Illogical Geology, the Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory

by George McCready Price

There are plenty of examples under this head, though two or three ought to be as good as a dozen. In the part of Alberta east of the Rockies already referred to, is a section of country of about fourteen square miles at least—and we know not how much more—where Cambrian fossils are found above Cretaceous, and the inevitable "thrust fault" is thus described by one of the officers of the Canadian Geological Survey. He has just been speaking of "a series" of these "gigantic thrust faults":—

"One of the largest and most important of these occurs along the eastern base of the chain, and brings the Cambrian limestones of the Castle Mountain group over the Cretaceous of the foot hills. This fault has a vertical displacement of more than 15,000 feet (? three miles), and an estimated horizontal displacement of the Cambrian beds of about seven miles in an easterly section. The actually observed overlap amounts to nearly two miles. The angle of inclination of its plane to the horizon is very low, and in consequence of this its outcrop follows a very sinuous line along the base of the mountains, and acts exactly like the line of contact of two nearly horizontal formations.

"The best places for examining this fault are at the gaps of the Bow and of the south fork of the Ghost River. At the former place the Cretaceous shales form the floor of the bay which the Bow has cut in the eastern wall of the range, and rise to a considerable height in the surrounding slopes. Their line of contact with the massive gray limestones of the overlying Castle Mountain group is well seen near the entrance of the gap in the hills to the north. The fault plane here is nearly horizontal, and the two formations, viewed from the valley, appear to succeed one another conformably."[27]

But what an amazing condition of affairs is this. Here are great mountainous masses of rock, very similar in mechanical and mineral make-up to thousands of examples elsewhere. The line of bedding between them "acts exactly like the line of contact of two nearly horizontal formations," and in a natural section cut out by a river the two "appear to succeed one another conformably." And yet we are asked to believe that all this is merely an optical illusion. The rocks could not possibly have been deposited in this way, for the lower ones contain "Benton fossils" (Cretaceous), and the upper ones are Cambrian, and almost the whole geological series and untold millions of years occurred after the upper one, and before the lower one was formed. Solely on the strength of the infallibility of a theory invented a hundred years ago in a little corner of Western Europe, which "promulgated, as respecting the world, a scheme collected from that province," and assumed that over all the world the rocks must always follow the order there observed, we are here asked to deny the positive evidence of our senses because these rocks do not follow this accepted order. I must confess that I cannot see the force of such a method of reasoning. It is carrying the argument several degrees beyond the reasoning of the three little green peas in the little green pod, as narrated in the exquisite fable of Eugene Field. These wise little fellows noticed that their little world was all green, and they themselves green likewise, and they shrewdly concluded from this that the whole universe must also be green. But we are not told of their travelling abroad and persisting in a systematic attempt to explain all subsequently observed facts in terms of their theory.

This government Report last quoted from says that in the eastern part of Tennessee the Appalachian Chain "presents an almost identical structure," and refers to a similar state of things in the Highlands of Scotland. Dana, in the last edition of his "Manual" (p. 369), refers to this report, and reproduces some of its plates showing some of the structures referred to; and on another page, in speaking of this similar example in Scotland, says that "a mass of the oldest crystalline rocks, many miles in length from north to south, was thrust at least ten miles westward over younger rocks, part of the latter fossiliferous"; and further declares that "the thrust planes look like planes of bedding, and were long so considered."[28]

Geikie quite naturally devotes several pages in his "Text-Book" to a description of these conditions in the Highlands; but from one of his first reports on these observations, published in Nature[29] we get some much more suggestive details. The thrust-planes, he says, are difficult to be "distinguished from ordinary stratification planes, like which they have been plicated, faulted, and denuded. Here and there, as a result of denudation, a portion of one of them appears capping a hill-top. One almost refuses to believe that the little outlier on the summit does not lie normally on the rocks below it, but on a nearly horizontal fault by which it has been moved into its place."

Speaking of some similar conditions in Ross Shire, which he himself had previously described as naturally conformable, he declares:—

"Had these sections been planned for the purpose of deception they could not have been more skillfully devised ... and no one coming first to this ground would suspect that what appears to be a normal stratigraphical sequence is not really so."

"When a geologist finds" things in this condition, he says, "he may be excused if he begins to wonder whether he himself is not really standing on his head."