Page:The origin of continents and oceans - Wegener, tr. Skerl - 1924.djvu/120

94 the ancient climates in his ideas on the philosophical aspects of the history of the human race. It was more or less fully supported by numerous authors, as Sir John Evans (1876), Taylor (1885), Löffelholz von Colberg (1886), Oldham (1886), Neumayr (1887), Nathorst (1888), Hansen (1890), Semper (1896), Davis (1896), Reibisch (1901), Kreichgauer (1902), Golfier (1903), Simroth (1907), Walther (1908), Yokoyama (1911), Dacqué (1915), as well as recently by Eckhardt in numerous publications, the latest in 1921, and by E. Kayser in his well-known Lehrbuch der Geologie (1918), and by Koszmat (1921), among others. This doctrine has always met with great opposition within the narrow circle of geological specialists and until the works of Neumayr and Nathorst the great majority of geologists totally rejected polar displacement. The picture changed after the publication of these works in so far that the adherents of the wandering of the poles became more numerous, though very slowly. To-day most geologists take the standpoint formulated in E. Kayser’s Lehrbuch, that the assumption of a great Tertiary displacement of the poles is in any case “difficult to avoid.” This can, indeed, be considered to be established, in spite of the remarkable bitterness with which some opponents challenge these ideas.

Although the grounds for the shifting of the poles (in certain periods of the earth’s history) are so compelling, nevertheless it cannot be denied that all previous attempts to fix the positions of the poles continuously throughout the whole geological succession have always led to self-contradiction, and indeed to contradiction of so grotesque a kind that