But I would only weary the reader by attempting to pursue this subject further. Those who wish to do so will find many additional examples in the larger works of Dana, LeConte, Prestwich, and Geikie, to say nothing of the more detailed statements buried in numerous Government Reports and special monographs in German and French.
From the very same set of beds different observers try to explain these puzzles in very different ways. Some, like Helm, will describe gigantic overthrust folds, and will draw immense arcs of circles several miles high in the air, as the place where the rocks must once have been. Others, like Rothpletz, from an examination of the very same rocks, will cut the mountain up into sections with imaginary fault-planes, and will tell how, in the district about Glarus for example, an enormous mass of mountains "travelled from east to west a distance of about twenty-five miles from the Rhine valley to the Linth," or how the "Rhatikon Mountain mass travelled from Montafon valley to the Rhine valley, about nineteen miles from east to west."[30]
With regard to some at least of these conditions in the Alps, Geikie virtually admits that these incredible and self-contradictory earth-movements are necessitated by and described from fossil evidence only, for he says:—
"... the strata could scarcely be supposed to have been really inverted, save for the evidence (sic) as to their true order of succession supplied by their included fossils." "... portions of Carboniferous strata appear as if regularly interbedded among Jurassic rocks, and indeed could not be separated save after a study of their enclosed organic remains."[31]
In fact, we are perfectly safe in concluding in all similar cases that we may encounter in the literature of the science that it is the reversed order of the fossils which constitutes the whole evidence; for, as I have said, we can imagine no possible physical evidence competent to form a foundation for such ideas, nor do I know of anything save the exigencies of this venerable theory of life succession, for which otherwise competent observers will thus freely sacrifice their common sense. When the dividing line between two sets of strata "acts exactly like the line of contact between two nearly horizontal formations," so much so that in a natural section cut out by a river the two "appear to succeed one another conformably," a calm judicial mind, divested of all theoretical prejudice, instead of talking about these conditions having been planned by nature "for the purpose of deception," will find no difficulty at all in believing that these rocks were really laid down in the reverse order in which we now find them, with the "younger" below and the "older" above, and only one under the hypnotic spell of a preconceived theory would at the suggestion of such a fact begin "to wonder whether he himself is not really standing on his head."
[CHAPTER VI]
FACT NUMBER FOUR
There is only one class of agents now working upon the rocks of the globe which have been in business continuously ever since the dry land appeared, and which have left us a legible record of approximately the amount of business they have been doing all these centuries. And my Fact Number Four, which will complete this line of argument in illustrating the antagonism between the facts of the rocks and the theory of life succession, is that the rivers of the world, which of course are the agents to which I have referred, in traveling across the country, act precisely as if they knew nothing of the varying ages of the rocks, but on the contrary treat them all alike as if they were of the same age, and as if they began sawing at them all at the same time. Of course it is, evidently, in only a few cases where the records are so free from ambiguity as to be quite incapable of being misunderstood, that is, the cases of rivers with steep rocky gorges, or those that cut through mountain ranges; but there are several such rivers in the world, and they all seem to tell the same story.
The famous Colorado River is a good example. It flows from "younger" strata into "older" in its deep cutting across the Arizona plateau.[32] Stated in terms of the current theory, this means that when the region of country about the lower part of this river's course first became dry land, the upper part was still sea, and that thus there was no such river in existence here until the very "youngest" of these rocks was formed. For otherwise the river must have started running from the sea toward the dry land, i.e., running up hill. Stated in terms neutral as to theory, it means that the whole of this region of country, drained by this large river, with its rocks of many varying "ages," was all elevated practically as it is now before this river began its work of erosion. It treats all these rocks as if they were of the same age, and as if it began sawing at them all at the same time.
Also its companion, the Green River, cuts through the Uinta Range in the same manner. Similar conditions are said to occur on the Danube, and in the river-courses of the Himalayas, and elsewhere.