of this character, especially when, as is usually the case, both the upper and the lower strata are quite uninjured in appearance.  No; the fossils are here in the wrong order, that is all.  And so, to save the long established doctrines of a very definite order of successive life-forms, this theory of a “thrust fault” is offered as the best available explanation.  As Dr. Albert Heim himself once expressed it very naively in a letter to the present writer, that the strata over these large areas are in a position manifestly at direct disagreement with the received order of the fossils, “is a fact which can be clearly seen,—­only we know not yet how to explain it in a mechanical way.”

An example in the Highlands of Scotland was about the next to be discovered.  Here, as Dana says, “a mass of the oldest crystalline rocks, many miles in length from north to south, was thrust at least ten miles westward over younger rocks, part of the latter fossiliferous;” and he further declares, “the thrust planes look like planes of bedding, and were long so considered."[42]

Sir Archibald Geikie and others had at first described these beds as naturally conformable; and when at length they were convinced that the fossils would not permit this explanation, Geikie gives us some very picturesque details as to how natural they look.

The thrust planes, he says, are with much difficulty distinguished “from ordinary stratification planes, like which they have been plicated, faulted, and denuded.  Here and there, as a result of denudation, a portion of one of them appears capping a hilltop.  One almost refuses to believe that the little outlier on the summit does not lie normally on the rocks below it, but on a nearly horizontal fault by which it has been moved into its place.”

Of a similar example in Ross Shire he declares: 

“Had these sections been planned for the purpose of deception, they could not have been more skilfully devised, ... and no one coming first to the ground would suspect that what appears to be a normal stratigraphical sequence is not really so."[43]

[Footnote 42:  “Manual,” pp. 111, 534.]

[Footnote 43:  Nature, November 13, 1884, pp. 29-35.]

Here again we have unequivocal testimony from the most competent of observers that there is no physical evidence whatever to lead any one to say that a ponderous scale of the earth’s crust was really pushed up on top of other portions, as this makeshift theory of “thrust faults” involves.  The fossils are here in the wrong order, just as in the case at Glarus; that is all.  The facts seem to be a flat contradiction to the theory of definite successive ages, and to save the theory this explanation of a “thrust fault” is invented, though there is absolutely no physical evidence of any disturbance of the strata.