252 ANNUAL liEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1928 



Daly,* in his new book, says : 



Neither Taylor nor Wegener has shown why the continents should move. 

 They have not discovered the force which did the gigantic work of overcoming 

 the resistances to continental migration. Nor have they evaluated these resist- 

 ances. For these reasons geologists are going slow in placing such mobility of 

 continents among the accepted principles of science. 



THE JIG-SAW PUZZLE 



Let US for the time being agree with Wegener that the Americas 

 have broken away from Euro-Africa and that their present shore 

 lines and shelf seas are practically those of the Cretaceous riftings, 

 and see Avhat these assumptions will lead to. If we take an 8-incli 

 globe and squeeze upon it over the Americas a quarter-inch layer 

 of plasteline, cut this out into the shape of these continents but 

 at the outer edge of the continental shelf, and then shift this plaste- 

 line replica over against Euro-Africa, following the instructions of 

 Wegener that Newfoundland must be placed beside Ireland and 

 Cape San Roque of Brazil fitted into the Bight of Biafra in Africa, 

 the resulting geography shows Central America about 1,200 miles 

 away from Africa and leaves Siberia and Alaska separated by about 

 600 miles! And these are not the only discrepancies, for the North 

 Atlantic Ocean (Poseidon) becomes much larger and of a totally 

 different shape from that shown by Wegener; and furthermore, the 

 Sierras of Argentina not only take on a northeast strike but are also 

 about 350 miles northwest of the place where they are supposed to 

 connect directly with the east-west trending Cape Mountains of 

 Africa. These facts are shown in Plates 2-4, and should be com- 

 pared with Wegener's results illustrated in Plate 1 and Behm's 

 in Figure 1. It is evident, therefore, that Wegener has taken 

 extraordinary liberties with the earth's rigid crust, making it pliable 

 so as to stretch the Americas from north to south about 1,500 miles, 

 and the greatest stretching is done in Central America. The smooth- 

 ing out of all the mountains will at best not reduce this discrepancy 

 by more than 500 miles. 



Diener, in 1915,^ in criticism of the displacement tlieory, directed 

 attention to the fact that when one shoves North America eastward 

 against Europe there results a great cleft and a deep ocean between 

 Siberia and Alaska. He was in error, however, in stating that 

 the opening would be 35° across, due to his working on a Mer- 

 cator map; by the plasteline method, previously described, we 

 find that the opening is nevertlieless about 600 miles wide. Such an 

 opening brings back in full force Diener's criticism, and alone is 

 fatal to Wegener's hypothesis, because since early Cambrian time 



* R. A. Daly, Our Mobile Earth, Charles Scrihner's Sons, 1926, p. 263. 



• Carl Diener, Die Grossformen der Erdoberfliiche, Mitt. k. k. geogr. Gesell., Wien, vol. 

 58, pp. 329-349. 



