FOSSIL PEDIGREES 99 



dox geologist prefers to suppress, it is the latter, and not the 

 former, .who is really reactionary. 



Price begins by stating the issue in the form of a twofold 

 question: (1) How can we be sure, with respect to a given 

 fauna (or flora) , say the Cambrian, that at one time it monop- 

 olized our globe to the complete exclusion of all other typical 

 faunas (or floras)., say the Devonian, or the Tertiary, of 

 which it is assumed that they could not, by any stretch of 

 imagination, have been contemporaneous, on either land or sea, 

 with the aforesaid "older" fauna (or flora) ? (2) Do the forma- 

 tions (rocks containing fossils) universally occur in such a 

 rigidly invariable order of sequence with respect to one an- 

 other, as to warrant our being sure of the starting-point in the 

 time-scale, or to justify us in projecting any given local order 

 of succession into distant localities, for purposes of chrono- 

 logical correlation? 



His response to the first of these questions consti- 

 tutes what may be called an aprioristic refutation of 

 the orthodox view, by placing the evolutionary palaeon- 

 tologist in the trilemma: (a) of making the awkward con- 

 fession that, except within limited local areas., he has no means 

 whatever of distinguishing between a geographical distribution 

 of coeval fossil forms among various habitats and a chrono- 

 logical distribution of fossils among sediments deposited at 

 different times; (b) or of denying the possibility of geographi- 

 cal distribution in the past, by claiming dogmatically that 

 the world during Cambrian times, for example, was totally 

 unlike the modern world, of which alone we have experi- 

 mental knowledge, inasmuch as^ it was then destitute of 

 zoological provinces, districts, zones, and other habitats pecu- 

 liar to various types of fauna, so that the whole world formed 

 but one grand habitat, extending over land and sea, for a 

 limited group of organisms made up exclusively of the lower 

 types of life; (c) or of reviving the discredited onion-coat theory 

 of Abraham Werner under a revised biological form, which as- 

 serts that the whole globe is enveloped with fossiliferous rather 



