[8] “It is a common occurrence,” says Charles Schuchert, “on the Canadian Shield to find the Archæozoic formations overlain by the most recent Pleistocene glacial deposits, and even these may be absent. It appears as if in such places no rocks had been deposited, either by the sea or by the forces of the land, since Archæozoic time, and yet geologists know that the shield has been variously covered by sheets of sediments formed at sundry times in the Proterozoic, Palæozoic, and, to a more limited extent, in the Mesozoic.” (“Textbook of Geology,” ed. of 1920, II, p. 569.) It may be remarked that, when geologists “know” such things, they know them in spite of the facts! A large number of striking instances are cited by Price to substantiate the foregoing rule and its converse. The impression left is that not only is the starting-point of the time-scale in doubt, but that, if we were to judge the age of the rocks by their physical appearance and position, we could not accept the conventional verdicts of modern geology, which makes fossil evidence prevail over every other consideration. 2. When two contiguous strata are parallel to each other, and there is no indication of disturbance in the lower bed, nor any evidence of erosion along the plane of contact, the two beds are said to exhibit conformity, and this is ordinarily interpreted by geologists as a sign that the upper bed has been laid down in immediate sequence to the lower, and that there has been a substantial continuity of deposition, with no long interval during which the lower bed was exposed as surface to the agents of erosion. When such a conformity exists, as it frequently does, between a “recent” stratum, above, and what is said (according to the testimony of the fossils) to be a very “ancient” stratum, below, and though the two are so alike lithologically as to be mistaken for one and the same formation, nevertheless, such a conformity is termed a “non-evident disconformity,” or “deceptive conformity,” implying that, inasmuch as the “lost interval,” representing, perhaps, a lapse of “several million years,” is entirely unrecorded by any intervening deposition, or any erosion, or any disturbance of the lower bed, we should not have suspected that so great a hiatus had intervened, were it not for the testimony of the fossils. Price cites innumerable examples, and sums them up in the general terms of the following empirical law: “Any sort of fossiliferous formation may occur on top of any other ‘older’ fossiliferous formation, with all the physical evidences of perfect conformity, just as if these alleged incongruous or mismated formations had in reality followed one another in quick succession.”