its true history, considered from the right view-point.

My chief authority for the strictly geological part of this subject will be Karl von Zittel's "History of Geology and Paleontology to the End of the Nineteenth Century," London, 1901; and where other authorities are not directly referred to this may be understood to be the source of my information. Whewell and Lyell have given us the history of the earlier observations, and the almost countless theories which succeeded one another thick and fast till the opening of the nineteenth century; but Zittel gives the modern history as well, which is presumably the equal if not the superior of anything before written on the subject, altho on the very points of most interest to us in this connection they are all sometimes provokingly meager.

The vain speculations of the ancient Greeks, from Thales of Miletus to Plato, are not worth any serious consideration here. The Romans were somewhat more practical, and Strabo, Seneca, and the two Plinys wrote some on geological subjects with some gleams of common sense; but on the breaking up of the Roman Empire the world again relapsed into semi-barbarism, and for many centuries "a barren scholasticism" blighted the healthy development of the human mind.

When the Bible was called forth

from the tomb of the dead languages and given its rightful place as the true light of the world, in the Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, men awoke from the hypnotic sleep of ages, and began to inquire for new worlds to explore, and new realms of knowledge to study out. God's book of nature once more resumed the place in education which it had held among the peoples of remote antiquity, and—

Plants, animals, and rocks were studied with enthusiasm, were examined, described, figured, and classified, so that in a relatively short space of time a fairly extensive botanical, zoological, and mineralogical literature sprung into existence.—"History," page 13.

But another strange perversity now seized upon men's minds. For, while the Greeks and Romans had realized that the fossils were the remains of real plants and animals, the "scientists" of this period would hear of no such thing.

With the dawn of the fifteenth century began that long series of disputes about fossils which lasted more than three centuries. The questions under discussion were, whether fossil organisms had taken origin from a vis plastica, or from living seeds carried in vapors from the sea, or from any living force in the earth itself; whether they might be regarded as mere illusory sports of nature, or as mineral forms, or if they really were the remains of animals and plants that had once lived and had been brought by the Flood or some other catastrophe into their present position."—Id., pages 13, 14.

Fossils and the Flood.

The famous artist Leonardo da Vinci, George Bauer (Agricola), Bernard Palissy the inventor, with Steno, and Robert Hooke (1635-1703), of England, had the right ideas about the fossils, believing them to be remains of former living things. The latter is the first who suggested that the fossils might be made to reveal something of the past condition of the earth, and from the occurrence of Chelonias and large Ammonites at Portland Isle, he "concluded that the climate of England had once been much warmer."

Scarcely had the organic origin and historical significance of fossils been successfully vindicated, than the doctrinal influences of the day stepped in and claimed all fossil forms as vestiges from the earlier creation interred in the earth during the great Deluge. The "Diluvialists" formed a powerful party amongst the geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and were warmly supported by the church. In England, Woodward, Burnet, and Whiston, had strong convictions in this direction; while in Germany, Wedel and Baier, and in Switzerland Johann Scheuchzer, taught that all fossils had been spread through Europe during the Flood.—Id., page 20.

But the wild fancies of Burnet and Whiston deserve rather to be called travesties alike on science and the Bible. John Woodward (1665-1722) seems to have been more rational.

He strongly opposed the opinion that fossils could be mere imitative sports of nature, and said they represented past faunas and floras. But he supposed these remains to have been carried to their present position in the earth by a "universal flood, the Deluge of the Scriptures."—Id., page 29.

Nevertheless Zittel names him along with Steno, Hooke, and John Ray, as one who "guided scientific thought to the true explanation of fossil remains."—Page 19.

Unfounded Theories.

Happy would it have been for science and for the world if all students of the rocks had given the Bible credit for telling the truth and had curbed their fancies so as to conform to its record. Unfortunately during this same time there lived other writers on geology such as Moro, De Maillet, and others, men who, like Burnet and Whiston, were engaged in spinning fantastic theories of the origin and history of our world; or as Zittel puts it, "accepted the risks of error, and set about explaining the past and the present from the subjective standpoint."—Page 23. From what I have already shown of present geological teachings my readers may doubt whether modern uniformitarianism has yet outgrown these methods.

J. G. Lehmann who in 1761 was appointed Professor of Chemistry and director of the Imperial Museum at St. Petersburg by the Tsarina Catherine of Russia, is undoubtedly one of the real founders of geological science. He distinguished the "primitive" rocks from the subsequently formed stratified ones, the latter he regarded as having been laid down by the Deluge. His work in geology was principally confined to the rocks of Thuringia, since classified as Permian.

Dr. Füchsel (1722-73) studied in great detail those rocks of the same district now known as Triassic. He was the first to use the terms "stratum" and "formation." The latter term he used "to signify a succession of strata which have been formed immediately after one another under similar conditions, and represent one epoch in the history of the earth; and this is the significance which has continued to be attached to the term in geology."—Page 36.

He distinguished nine of these "formations," from the oldest to the middle Triassic. Füchsel's work first "gave to the geological formation a definite paleontological value," and, by being afterward taken as the model for the Wernerian school of geologists, had a vast influence over the science in Germany, and in fact the whole world.

Professor Arduino, in Padua, Italy, must also be mentioned here, for it was he who first subdivided the stratified rocks into "Primitive," "Secondary," and "Tertiary" groups, as representing successive ages.

Wandering from True Methods.

These three men, particularly Lehmann, were undoubtedly largely following true empirical or scientific methods. Their work was especially of value to subsequent generations in being detailed and almost exhaustive descriptions of particular localities,—descriptions that have seldom been equaled since. Tho in so far as they indulged in speculation about time and laid off the strata in groups of successive ages, as Füchsel and Arduino did, they were making these small localities, mere spots on the globe, the standard by which to judge all the rest of the earth, thus leaving safe inductive principles far behind. This monstrous assumption that because the rocks occur in a certain order in a particular locality, therefore they must occur in this order all over the globe, has ever been the stumbling-block of geological science; for it involves this palpable absurdity that different kinds of sediment could not be formed contemporaneously in localities distant from one another. Thus far however the rocks were being thus set off in "ages" solely on the grounds of their mechanical and mineralogical character. To work on the same principle with the fossils was an invention of a much later date.

(To be continued.)