. God's two books; or, Plain facts about evolution, geology, and the Bible . ve assemblages of plants and animals; though, ifBuffon had lived on the plain east of the Rocky Mountains,his rule of thumb about the order in which the fossils occurwould make the huge Cretaceous dinosaurs of Colorado andWyoming, and the giant amphibians of the Permian rocksof Texas, as much modern deposits as any Tertiary orPleistocene; for in thousands of cases they occur as near thesurface, and occupy as completely all the surface rocks, as who really knows. His scheme of successive ages of creation,professedly ba
. God's two books; or, Plain facts about evolution, geology, and the Bible . ve assemblages of plants and animals; though, ifBuffon had lived on the plain east of the Rocky Mountains,his rule of thumb about the order in which the fossils occurwould make the huge Cretaceous dinosaurs of Colorado andWyoming, and the giant amphibians of the Permian rocksof Texas, as much modern deposits as any Tertiary orPleistocene; for in thousands of cases they occur as near thesurface, and occupy as completely all the surface rocks, as who really knows. His scheme of successive ages of creation,professedly based on his crude geology, makes him the real fatherof the theory of life succession, and thus of biological Evolution. (101) 102 GODS TWO BOOKS do any of the so-called recent deposits of France, Ger-many, or England, which Buffon had in mind. Of course there is one way of proving the relative agesof strata which we can all acknowledge to be truly we find undisturbed strata lying one above another,the lower one is evidently the older of the two; but whether. SCENE TN THE BAD LANDS Where many remarkable fossils have been foundlaid down ten minutes earlier or ten million years earlier,how are we to tell, except by assuming the succession oflife en bloc, and deciding the matter according to the fossilsthey contain? In doing this, we are also tacitly assuminguniformity, or that these beds, with change of flora andfauna, did not occur by any abnormal action of the elementswhich might wash different kinds of contemporary faunasand floras into their present positions. No one pretends GODS TWO BOOKS 103 that this test of superposition is of any service in comparingthe rocks of distant or disconnected regions. How thenshall we correlate the rocks of distant lands, except weassume that there has been a succession of life upon theglobe in a particular order? All admit that everywhere there are, at the base of thefossil-bearing strata, rocks which are non-fossiliferous; anda
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