Illogical Geology, the Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory

by George McCready Price

"They are found at all suitable places along the whole line of the shore between the mouth of the Obi and Behring Straits, and the further north the more numerous do they become, the islands of New Siberia being now one of the favorite collecting localities. The soil of Bear Island and of Liachoff Islands is said to consist only of sand and ice with such quantities of mammoth bones as almost to compose its chief substance. The remains are not only found around the mouths of the great rivers, as would be the case if the carcasses had been washed down from more southern localities in the interior of the continent, but are imbedded in the frozen soil in such circumstances as to indicate that the animals had lived not far from the localities in which they are now found, and they are exposed either by the melting of the ice in unusually warm summers, or by the washing away of the sea cliffs or river banks by storms or floods. In this way the bodies of more or less nearly perfect animals, even standing in the erect position, with the soft parts and hairy covering entire, have been brought to light."[64]

But these remains of the mammoth, though the best known, are not the only ones attesting extraordinary conditions: though of course in warmer latitudes we do not find perfect "mummies" with the hide and flesh preserved untainted. Let us go to a warmer climate, to Sicily, and read a description of the remains of the hippopotamus found there. I quote from Sir Joseph Prestwich:

"The chief localities, which centre on the hills around Palermo, arrest attention from the extraordinary quantity of bones of Hippopotami (in complete hecatombs) which have there been found. Twenty tons of these bones were shipped from around the one cave of San Ciro, near Palermo, within the first six months of exploiting them, and they were so fresh that they were sent to Marseilles to furnish animal charcoal for use in the sugar factories. How could this bone breccia have been accumulated?... The only suggestion that has been made is that the bones are those of successive generations of Hippopotami which went there to die. But this is not the habit of the animal, and besides, the bones are those of animals of all ages down to the foetus, nor do they show traces of weathering or exposure....

"My supposition is, therefore, that when the island was submerged, the animate in the plain of Palermo naturally retreated, as the waters advanced, deeper into the amphitheatre of hills until they found themselves embayed, as in a seine, with promontories running out to sea on either side and a mural precipice in front. As the area became more and more circumscribed the animals must have thronged together in vast multitudes, crushing into the more accessible caves, and swarming over the ground at their entrance, until overtaken by the waters and destroyed."[65]

Our author then adds this summary of his argument:

"The extremely fresh condition of the bones, proved by the retention of so large a proportion of animal matter, and the fact that animals of all ages were involved in the catastrophe, shows that the event was geologically, comparatively recent, as other facts show it to have been sudden."

That it must have been a good deal more "sudden" than even this author will admit, is evident from the nature of the hippopotamus. I never thought that it was particularly afraid of the water, or likely to be drowned by any such moderate catastrophe as Prestwich invokes in this singular volume. The reader must, however, note that this affair, like the entombment of the mammoth, certainly took place since man was upon the globe, even according to the uniformitarians. Would it not be economy of energy to correlate the two together? But if man dates from "Miocene times," as some contend, he must have witnessed half a dozen awful affairs like these, for there is scarcely a country on the globe that has not been under the ocean since then.

Let us proceed.

But whither shall we turn to avoid finding similar phenomena? The vast deposits of mammals in the Rocky Mountains may occur to the reader. As Dana says, they "have been found to be literally Tertiary burial grounds." I need not go into the details of these deposits, nor of those in other places containing the great mammals which must have been contemporary with "Tertiary man," for I would only weary the reader with a monotony of abnormal conditions of deposit—unlike anything now being produced this wide world over. We shall be stating the case very mildly indeed, if we conclude that the vast majority of the fossils, by their profuse abundance and their astonishing preservation, tell a very plain story of "speedy burial after death," and are of an essentially different character from modern deposits.