This Advance Edition has been issued by the Publishers in this cheap form to enable them to get out several thousand copies for critical review at comparatively small expense. Succeeding editions will be in regular book form, and will be sold at the usual rates for bound volumes.
"It is a singular and a notable fact, that while most other branches of science have emancipated themselves from the trammels of metaphysical reasoning, the science of geology still remains imprisoned in 'a priori' theories."—Sir Henry Howorth: "The Glacial Nightmare and the Flood." Preface. VII.
THE MODERN HERETIC COMPANY
257 S. Hill St., Los Angeles, California
1906
COPYRIGHT 1906
BY
GEORGE McCREADY PRICE
LOS ANGELES, CAL.
[PART I]
[PREFACE]
This book is not written especially for geologists or other scientists as such, though it deals with the question which it discusses from a purely scientific standpoint, and presupposes a good general knowledge of the rocks and of current theories. It is addressed rather to that large class of readers to whom geology is only an incident in larger problems, and who are not quite wholly satisfied with those explanations of the universe which are now commonly accepted on the testimony of biological science. I am free to say that my own conviction of the higher value and surer truth of other data outside of the biological sciences have always been given formative power in my own private opinions, and that in this way I have long held that there must be something wrong with the Evolution Theory, and also that there must be a surer way of gauging the value of that Theory, even from the scientific standpoint, than the long devious processes connected with Darwinism and biology. Some years ago, when compelled to investigate the subject more fully than I had hitherto done, I discovered, somewhat to my own surprise, the phenomenal weakness of the geological argument. The results of that investigation have grown into the present work.