Illogical Geology, the Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory

by George McCready Price

And yet with all the alleged vicissitudes of the continents during the millions of years since the Cretaceous age, there is so far as I am aware not a trace of either the chalk or the sponges in any of the "subsequent" rocks. Pieces of Cretaceous rock are of course found thus sporadically as boulders, but there is no natural deposit of this kind. But in the light of these modern discoveries why is not the Chalk of "the white dear cliffs of Dover," full of modern living species as we now know it to be, just as "recent" a deposit as the "late" Tertiaries or the Pleistocene?

Another good illustration of the absurdity of the present arrangement of the rocks is found in the Echinoderms—crinoids, star-fishes, sea-urchins, etc. Of the latter Prof. A. Agassiz found in the deep waters of the West Indies, four genera of Echinids or sea-urchins of the "later Tertiary," but 24 genera of the "early" Tertiary, 10 of the Cretaceous, and 5 of the Jurassic.[48]

But far from being uncommon we know that similar discoveries have been in almost constant progress during the last half century. And were it not that "zoological students are," as Zittel says, "too actively engaged and keenly interested in building up new observations to attempt to spell through the arbitrary palaeontological conclusions" found in the "dead weight of stratigraphical-palaeontological literature," there is no telling what hosts of similar facts might not be pointed to regarding the forms found in all the "older" rocks.

Of the star-fishes and serpent-stars (Asteridea and Ophiuridea), Zittel says: "It would seem that the Palaeozoic 'sea-stars' differed very little from those in the seas of the present age." (p. 395.) The crinoids, we are told, "are among the earliest in geological history," making up vast limestones of the Palaeozoic rocks; and forms scarcely separable from the modern are found in the Jurassic, but so far as the text-books tell us are absolutely unknown in any later deposits. But there are several modern genera, such as Pentacrinus, Rhizocrinus, Bathycrinus, etc., found in the deep waters of nearly all the oceans. The genus Rhizocrinus was discovered off the coast of Norway about the sixties of the last century. But what were these creatures doing since "Jurassic times," while the "pulsating crust" was putting parts of the continents under the sea for ages at a stretch? Why did they form no deposits during the Cretaceous, Eocene, Miocene or Pliocene ages? Surely the absurdity of the present arrangement is evident to a child. During all these intervening ages the climate of the globe continued of the same remarkable mildness, fossils of all these formations being found about as far north as explorers have ever gone. Why did the crinoids and polyp-corals suspend business from "Jurassic times" to the "recent," merely to accommodate a modern theory? Dana says that "The coral reefs of the Oolyte in England consist of corals of the same group with the reef-making species of the existing tropics,"[49] and he argues from this fact that the mean temperature of the waters must have been about 69 deg. F. But a luxuriant vegetation still continued in the Arctic regions during the Cretaceous and the Tertiaries. How absurd to say that these corals built no reefs about the European coasts during all these ages. Or, to put the matter in another way, considering how many of their characteristic types are alive in our modern seas, why should we say that the crinoidal or coral limestones of the Mesozoic or Palaeozoic rocks are not as recent as the nummulitic limestones of the Eocene or any late Tertiary deposits?

It is no answer at all to tell us that, though the general types are the same, the species of the Palaeozoic and the Mesozoic are entirely extinct. I have not had the courage "to attempt to spell through" all the "dead weight" of the modern literature, but I think that the world would like more satisfactory proof of this oft-repeated assertion than the customs and traditions of a hundred years, and the exigencies of a fanciful theory. This worn-out argument of Cuvier's about extinct species has kept up a running fight with common sense for many decades, and though driven backward from one point to another over the long thin line of this taxonomic series of the fossil world, it still contests every inch of ground.

But let us try the tree-ferns and cycads of the coal beds of the "older" rocks. In northern regions they are not found "later" than the Triassic and Jurassic, and doubtless the same holds good of the rocks in the Tropics, where the modern species now live in fair abundance. But how did they come to shift to the Tropics so many millions of years before the palms, etc., of the Tertiaries thought it time to do the same? The climate had not changed a bit: how did they come to scent the coming "Glacial Age" so much earlier than their more highly organized fellows?

The "Challenger" expedition found some Cyathophylloid corals now building reefs at the bottom of our modern ocean. The geologists had already assigned the last of them to the Carboniferous and Permian rocks with the idea that they were extinct. But where have these fellows kept themselves during all the intervening ages while the continents were deep under the ocean time and time again? or why are not the rocks containing their fossils as "recent" as any deposits on the globe?

And so I might go on. There is hardly a tribe found in the "older" rocks which does not have its living representatives of to-day, and with, I believe, a fair proportion of the species identical; though in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cases these species, genera, or even whole tribes, have somehow skipped all the intervening formations.

But let us drop this method of studying our subject, and look at it from a slightly different standpoint.

Thus Dana[50] says that: