FOSSIL PEDIGREES 97 



show that the fossils in what are now the uppermost layers 

 ought properly to lie underneath those in the beds below them." 

 ("Textbook," ed. of 1903, p. 837.) In fact, the palaeontologist, 

 H. A. Nicholson, lays it down as a general principle that, wher- 

 ever the physical evidence (founded on stratigraphy and 

 lithology) is at variance with the biological evidence (founded 

 on the presence of typical fossil organisms), the latter must 

 prevail and the former must be ignored: "It may even be 

 said," he tells us, "that in any case where there should ap- 

 pear to be a clear and decisive discordance between the 

 physical and the palaeontological evidence as to the age of 

 a given series of beds, it is the former that is to be distrusted 

 rather than the latter." ("Ancient Life History of the Earth," 

 p. 40.) 



George McCready Price, Professor of Geology at a denomi- 

 national college in Kansas, devotes more than fifty pages of 

 his recent work, "The New Geology" (1923), to an intensely 

 destructive criticism of this dogma of the supremacy of fossil 

 evidence as a means of determining the relative age of strata. 

 To cite Price as an "authority" would, of course, be futile. 

 All orthodox geologists have long since anathematized him, 

 and outlawed him from respectable geological society. Charles 

 Schuchert of Yale refers to him as "a fundamentalist har- 

 boring a geological nightmare." {Science, May 30, 1924, 

 p. 487.) Arthur M. Miller of Kentucky University speaks 

 of him as "the man who, while a member of no scientific body 

 and absolutely unknown in scientific circles, has . . . had the 

 effrontery to style himself a 'geologist.' " {Science, June 30, 

 1922, pp. 702, 703.) Miller, however, is just enough to admit 

 that he is well-informed on his subject, and that he possesses 

 the gift of persuasive presentation. "He shows," says Miller, 

 "a wide familiarity with geological literature, quoting largely 

 from the most eminent authorities in this country and in 

 Europe. Any one reading these writings of Price, which pos- 

 sess a certain charm of literary style, and indicate on the 

 part of the author a gift of popular presentation which makes 



