Page:The origin of continents and oceans - Wegener, tr. Skerl - 1924.djvu/33

Rh which however he did not consider) undergo, according to him, not only displacement but also deformation; they wander collectively westwards drawn by the tidal forces of the sun on the viscous body of the earth (as also E. H. L. Schwarz assumed in the ''Geogr. Journ.'', 1912, pp. 284–299). But the oceans were considered by him as sunken continents, and he expressed fantastic ideas about the so-called geographical homologies and other problems of the face of the earth, which we will pass over. Like the present writer, Pickering in a work on the similarities of the South Atlantic coasts has expressed the supposition that America was torn off from Europe-Africa and was dragged across the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean. But he did not consider that all the facts of the geological history of both these continents necessitated the assumption of an earlier connection up to the Cretaceous period, and thus he places the connection in the very remote past, and thought that the breaking away was connected with the theory of G. H. Darwin that the moon was thrown off the earth. Traces of this he believed are still to be seen in the Pacific basin.

F. B. Taylor approaches the sphere of the displacement theory in another way. In a work which first appeared in 1910 he assumes not unimportant horizontal displacements of the individual continents in