Page:The origin of continents and oceans - Wegener, tr. Skerl - 1924.djvu/25



E who examines the opposite coasts of the South Atlantic Ocean must be somewhat struck by the similarity of the shapes of the coast-lines of Brazil and Africa. Not only does the great right-angled bend formed by the Brazilian coast at Cape San Roque find its exact counterpart in the re-entrant angle of the African coast-line near the Cameroons, but also, south of these two corresponding points, every projection on the Brazilian side corresponds to a similarly shaped bay in the African, and conversely each indentation in the Brazilian coast has a complementary protuberance on the African. Experiment with a compass on a globe shows that their dimensions agree accurately.

This phenomenon was the starting-point of a new conception of the nature of the earth’s crust and of the movements occurring therein; this new idea is called the theory of the displacement of continents, or, more shortly, the displacement theory, since its most prominent component is the assumption of great horizontal drifting movements which the continental blocks