106 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



as if these alleged incongruous or mismated formations had 

 in reality followed one another in quick succession." 



A quotation from Schuchert's "Textbook of Geology," 

 (1920), may be given by way of illustration: "The imperfec- 

 tion," we read, "of the geologic column is greatest in the 

 interior of North America and more so in the north than in 

 the south. This imperfection is in many places very marked, 

 since an entire period or several periods may be absent. With 

 such great breaks in the local sections the natural assumption 

 is that these gaps are easily seen in the sequence of the strata, 

 but in many places the beds lie in such perfect conformity 

 upon one another that the breaks are not noticeable by the 

 eye and can be proved to exist only by the entombed fossils 

 on each side of a given bedding plane. . . . Stratigraphers 

 are, as a rule, now fully aware of the imperfections in the 

 geologic record, but the rocks of two unrelated formations may 

 rest upon each other w4th such absolute conformability as to 

 be completely deceptive. For instance, in the Bear Grass 

 quarries at Louisville, Ky., a face of limestone is exposed in 

 which the absolute conformability of the beds can be traced 

 for nearly a mile, and yet within 5 feet of vertical thickness 

 is found a Middle Silurian coral bed overlain by another 

 coral zone of Middle Devonian. The parting between these 

 two zones is like that between any two limestone beds, but 

 this insignificant line represents a stratigraphic hiatus the 

 equivalent of the last third of Silurian and the first of De- 

 vonian time. But such disconformities are by no means rare, 

 in fact are very common throughout the wide central basin 

 area of North America." {Op. cit., II, pp. 586-588.) 



In such cases, the stratigraphical relations give no hint of 

 any enormous gap at the line of contact. On the contrary, 

 there is every evidence of unbroken sequence, and the phys- 

 ical appearances are as if these supposed "geological epochs" 

 had never occurred in the localities, of which there is ques- 

 tion. Everything points to the conclusion that the alleged long 

 intervals of time between such perfectly conformable, and, 



