Page:The church, the schools and evolution.djvu/24

 but in a great variety of orders, demonstrating, as he says, that they cannot be arranged off into ages, but that they simply indicate different forms of life that existed side by side. He then exclaims:


 * How much of the earth's crust would we have to find in this upside down order of the fossils, before we would be convinced that there must be something hopelessly wrong with the theory of Successive Ages which drives otherwise competent observers to throw away their common sense and cling desperately to a fantastic theory in the very teeth of such facts?

Then he tells us that


 * the theory of Successive Ages, with the forms of life appearing on earth in a precise and invariable order, is dead for all coming time for every man who has had a chance to examine the evidence and has enough training in logic and scientific methods to know when a thing is really proved.

And he concludes that the work of strict inductive science has destroyed this "fantastic scheme" forever,


 * and thus leaves the way open to say that life must have originated by just such a literal creation as is recorded in the first chapters of the Bible. If these statements have any meaning at all, they can mean only that the geological foundation for the theory of evolution has also collapsed.

c. It remains for us to listen to the testimony of a few more men of science concerning the whole theory of evolution in general.