# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S73
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Biblical History of Creation and the Geological Theories of the Earth's Formation. 73

individual regions that the main formations appear, in individual parts of their constituents, layered one upon another. ""One must not imagine — as Wagner remarks, I, p. 358, concerning their sequence of deposition — that the rock types extend across the whole surface of the earth in one uninterrupted expanse, as for example the leaves of an onion lie wrapped around one another, but rather they occur only in partial extents. — — Just as little may one expect that all mountains are composed of the entire series of rock types; on the contrary, a considerable number of the latter is often missing, and indeed either in such a way that the upper ones are entirely absent, or that only certain intermediate members are missing between the upper and lower deposits, while the upper ones do occur and then again follow regularly one upon another according to their general norm.""

5. "Geognostic observation has shown that many rock formations of one and the same mineral composition and structure, wherever they occur, also contain the same kinds of petrifactions, while others, with the same mineral composition and formation, show different petrifactions in different places — for which reason not a few rock and earth strata, which show no difference at all in their mineral and chemical composition, have been divided into different formations merely for the sake of the difference in their fossil inclusions. But even if we were to assume a definite relation of dependence between the kinds of mountains and their fossil remains as universally valid, nothing at all would yet follow from it concerning the periods of formation of the various formations, so long as the age of the formations is not established with certainty on other grounds. Furthermore, it is by no means an established fact that even every main formation has an organization of the animal and plant kingdom peculiar to itself alone, and that no transitions of the same fossils occur from one formation into another. — ""There are numerous known cases in which the remains of one and the same species occur not merely in two, but even in several successive formations."" The opinion frequently advanced, that in the various animal and plant forms of the successive mountain formations a gradual and, so to speak, stepwise progressive development of the animal and plant world is expressed, has not been able to rise to general acceptance (cf. Naumann II, p. 26 f.); and concerning the claim often put forward as an established fact, that the transitional mountains contain fossils only of the lower orders of plants and animals, and that among animals the mammals first appear in the Trias, Jura, and chalk formations, and warm-blooded animals indeed only in the tertiary formations, a geologist judges in "Ausland," 1860, No. 6, p. 138 f.: ""Only a few years ago all the geological handbooks repeated that the mammals had appeared suddenly in the tertiary period, whereas the richest accumulation of fossil mammals now known belongs to the middle period of the secondary sequence of strata, and a veritable