hypothesis is dead, its spirit is traceable, under a transcendental form, even in the conclusions of its antagonists.” (“Illustrations of Universal Progress,” pp. 329-380, ed. of 1890.) But overlooking, for the moment, the mechanical absurdity involved in the notion of a regular succession of universal layers of sediment, and conceding, for the sake of argument, that the substitution of fossiliferous, for lithological, strata may conceivably have remedied the defects of Werner’s geological time-scale, let us confine ourselves to the one question, which, after all, is of prime importance, whether, namely, without the aid of Procrustean tactics, the actual facts of geology can be brought into alignment with the doctrine of an invariable order of succession among fossil types, and its sequel, the intrinsic time-value of index fossils. The question, in other words, is whether or not a reliable time-scale can be based on the facts of fossiliferous stratification as they are observed to exist in the concrete. Price’s answer is negative, and he formulates several empirical laws to express the concrete facts, on which he bases his contention. The laws and facts to which he appeals may be summarized as follows: 1. The concrete facts of geology do not warrant our singling out any fossiliferous deposit as unquestionably the oldest, and hence we have no reliable _starting-point_ for our time-scale, because: (_a_) We may lay it down as an empirical law that “any kind of fossiliferous rock (even the ‘youngest’), that is, strata belonging to any of the systems or other subdivisions, may rest directly upon the Archæan or primitive crystalline rocks, without any other so-called ‘younger’ strata intervening; also these rocks, Permian, Cretaceous, Tertiary, or whatever thus reposing directly on the Archæan may be themselves crystalline or wholly metamorphic in texture. And this applies not alone to small points of contact, but to large areas.” (_b_) Conversely: any kind of fossiliferous strata (even the “oldest”) may not only constitute the surface rocks over wide areas,[8] but may consist of loose, unconsolidated materials, thus in both position and texture resembling the “late” Tertiaries or the Pleistocene—“In some regions, notably in the Baltic province and in parts of the United States,” says John Allen Howe, alluding to the Cambrian rocks around the Baltic Sea and in Wisconsin, “the rocks still retain their original horizontality of deposition, the muds are scarcely indurated, and the sands are incoherent.” (Encycl. Brit., vol. V, p. 86.)