SOME FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF EARTH 
HISTORY. 
JAMBS H. LEES. 
We have been accustomed to think, most of us, that in the 
early days of the world’s geologic, history Nature manifested her- 
self in forms different from those with which we are familiar; 
that God, the supreme Power of the universe, employed other 
types of energy than those by means of which He works today. 
And these conceptions have been fostered and influenced very 
largely, consciously or unconsciously, by our religious and theo- 
logical training. For we each have a theology, whether we rec- 
ognize and admit it or not, and we are governed in our thinking 
to a large extent by this theology and it is very likely to color our 
outlook upon life and our interpretations of the phenomena of 
the outside world. We have accepted the science of three thou- 
sand years ago because of a certain imputed authority, and have 
given it precedence, in the theological domain at least, over the 
science of today. Our religious instruction has been distinctive 
in the teaching that the methods which God used in creating this 
world were entirely apart from those by which He perpetuated it. 
The science of geology was founded upon this concept. The 
world is today peopled with certain groups of animal and plant 
life. In the rocks are found entombed the remains of other types 
differing widely from each other and from modern forms. These 
facts were accounted for in early days by the hypothesis of a 
series of creative flats and destructive cataclysms whereby new 
and successively higher orders of life were alternately deployed 
and as autocratically swept off the stage, as it were in a moment 
of time. Here again theology has guided science and we have 
investigated natural phenomena in the light of a pseudo-scientific 
interpretation which we have read into certain Biblical passages. 
Our scientific forbears at first failed to realize that the laws of 
development and decay operated as perfectly and inexorably in 
the beginning as now, that the perpetuation or the extermination 
of any form of life depends upon its ability to adapt itself to 
external conditions and also upon what I may call its adherence 
to standard. It is the plainer, simpler, more mobile types which 
