FOSSIL PEDIGREES 107 



often, lithologically identical, formations are a pure fiction 

 elaborated for the purpose of bolstering up the dogma of the 

 universal applicability of the European classification of fos- 

 siliferous rocks. Why not take the facts as we find them? 

 Why resort to tortuous explanations for the mere purpose of 

 saving an arbitrary time-scale? Why insist on a definite 

 time- value for fossils, when it drives us to the extremity 

 of discrediting the objective evidence of physical facts in 

 deference to the preconceptions of orthodox geology? Were 

 it not for theoretical considerations, these stratigraphic facts 

 would be taken at their face value, and the need of saving 

 the reputation of the fossil as an infallible time index is not 

 sufficiently imperative to warrant so drastic a revision of the 

 physical evidence. 



3. The third class of facts militating against the time-value 

 of index fossils, are what Price describes as "deceptive con- 

 formities turned upside down," and what orthodox geology 

 tries to explain away as "thrusts," "thrust faults," "over- 

 thrusts," "low-angle faulting," etc.^ In instances of this 

 kind we find the accepted order of the fossiliferous strata 

 reversed in such a way that the "younger" strata are con- 

 formably overlain by "older" strata, and the "older" strata 

 are sometimes interbedded between "younger" strata. "In 

 many places all over the world," says Price, "fossils have 

 been found in a relative order which was formerly thought 

 to be utterly impossible. That is, the fossils have been found 

 in the 'wrong' order, and on such a scale that there can 

 be no mistake about it. For when an area 500 miles long 



^ Thus, to explain away "wrong sequences" of fossils, Heim and 

 Rothpletz postulate the great Glaums overthrust in the Alps, Geikie 

 the great overthrust in Scotland, McConnell, Campbell, and Willis 

 a great overthrust along the eastern front of the Rockies in Montana 

 and Alberta, while Hayes recognizes numerous overthrusts in the 

 southern Appalachians. "The deciphering of such great displacements," 

 says Pirrson, speaking of thrust faults, "is one of the greatest triumphs 

 of modem geological research." ("Textbook of Geology," 1920, I, p. 

 367.) Desperate measures are evidently justifiable, when it is a question 

 of saving the time-value of fossils 1 



