108 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



and from 20 to 50 miles wide is found with Palaeozoic rocks 

 on top, or composing the mountains, and with Cretaceous 

 beds underneath, or composing the valleys, and running under 

 these mountains all around, as in the case of the Glacier Na- 

 tional Park and the southern part of Alberta, the old notion 

 about the exact and invariable order of the fossils has to be 

 given up entirely." 



Price formulates his third law as follows : ''Any f ossilif erous 

 formation, 'old' or 'young,' may occur conformably on any 

 other f ossilif erous formation, 'younger' or 'older.' " The corol- 

 lary of this empirical law is that we are no longer justified in 

 regarding any fossils as intrinsically older than other fossils, 

 and that our present classification of fossiliferous strata has 

 a taxonomic, rather than a historical, value. 



Low-angle faulting is the phenomenon devised by geolo- 

 gists to meet the difficulty of "inverted sequence," when all 

 other explanations fail. Immense mountain masses are said 

 to have been detached from their roots and pushed horizon- 

 tally over the surface (without disturbing it in the least), 

 until they came finally to rest in perfect conformity upon 

 "younger" strata, so that the plane of slippage ended by being 

 indistinguishable from an ordinary horizontal bedding plane. 

 These gigantic "overthrusts" or "thrust faults" are a rather 

 unique phenomenon. Normal faulting is always at a high 

 angle closely approaching the vertical, but "thrust faults" 

 are at a low angle closely approximating the horizontal, and 

 there is enormous displacement along the plane of slippage. 

 The huge mountain masses are said to have been first 

 lifted up and then thrust horizontally for vast distances, 

 sometimes for hundreds of miles, over the face of the 

 land, being thus pushed over on top of "younger" rocks, 

 so as to repose upon the latter in a relation of per- 

 fectly conformable superposition. R. G. McConnell, of the 

 Canadian Survey, comments on the remarkable similarity 

 between these alleged "thrust planes" and ordinary stratifica- 

 tion planes, and he is at a loss to know why the surface soil 



