264 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 2 8 



and paleontologists need a distance something like this during 

 Paleozoic times to explain the scattering faiinal similarities of these 

 lands. On the other liand, the stratigraphers of Great Britain insist 

 on a high land to the northwest at least 500 miles across, or a low 

 land at least 1,000 miles wide, to supply the great mass of detritals 

 of Ordovician and Silurian times seen in these islands. 



Everyone knows that the folding and thrusting of the Caledonian 

 structures is intense. If, then, Newfoundland lay adjacent to Ire- 

 land, why is it that this exact time of orogeny is unknown in the 

 former? And in any event, even if one fits the time of the Cale- 

 donian folding into that of the Devonian and early Permian time of 

 Newfoundland, why does this intensity of the Caledonides decrease 

 so quickly into the far simpler foldings of Newfoundland? 



Eercynides. — In regard to the Hercynide structures, they can not 

 be connected at all with the Appalachians ; it is the Caledonides that 

 connect with the latter.^" What we see in northeastern North 

 America connecting with the Hercynides are not the structural re- 

 lations but the faunal ones of the North Atlantic (Poseidon). These 

 connections are seen in the Lower Ordovician of southeastern New- 

 foundland, the Silurian of Arisaig, Nova Scotia, the Lower Devonian, 

 and Lower Carboniferous (Windsor) of New Brunswick. The writer 

 has long been explaining these similarities as due to the shelf seas 

 along the south side of the New Brunswick geanticline, which was the 

 borderland of the Appalachian-Caledonian seaway wherein the 

 marine faunas migrated and evolved. 



Regarding Wegener's reconstruction of the tectonic lines between 

 northeastern North America and northwestern Europe, Lake says^^ 

 that they fit very well, but that this results from taking great liber- 

 ties with the earth's crust; 



he has pressed Newfounclland and Labrador strongly toward the northwest 

 and has turned the former through an angle of about 30°. The westerly motion 

 of Newfoundland may be admitted as consistent with the hypothesis; but if, 

 in addition to moving the masses of sial, we are also allowed to mold them 

 .".s we will, the coincidences that we deduce become evidence of imaginative 

 powers, not of former realities. 



Pre-C avihriari trends. — The pre-Cambrian connections of Hol- 

 arctis across the North Atlantic are worthless for Wegener's purpose, 

 because these structures were made during the first half of geologic 



1" E. B. Bailey (Nature, Nov. 5, 1927, p. 674) does actually make this connection, begin- 

 ning with the Boston basin of Carboniferous formations and continuing southwest into 

 the true Appalachians. But surely the Caledonides did not continue Into Louisiana as 

 shown on his map. An actual connection of the ends of the folds of the Boston basin 

 with those of Belgium can not be demonstrated ; this is far more readily done with the 

 Caledonides of America and northwestern Europe. Furthermore, there is no demonstrated 

 crossing, in Massachusetts or elsewhere in America, of the younger Hercynides over the 

 older Caledonides. It is the theory of the matter that Bailey is discussing, wbile Wegener 

 is saying that the several ends can be proved to have once been continuous. 



"Philip Lake, Geo. Mag., vol. 59 (1922), p. *44, 



