Illogical Geology, the Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory

by George McCready Price

"The genial climate of the Champlain period was abruptly (italics Dana's) terminated. For carcasses of the Siberian elephants were frozen so suddenly and so completely at the change, that the flesh has remained untainted." (Id. p. 230.)

I quite agree with this author that the evidence is conclusive as to the climate and food being "all the animals could have desired," and that they must have "had their choice of the best." But it seems to me that in following out their theory these authors have not left the poor creatures very much to choose from. For as the inevitable result of their theory in arranging the plants as well as the animals in chronological order according to the percentages of living and extinct forms, they have already disposed of, and consigned to the "early" Tertiaries, etc., all the probable vegetation on which these animals lived, and thus have nothing left on which to feed the horse and bison, rhinoceros and elephant, etc., away within the Arctic Circle, except the few miserable shrubs and lichens which now survive there.

But this strange, inconsistent notion of Dana's that the so-called Glacial phenomena lie in between the warm Tertiary and the equally warm "Champlain period," is easily understood as the survival of the notion, so tenaciously held even later than the middle decades of the nineteenth century, that Man was not a witness of any of the great geological changes. When the evidence became overwhelming that Man lived while the semi-tropical animals roamed over England, the "Glacial period" still remained as a sort of buffer against the dangerous possibility of extending the human period back any further. I am not aware that this venerable scientist ever became quite reconciled to the idea of "Tertiary Man," though in his "Manual" he mentions a few evidences in favor of this now almost universally accepted opinion.

As for the real teachings of the Drift phenomena there is no need of explanation here. At the very most they are confined to a quite limited part of the northern hemisphere, there being no trace of them in Alaska, nor on the plains of Siberia, where now almost eternal frosts prevail.[76] In fact they are practically confined between the Rocky Mountains and the Missouri River on the west, and the Ural Mountains on the east; and with a little common sense infused into the foundation principles of the science we will cease to be tormented with a "Glacial Nightmare." Much of the Drift phenomena with the raised beaches are certainly later events than most of the other geological work, but are inseparably connected with the general problem in their explanation. Even from the ordinary standpoint, I am not aware that the elaborate argument of Howorth has even been satisfactorily answered. Indeed, I feel almost like saying that this writer's various contributions to the cause of inductive geology mark the beginning of the dawn.

Hence it may suffice here to merely call attention to the great simplicity introduced into this vast complexity of the glacialists, by the positive assurance of this author that the "Drift period" and the Pleistocene end together, and join onto the modern; or perhaps I ought rather to say that the so-called Glacial phenomena lie in between the true fossil world and our modern one.

"Thus, in regard to the Pleistocene mammals, the view is now generally accepted that, in every place where they have been found in a contemporary bed, that bed underlies the till, and is therefore pre-glacial. As in other places, so here (Scotland), teeth and bones of mammals have occurred in the clay itself; but in all such cases they occur sporadically and as boulders. As Mr. James Geikie says, 'They almost invariably afford marks of having been subjected to the same action as the stones and boulders by which they are surrounded; that is to say, they are rubbed, ground, striated, and smoothed.'"[77]

And again:

"The Pleistocene fauna, so far as I know, came to an end with the so-called Glacial age." (Id. p. 463.)

From a recent notice in Nature[78] it would seem that even Dr. H. Woodward, of the British Museum, supports this general view in his "Table of British Strata," by the statement that the glacial deposits contain only derived fossils.

But this is such a decided simplification of the problem of climate that I am utterly at a loss to understand how any one can still cling to the complex and highly artificial arrangement of numerous "interglacial" periods, to account for a few bones of mammals or a few pockets of lignite; and how they can even place between the "Glacial period" and our times the "genial Champlain period," with it, as Dana says, "abruptly terminated," and becoming "suddenly extreme as of a single winter's night." Howorth, in the latter part of the chapter already quoted from (pp. 460-478), gives a good review of this subject of intermittent climates, and strongly supports his contention that the stratigraphical evidence all points to the fact that the Pleistocene forms are always older than the Drift-beds, and where the flora and fauna of the Pleistocene occur in the Drift, they do so only as boulders; that, in fact, as he says in his Preface, "The Pleistocene Flood ... forms a great dividing line in the superficial deposits," separating the true fossil world from the modern.