228 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1915. 



and, before the collapse of the Azorian region, other collapses oc- 

 curred there, the size of which, more easily measurable, staggers the 

 imagination. 



Since Eduard Suess and Marcel Bertrand taught us to regard our 

 planet and to decipher the slow or rapid transformations of its 

 face through unnumbered centuries we have become assured of the 

 existence of a very ancient continental bond between northern 

 Europe and North America and of another continental bond, also 

 very ancient, between the massive Africa and South America. There 

 was a North Atlantic continent comprising Russia, Scandinavia, 

 Great Britain, Greenland, and Canada, to which was added later 

 a southern band made up of a large part of central and western 

 Europe and an immense portion of the United States. There was 

 also a South Atlantic, or African-Brazilian, Continent extending 

 northward to the southern border of the Atlas, eastward to the 

 Persian Gulf and to Mozambique Channel, westward to the eastern 

 border of the Andes and to the Sierras of Colombia and Venezuela. 

 Between the two continents passed the mediterranean depression, 

 that ancient maritime furrow, which has formed an escarp about 

 the earth since the beginning of geologic times, and which we still 

 see so deeply marked in the present Mediterranean, the Caribbean 

 Sea, and the Sunda or Flores Sea. A chain of mountains broader 

 than the chain of the Alps, and perhaps in some parts as high as the 

 majestic Himalaya, once lifted itself on the land inclosed shore of 

 the North Atlantic continent, embracing the Vosges, the Central 

 Plateau of France, Brittany, the south of England and of Ireland, 

 and also Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and, in the United States, 

 all the Appalachian region. The two coasts which front each other 

 above the Atlantic waters 3,000 kilometers (1,875 miles) apart, that 

 of Brittany, Cornwall, and the south of Ireland on one side, that of 

 Newfoundland and Nova Scotia on the other side, are among the 

 finest estuary shores in the world, and their estuaries are face to 

 face. In the one as in the other, .the folds of the ancient chain are 

 cut abruptly, and often naturally, by the shore; and the dirigent 

 lines of the European chain are directly aligned with those of 

 the American chain. Within a few years it will be one of the 

 pleasures of oceanogra pliers, by clearing up the detailed chart of 

 the ocean beds between Ireland and Newfoundland, to establish the 

 persistence of a fold, of oriented mountainous aspect, on the site 

 of this old engulfed mountain chain. Marcel Bertrand gave the 

 name of " Hercynian " to this old chain. Eduard Suess calls it the 

 chain of the Altaides, for it comes from far-off Asia, and to him 

 the Appalachians are nothing less than the American Altaides. 



Thus the region of the Atlantic, until an era of ruin which began 

 we know not when, but the end of which was the Tertiary, was 



