(3) That in very many cases and over many square miles of country these conditions are exactly reversed, and such very "ancient" rocks as Cambrian limestones are on top of the comparatively "young" Cretaceous, while the lime between them "acts exactly like the line of contact of two nearly horizontal formations," and in a natural section made by a river the two "appear to succeed one another conformably." To any one ignorant of the theory of life succession they have every appearance of having been deposited as we find them. (4) That the rivers of the world, in cutting across the country, completely ignore the varying ages of the rocks in the different parts of their courses, and act precisely as if they began sawing at them all at the same time. Now I know not what additional fact can be demanded or imagined to complete the demonstration that there is =no particular order= in which the fossils can be said to occur as regards succession in time. It is true, some fossiliferous deposits, metamorphosed almost beyond recognition, and buried deep beneath thousands of feet of subsequent deposits, have enough appearance of remote antiquity about them in all conscience. But to increase this antiquity by saying that other equally prodigious masses of rocks elsewhere were deposited long after these, or by pointing to still other deposits in another region which are said to be older than any of the others, is an illogical and wholly unscientific procedure. I fear I could scarcely confine myself within the bounds of parliamentary language were I to attempt to express an opinion regarding any effort that may now be made to justify the life succession theory in view of the above acknowledged facts. And surely it is scarcely necessary in this enlightened age to point out how completely this vitiates any biological argument (such as that of Darwinism) which has incorporated into its system the results of such illogical reasoning, or which in any way is dependent upon the conclusions of such a theory of geology. In view of the laws of evidence, which every intelligent person is supposed to understand now-a-days, surely some strange things passed for scientific proof during the nineteenth century. For, as we have seen, the earlier geologists did little better than =assume= the succession of life bodily; than Agassiz and his contemporaries =arranged the details= and the exact order of these successive life forms by comparison with the embryonic life of the modern individual; and now the evolutionists of our day, led by such men as Spencer and Haeckel with their "phylogenetic principle," =prove their theory of evolution= by showing that the embryonic life of the modern individual is only "a brief recapitulation, as it were, from memory," of the (assumed) geological succession in time. Surely this will some day make a more amazing record for posterity than those of phlogiston or the epicycles of Ptolemy.