it follows its absurd, unscientific
theories. But wherever it agrees with facts and common sense, it
contradicts these absurd theories; and wherever it agrees with these
theories, it contradicts facts and common sense. That most educated
people still believe its main thesis of _a definite age for each
particular kind of fossil_ is a sad but instructive example of the
effects of mental inertia.

IV

The reader will find this matter discussed at length in the author's
"Fundamentals of Geology"; but here it will be necessary only to draw
some very obvious conclusions from the _five facts_ which we have set in
opposition to the theory of Successive Ages.

1. The first and absolutely incontrovertible conclusion is that this
theory of successive ages must be a gross blunder, in its baleful
effects on every branch of modern thought deplorable beyond computation.
But it is now perfectly obvious that the geological distinctions as to
age between the fossils are fantastic and unjustifiable. No one kind of
true fossil can be proved to be older or younger than another
intrinsically and necessarily, and the methods of reasoning by which
this idea has been supported in the past are little else than a
burlesque on modern scientific methods, and are a belated survival from
the methods of the scholastics of the Middle Ages.

Not by any means that all rock deposits are of the same age. The lower
ones in any particular locality are of course "older" than the upper
ones, that is, they were deposited first. _But from this it by no means
follows that the fossils contained in these lower rocks came into being
and lived and died before the fossils in the upper ones_. The latter
conclusion involves several additional assumptions which are wholly
unscientific in spirit and incredible as matters of fact, one of which
assumptions is the _biological form of the onion-coat theory_. But since
thousands of modern living kinds of plants and animals are found in the
fossil state, _man included_, and no one of them can be proved to have
lived for a period of time alone and before others, we must by other
methods, more scientific and accurate than the slipshod methods hitherto
in vogue, attempt to decide as best we can how these various forms of
life were buried, and how the past and the present are connected
together. But the theory of definite successive ages, with the forms of
life appearing on earth in a precise and invariable order, is dead for