A quotation from Schuchert’s “Textbook of Geology,” (1920), may be given by way of illustration: “The imperfection,” we read, “of the geologic column is greatest in the interior of North America and more so in the north than in the south. This imperfection is in many places very marked, since an entire period or several periods may be absent. With such great breaks in the local sections the natural assumption is that these gaps are easily seen in the sequence of the strata, but in many places the beds lie in such perfect conformity upon one another that the breaks are not noticeable by the eye and can be proved to exist only by the entombed fossils on each side of a given bedding plane.... Stratigraphers are, as a rule, now fully aware of the imperfections in the geologic record, but the rocks of two unrelated formations may rest upon each other with such absolute conformability as to be completely deceptive. For instance, in the Bear Grass quarries at Louisville, Ky., a face of limestone is exposed in which the absolute conformability of the beds can be traced for nearly a mile, and yet within 5 feet of vertical thickness is found a Middle Silurian coral bed overlain by another coral zone of Middle Devonian. The parting between these two zones is like that between any two limestone beds, but this insignificant line represents a stratigraphic hiatus the equivalent of the last third of Silurian and the first of Devonian time. But such disconformities are by no means rare, in fact are very common throughout the wide central basin area of North America.” (_Op. cit._, II, pp. 586-588.) In such cases, the stratigraphical relations give no hint of any enormous gap at the line of contact. On the contrary, there is every evidence of unbroken sequence, and the physical appearances are as if these supposed “geological epochs” had never occurred in the localities, of which there is question. Everything points to the conclusion that the alleged long intervals of time between such perfectly conformable, and, often, lithologically identical, formations are a pure fiction elaborated for the purpose of bolstering up the dogma of the universal applicability of the European classification of fossiliferous rocks. Why not take the facts as we find them? Why resort to tortuous explanations for the mere purpose of saving an arbitrary time-scale? Why insist on a definite time-value for fossils, when it drives us to the extremity of discrediting the objective evidence of physical facts in deference to the preconceptions of orthodox geology? Were it not for theoretical considerations, these stratigraphic facts would be taken at their face value, and the need of saving the reputation of the fossil as an infallible time index is not sufficiently imperative to warrant so drastic a revision of the physical evidence.