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EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Oct 18, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 42.

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EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY

By Geo. McCready Price

HISTORICAL SKETCH.

Buffon and Werner.

THE great French naturalist Buffon (1707-88) had little faith in the theories hitherto advanced about the past of our globe, and is credited by Zittel with the sarcastic remark "that geologists must feel like the ancient Roman augurs who could not meet each other without laughing." He boldly denounced the idea of a universal Deluge, and set about constructing an accurate (?) and detailed history of the past and future of our earth, basing his ideas on "all the actual observations hitherto recorded in geological science."
His work, Epoques de la Nature, appeared in 1778.
Buffon there enumerates five "facts" of first importance, and five additional "monuments" or comments. The "facts" are physical in character; they postulate the oblate-spheroidal form of the earth; compare the small amount of heat received from the sun with the large supply possessed by the body of the earth; the effect of the earth's internal heat in altering the rocks of the crust; and the presence of fossils everywhere over the earth, even on the tops of the highest mountains. The "monuments" assert that all limestones consist of the remains of marine organisms, and that in Asia, America, and the North of Europe the remains of large terrestrial animals occur at a small depth below the surface, showing that they apparently dwelt in these regions at no very remote age; whereas the deeper-lying remains of marine creatures in the same region belong to extinct species, or are related only to forms now inhabiting far distant seas.—"History," page 42.
Surely here was a wonderful array of "facts" and "monuments" from which to build up a circumstantial account of the exact formation of our globe!
Starting from these axioms, Buffon portrays in very attractive terms the beginning, the past, and the future (sic.) of our planet.—Ibid.

Speculations.

But I shall not weary my readers with the silly details of his seven "epochs" or periods in the history of the earth from the time it split off from the sun till the present or seventh "epoch" with man as lord of creation. And yet Zittel says of this flimsy tissue of wild, unscientific speculations that it "for the first time brought the historical possibilities of geology to the forefront."—"Possibilities"! yes, I should think so: the possibility of giving a quasi-scientific character to absurd speculations from the subjective standpoint."
And yet we can hardly estimate the far-reaching influence of these "dreams of a whirling brain" merely because of the fact that this brain happened to be that of the otherwise great naturalist Count De Buffon. From this time down it seems that the scientists who have dealt with geology in any manner have never had a shadow of doubt that somehow or other there has been a succession in the life upon the globe

from the low to the high,

and that it is the business of geology to straighten out the details of this wonderful fact of becoming. All subsequent theories of evolution, including that of Lamarck (1744-1829) and the more modern one of Charles Darwin, or the successive "creations" of Cuvier and the other catastrophists which are of the same stamp, seem to be only amplifications of this wonderful "induction" which Buffon extracted from his five precious "monuments" about the higher forms of life being found in the superficial deposits and lower forms in the deeper-lying strata. Even the seven "days" of Sir William Dawson and the other religious geologists, who tried to quiet the scruples of the church with their "Day-Period Theory of Creation," seem to have come bodily from Buffon's seven epochs, and it has taken a good many long years to develop the magnificent reductio ad absurdum argument against this general idea of life-succession or evolution which we now possess, and which is the very quintessence of the general results of modern science, brought about in these last days for the evident purpose of calling the attention of all men to "Him who made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters," and who has given us the Sabbath as a memorial of this event.
The period from 1790 to 1820 Zittel characterizes as "The

Heroic Age of Geology."

The characteristic features of this age, and that which gave it a rejuvenating significance in the development of geology, was the determined spirit that prevailed to discountenance speculation, and to seek untiringly in the field and in the laboratories after new observations, new truths.—Page 46.
To this age belongs Pallas, who spent six years (1768-74) in Eastern Russia and Siberia, and who was the first to call the attention of the world to the astonishing character of the remains of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and bison entombed in the arctic regions of Siberia in such countless numbers.
De Saussure (1740-99) is another of the founders of geology. He spent his life among the French-Swiss Alps, and his works are still regarded as "reliable books of reference for all Swiss geologists to the present day."

Werner's Teaching.

