226 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1<>24 



Stan as in Tasmania, as much in the Falklands as in the Transvaal ; 

 and this glacial episode, many times repeated, seems to have been 

 as important and as general, even if not more so, than the great 

 glacial invasions of the north during the quarternary period. 



All this is very difficult to explain and very embarrassing to the 

 geologist. One has dreamed of the displacement of the poles and 

 attempted to place the South Pole in the Indian Ocean not very far 

 from the Cape of Good Hope to account for the cold climate and 

 the glacial invasions. But then two obstacles are encountered : First, 

 as there is a difference of nearly 70° of latitude between the Cape 

 of Good Hope and the northern border of Hindustan, at the foot of 

 the Himalayas, it is necessary to carry the glaciers which came from 

 the South Pole even within 20° of the Equator ; further, the North 

 Pole, antipode of the South Pole, would then fall in Mexico or in 

 the Rocl^ Mountains, in a country where the deposits of the Upper 

 Carboniferous are of calcereous Fusulina — that is to say, sediments 

 formed in a warm, not polar, sea. 



With the theory of Wegener 3verything arranges itself, and there 

 is no more difficulty. Let us suppose that in the Carboniferous the 

 African mass may be joined to the Brazil, that the Hindustan may 

 even be joined to the African mass, the southern point of Hindustan 

 coming to attach itself to the east coast of Madagascar, and Mada- 

 gascar being itself attached to the African coast ; that Australia may 

 come to aggregate itself also to this mass by joining its west coast 

 to the east coast of Hindustan. There is thus a great southern con- 

 tinental mass, which a transverse sea, the Tethys, separates from 

 another, the northern mass thus uniting again North America to 

 the north of Eurasia. By simply gliding let us displace on the 

 globe the two masses and Tethys, with regard to the supposedly 

 fixed axis of the earth. Let us arrest this movement in such a man- 

 ner that the South Pole may be in what is to-day the Indian Ocean, 

 not far from the region where we have made Australia, Hindustan, 

 Madagascar, and Africa come together ; all this region becomes polar 

 antarctic, and it is therefore quite natural that the climate there 

 should be rigorous and promote glacial invasions. At the same time 

 the North Pole falls no longer in the Rocky Mountains, but in the 

 open Pacific, on account of the union of North America and of 

 Eurasia — that is to say, in a region whose geographic and geologic 

 conditions during the Carboniferous period are totally unknown to 

 us. Finally, and this is the most seductive part of the hypothesis, 

 the coal basins of the Tethys and of the northern border of the 

 Tethys, those of China, southern Siberia, southern Russia, Poland, 

 Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain, Canada, and the United 

 States are all either on the Equator or within less than 30° of north 

 latitude. One, then, can understand the warm climate which reigns 



