EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY by Geo. McCready Price

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Nov 1, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 44.

EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY

By Geo. McCready Price

HISTORICAL SKETCH.

(Continued.)

Smith, Cuvier, and Hutton.

On another page, where Zittel speaks of Werner's habits of exact observation, he complains that he failed to recognize the value of fossils as revealing the age of rocks.

Great tho the advantages of Werner's method were, it was not without its weaknesses. The chronological succession of the individual members of a formation was not determined with sufficient precision, the fossils were scarcely used in determining the age of a rock stratum, and the history of organic creation was not even recognized as a subject of investigation in geognosy.

In this respect the great pioneer was the English engineer, William Smith. He was the first to make known on incontestable evidence that the stratified rocks of England could be most securely identified and arranged in chronological order according to their organic contents. Smith's method of determining the age of rock-strata from the organic remains found in them provided an inestimable complement to Werner's system, since the latter rested in the main upon mineralogical distinctions. William Smith has received the merited appellation of

"Father of Historical Geology."

Two French scientists, Alexandre Brongniart and Cuvier, attained similar results [not from the same part of the great "phylogenic series," but an entirely different one], independently of William Smith, from their examination of the fossils in the rocks of the Paris basin.—"History," pages 47, 48.

William Smith (1769-1839) was, as the quotation given above indicates, a civil engineer, or land surveyor, who conceived the idea of determining the relative ages of strata by their fossils. Just how far he carried this idea it is impossible for me to determine. Lyell says nothing along this line about him, save that he followed the leading divisions of the secondary strata as outlined by Werner, tho he claims "independently" of the latter. ("Principles," page 50, 8th Ed.) As for Zittel, he remarks that "Smith confined himself to the empirical investigation of his country, and was never tempted into general speculations about the history of the formation of the earth,"—words which to my mind are the very highest praise, and which seem to indicate that he was only in a very limited way responsible for the unscientific and illogical scheme of a "phylogenic series" or complete "life-history of the earth" which now masquerades as the science of geology. Doubtless like his little bright-eyed German contemporary, A. G. Werner, he had enough of the logical faculty to see the absurdity of first assuming your premises and then proving them by means of your conclusion, i. e., first assuming that there has been a gradual development on the earth from the lowest to the highest, and then arranging the fossils from widely-separated localities over the earth in such a way that they can not fail to testify to the fact.

His observations began about 1791, and continued for twenty-five years in all parts of England:

He entered his observations in colored geological maps, and compiled them from time to time in the form of tables or as explanatory notes to his maps. He also carried out a scheme of arranging a collection of fossils according to the succession of strata; his own collection was acquired by the British Museum, and is still exhibited there. After his long period of field observations, William Smith came to the conclusion that one and the same succession of strata stretched through England from the south coast to the east, and that each individual horizon could be recognized by its particular fossils, that certain forms reappear in the same beds in the different localities, and that each fossil species belongs to a definite horizon of rock.—"History Geology," page 110.

It is not my purpose to question this generalization of Smith's; but, granting its perfect accuracy, I fail to see how it is one whit ahead of Werner's scheme which we have seen that Zittel characterizes as "weak" and narrow.

Quoting again this author's criticism of Werner's work, we can say that Smith's observations also were "limited to a small district," and "his chronological scheme of formations was founded upon the mode of occurrence of the rocks [fossils] within these narrow confines." There is, as we have shown, a monstrous jump from this to the conclusion that even these particular fossils must always occur in this manner over the whole earth. How can any one deny that if we had a complete collection of all the fossils laid down during the last thousand years—when all admit that the so-called "phylogenic series" is complete—we could still arrange them in this same order from the lowest to the highest forms of life, and might even happen to find "small districts" where the "mode of occurrence of the rocks within these narrow confines" would have all the appearance of showing a true "phylogenic" order. This of itself ought to be sufficient to show any one the purely hypothetical and imaginary value of the fossils in determining the age of rock deposits.

Smith's famous geological map of England and Wales appeared in 1815, "and was the model of all subsequent geological maps."

But while Smith was thus working out the details of the Jurassic and Cretaceous systems in England, the rocks of the Paris Basin were being detailed in the same way on the basis of their organic contents, tho, as Zittel says, quite independent of Smith's work. This was due to the combined labors of Alex. Brongniart, Professor of Mineralogy in the Natural History Museum in Paris, and Georges Cuvier, afterwards Baron Cuvier, the famous zoologist and palaeontologist. Their joint work appeared in 1808, and a second and larger one on the same lines in 1811.

Afterwards it was demonstrated that many of the fossils of the Paris basin agreed with the fossils in the deposits near Verona [Italy] which Arduino had termed Tertiary deposits. And the series was then incorporated in the chronological succession of the rocks as the Tertiary formations.—"History," page 105.

Soon after their publication, Smith's researches were productive of results which he could never have anticipated. It was found that the strata described by him from the Lias to the Purbeck horizons filled the great gap between the Muschelkalk and the Cretaceous formations in Werner's system. European geology was thus enriched by the accurate knowledge of an important series of fossiliferous geological horizons, and the equivalents of the English Lias, Cornbrash, Portland, and Purbeck series were sought for and discovered in various parts of Europe.—Id., page 112.

The details of these were all well worked out, and then there only remained a small part, the beginning or little end, of their great succession of life, to make the whole thing practically complete as we have it to-day—with a single exception shortly to be mentioned.

The part of the geological record which still remained very obscure was the so-called "Transitional" series below the Carboniferous rocks, embracing the thick graywacke formation with interbedded shales, slates, conglomerates, and limestones. . . . No complete sub-division of the immense complex of strata between the crystalline schists and the coal measures had been attempted.—Id., page 432.

These rocks also were then straightened out in chronological order according to their fossils by Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison—giving rise in the process to the notorious "Cambro-Silurian Controversy"—and the chain of life was complete, with the exception of where it joined on to the "modern" period, the truly inductive method being thus reversed, and the most important of all, viz., the rocks containing human remains and other living species, being left for a score or more of years after the others were all tabulated off according to their pretty scheme.

But thus by piecing together "the record" from distant localities, and by ingenious dove-tailing here and there, assuming all the while—

That over all the earth the fossils must always occur in the particular order in which they were found to occur in a few corners of Western Europe; and—
That in the long ago totally different kinds of fossils from separated localities could not possibly be contemporaneous with one another as we know they are to-day in "recent" deposits;

—we have the general evolutionary outline of Buffon elaborated into the complete "phylogenic series" from the Cambrian to the Pleistocene. But one of the most astonishing things about it is that, during all these subsequent years, no one, so far as I know, has ever pointed out the horrible logic in taking this "immense complex" of guesses and assumptions as the starting point for new departures, the solid foundation for renewed "investigations" as to just how this wonderful phenomenon of development has occurred. There really seems to me little hope of reaching with any arguments a generation of scientists who can elaborate genealogical trees of descent for the different families and genera of the animal kingdom, including man himself, based wholly on such a series of childish assumptions and blind guesses, and then palm off their work on a credulous world as the latest results of science.