But far more famous than any geologist thus far is A. G. Werner (1749-1817), Professor of Mineralogy at Freiberg, who exercised an unrivaled authority amongst the followers of the strict descriptive method in natural history. By the skill and eloquence of his teaching, far more than by his books and writings, Werner inspired in his scholars and adherents a devotion toward exact methods of study.—Page 47.
From all parts of Europe students came, and, when they returned to their own countries, they spread the teachings of geognosy and mineralogy as Werner had taught it to them.—Page 57.
Werner was the great original "Neptunist," for he taught that all the rocks of the earth's crust had taken origin as mechanical or chemical precipitates from aqueous solutions, while volcanic products represented rock material originally formed in this way subsequently melted and ejected. He thought all volcanic rocks thus later than the sedimentary rocks, and that volcanoes were caused by coal deposits burning beneath the ground. On this last point he was certainly much nearer the truth than the current theories of the present day.
Following the theories of a certain Swedish scientist, named Bergman (1735-84), Werner distinguished five "suites" of rocks from the "Primitive" or crystalline—granite, gneiss, mica, schist, etc.—to the more recent or volcanic: these "suites" or series being characteristic of the successive epochs of the earth's history; and he imagined them all successively enveloping the whole earth like the coats of an onion, one outside the other.

Examination of Theories.

Let us now consider these theories. This is what Zittel says about it:
Unfortunately, Werner's field observations were limited to a small district, the Erz mountains and the neighboring parts of Saxony and Bohemia. And his chronological scheme of formations was founded upon the mode of occurrence of the rocks within these narrow confines.—"History of Geology," page 59.
And yet it is precisely such a charge as this that I have to bring against the modern doctrine of the successive ages based on the life-succession idea. Werner, from observations "limited to a small district," constructed his scheme of chronological sequence in a certain order based entirely upon the mineralogical or mechanical character of his "suites." And other geologists adopting his views long considered that the rocks everywhere conformed to this classification, even so great an observer as Von Humboldt thinking that the rocks which he examined in Central and South America fully confirmed Werner's chronological arrangement.
But geologists of to-day only smile at such notions, for it has since been abundantly demonstrated that, take the world over, the rocks do not occur in the order which Werner imagined. Besides, we have now pretty well digested the fact that while one kind of mineral or rock may be forming in one locality, a totally different kind of deposit may be in process of formation in another spot not far off at the very same time. But in a precisely similar way the idea of a time value was, as we shall presently see, transferred from the mechanical and mineralogical character of the rocks to their fossil contents; and from observations again "limited to a small district," William Smith and others conceived the idea that the fossils occurred always in a certain order; that### only certain fossils
lived at a certain time; and that, for example, while the Trilobites were living and dying in one locality, Numulites, or Mammals, positively were not living and dying in another locality. Here is where the puerile assumption comes in. When we find the very same species of fossil in two separated localities we do well to regard the two deposits as (in a geological sense) "contemporaneous." But when, to repeat an example from a previous article, we find Carboniferous fossils lying next to the Archaean in Nova Scotia, and other coals of the Cretaceous rocks also lying next to the Archaean in Vancouver, it is only bold, unscientific assumption to say that the two can not have been formed at the same period of time. In the very same manner as that of Werner, Smith's "chronological scheme of formations was founded upon the mode of occurrence of the rocks within these narrow confines."
The two cases are exactly parallel; only it has taken us nearly a hundred years, it seems, to find out that the fossils do not follow the pre-arranged order of William Smith and Cuvier any better than the rocks and minerals do the scheme of Werner. Hundreds of geologists still seem to think that the fossils in general agree with the standard order, but then we must remember how many hundreds of sharp observers said the same thing for decades about Werner's scheme. As we have already remarked, even Humboldt in his epoch-making travels through Central and South America "thought that the distribution of the rocks in these regions fully confirmed Werner's chronological succession of the groups of formations."—"History of Geology," page 121.

Nature No Guide.

But these things only illustrate that profound truth thus set forth by one of the greatest of living scientists, now curator of the scientific part of the British Museum—
Nature, it has been well said, gives no reply to a general inquiry—she must be interrogated by questions which already contain the answer she is to give; in other words, the observer can only observe that which he is led by hypothesis to look for; the experimenter can only obtain the result which his experiment is designed to obtain.—E. Ray Lankester, "Degeneration," page 8.
How much better it would have been for the world, how much faster men would have progressed in true science, if they had always been content to make their hypotheses conform to the Word of God.
(To be continued.)