I
In all the previous chapters I have not been giving any very new facts
or any discoveries of my own. True, my conclusions from the facts may
seem novel; but in general I have been giving merely facts which are
almost universally acknowledged by educated men. The conservation laws
of matter and of energy, the impassable gulf between the living and the
not-living, the laws governing cell multiplication, are matters of
common knowledge and will be found in the appropriate college text-books
throughout the civilized world. Even the facts which I have presented
regarding variation and heredity are admitted in one way or another by
practically all biologists. But in following our general subject into
the field of geology, I shall be obliged to present some comprehensive
truths and general conclusions which are not so widely acknowledged,
because only recently brought to light. However, as these facts and
conclusions may seem very new and strange to many, I shall endeavor to
build up my argument wholly on the recorded observations of the very
highest authorities rather than on my own unsupported testimony; though
for the sake of brevity I shall be obliged to refer the reader to my
"Fundamentals of Geology" (1913) for some of the details.
One of the great outstanding ideas of geology as usually taught is that
life has been on the globe for many millions of years, that in fact
there has been a graded succession of different types of life in a well
defined invariable order, from the lower and more generalized to the
higher and more specialized. Quite obviously this succession of life was
antagonistic to the former views of a literal Creation; and only on this
supposed fact as an outline has the modern theory of biological
evolution been built up. For if geology cannot furnish the most
unquestionable proof that life has occurred in a very definite and
invariable order, what is the use of talking about the development of
one form of life into another by a gradual process of evolution?
One of the highest scientific authorities in America, Prof. Thomas Hunt
Morgan, of Columbia University, has recently said, "The direct evidence
furnished by fossil remains is by all odds the strongest evidence that
we have in favor of organic evolution."[33] Accordingly we purpose to
examine carefully what this by all odds "strongest evidence" is like.
[Footnote 33: "A Critique of the Theory of Evolution," p. 24.]