EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY by Geo. McCready Price

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Apr 12, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 15.

EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY

By Geo. McCready Price

XIX. EXTINCT SPECIES.

(Concluded.)

SURELY I have now established to the satisfaction of all my readers the point with which I set out in Articles XII. and XIII. of this series, viz., that the current

Geology Is Founded on Hypotheses

and not on facts, and that these hypotheses are no less than three in number, perfectly distinct as assumptions, and yet inseparable in their intertwining and mutual relationships:

The uniformly quiet and regular action of the elements;
The originally-molten condition of our globe;
The notion that the rocks show how life has occurred on our globe in a certain order of progress.

But if I have thus established this fact that modern evolutionary Geology is thus a purely deductive and not an inductive science, as completely deductive as a system of Geometry based on at least highly questionable postulates and axioms (I am reasoning from the scientific standpoint), surely every friend of true science will welcome any prospect of refounding it on a truly inductive basis.

A Scientific Reconstruction Needed.

That such a reconstruction is possible and indeed inevitable before long I am perfectly assured. It has been the next thing in order ever since man and some of our modern animals were proved to have been contemporary with the fossil forms of the Pleistocene and Tertiary rocks. In subsequent articles I shall endeavor to outline the principles of a truly inductive science of Geology. Here I may sketch in advance what I conceive to be the only scientific method of approaching this study.

To be in any sense inductive, or a reasoning from the known to the unknown so as to arrive at underlying principles or causes from facts observed, we must start with man himself and modern living species and work backward. I do not exactly mean that Geology must be built onto the end of Archeology, tho it may amount to something like that. But Archeology can at least teach us many things by way of introduction that were absolutely unknown in the earlier years of Geology. Adapting what Zittel said about chemistry, we may say that “the foundations of Geology had been laid without the assistance of Archeology.” For example, what was there known a century ago of the wonderful civilization of ancient Egypt? of the revelations made known by the arrow-headed inscriptions of Babylon? of the almost equally-wonderful civilizations of Yucatan, Mexico, and Peru? or of that genetic lingual tie that unites the Indo-European nations in one brotherhood?—all eloquent of a previous common state of civilization before the peoples were scattered abroad. What, moreover, was there then known of what Rawlinson calls “the consentient belief” of all the great races of mankind in the

Reality of a Great Deluge

which once happened to our race, and which must have occurred before these peoples were scattered abroad who now possess these traditions, a reality which no reputable scientist now denies since the recovery of the Chaldean Deluge tablets of at least 2,000 B.C.? These facts must all be taken into consideration in our investigation of the past, tho it may be that there is a well-defined line which separates Archeology from Geology.

What the True Method Would Avoid.

But when we cross this line we have still to deal with man and his surroundings. In any truly-inductive study of Geology the rocks of the so-called “Glacial Age” and the Tertiaries, the surface rocks, will not be as Zittel says they have been, “the last to be understood,” and only attacked after everything else had been arranged according to the doctrine of Uniformity and à priori methods of reasoning with the result that, failing to equate these two ends of our scientific investigations, we have for over half a century been laboring under a “Glacial Nightmare,” and these deposits on the very top of the ground “still remain in many respects the despair of Geology.” But there is no science in all this. Is it scientific to start with what we know the least about, and make our more accurate knowledge of things near at hand square with our theories of things more remote? The current Geology has never used a trace of induction in its fundamental principles and methods, but has always started with some hypothetically “oldest” forms, and often having located them at the vanishing point of the vistas of a past eternity, has trusted to its skill in dead reckoning to be able to work up by slow stages to the present, and to arrive here with a sufficiently small cargo of “living” species undisposed of to join on to the present smoothly and easily on the basis of uniformity and slow secular change. This is Geology by hypothesis; it is a kind of “science” by which some people have, for a century or so, tried to explain the known in terms of the less known or unknown, and have blamed the Bible because it did not agree with their results. Such are the methods “which dominated medieval scholasticism and made it so barren.”

A Wiser Course of Procedure.

We have learned a better way. Let us start with man and all the living species of plants and animals, and, working back among the strata, find where and how their fossils occur, and then decide as best we can how they were placed there, and how the intervening changes took place. Let us, for instance, focus all the powers we have on those specimens of our species generally termed “pre-Glacial” or “Tertiary” man, and with the aid of all the known facts of Zoology, paleontology, and meteorology, endeavor to reconstruct the flora and fauna of that ancient world, and the marvelously-uniform climate in which they lived—a climate under which mild temperate conditions seem to have prevailed over all the Arctic regions, and semi-tropical conditions over England, Western Europe, and North America. Bearing in mind now that no manner of reasoning or tinkering with the strata can ever prove one fossil intrinsically older than any other form, or than man himself, let us ask a few questions. Where are the great mammals which roamed over these regions at that time? Where is the vegetation on which they fed or beneath which they lived? And where are the semitropical invertebrates that lived in the tepid waters of the surrounding seas, or the hardy alpine forms that may then have lived under semi-Arctic conditions on those ancient mountain tops? Can we hope to dovetail such a world into the present on any basis of uniformity or slow secular change? Why, the thing is too absurd for consideration. The Biblical Deluge will explain it, and nothing else will.