Illogical Geology
The Weakest Point in
The Evolution Theory

BY
GEORGE McCREADY PRICE

Editor of "The Modern Heretic," and Author of "Outlines of Modern Science and Modern Christianity."

The   Modern   Heretic   Company
257 S. HILL STREET, LOS ANGELES, CAL.

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ILLOGICAL GEOLOGY

THE WEAKEST POINT IN THE EVOLUTION THEORY

To the Reader.

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.

Though mostly critical and analytic, it is not wholly so. But so far as it is constructive there is one virtue which can rightly be claimed for it. It is at least an honest effort to study the foundation facts of geology from the inductive may be standpoint, and whether or not I have succeeded in this, it is, so far as I know, the only work published in the English or any other language which does not treat the science of geology more or less as a cosmogony.

That such a statement is possible is, I think, my chief justification in giving it to the public. It would seem as if the twentieth century could afford at least one book built up from the present, instead of being postulated from the past.

GEORGE McCREADY PRICE.

257 South Hill Street,
Los Angeles, California,
   June, 1906.

CONTENTS