326 



C. SKOTTSBERG 



Einzelheiten einzugehen, auf der asiatischen Seite des Ozeans zu suchen, der sie jedenfalls 

 in den betrachteten geologischen Zeiten erheblich naher als heute gelegen haben miis- 

 sen. Die l)ioIogischen Verhaltnisse scheinen dies zu bestatigen. So haben nach G rise- 

 bach und Driide die Hawaiinseln eine Flora, die am nachsten verwandt nicht mit 

 Nordamerika ist, das ihnen doch am nachsten liegt, imd von dem heute Luft- und 

 Meeresstromung herkommen, sondern mit der alten Weh. Die Insel Juan Fernandez 

 zeigt nach Skottsberg gar keine Verwandtschaft mit der doch so nahen Kiiste von 

 Chile, sondern mit Feuerland, Antarktika, Neuseeland und den anderen pazifischen 

 Inseln. Doch sei hervorgehoben, dass die biologischen Verhaltnisse auf Inseln allge- 

 mein schwerer zu deuten sind als diejenigen auf grosseren Landriiumen. 



In the 3rd edition p. 59 we read after "Inseln": "Dies passt vorziiglich zu unserer 

 Vorstellun*,^ dass Siidamerika, nach Westen wandernd, sich ihr erst in letzter 

 Zeit so weit genahert hat, dass der Florenuntersciiied auffallend wird." In the 

 following editions this sentence was excluded. 



Certainly I never said anything like that and I fail to see where Wegener 

 got his strange ideas; just as many other writers I have pointed out that the Andean- 

 Chilean element is stronger than any other. Even to a iirm believer in the festoon 

 theory the Juan F^ernandez and Desventuradas Islands ought to offer insuperable 

 difficulties. WEGENER built his theory on the island arcs accompanying the Asiatic- 

 Australian continental border; geologically these arcs are continental, but when 

 he came to island chains like Hawaii, the Marshall Islands and the Society Islands 

 — and we can add Marquesas, Tuamotu etc. — all of which are situated outside 

 the deep trenches, neovolcanic and regarded as built up from the depths of 

 the ocean — he was driven to assume that they have a sialic basement hidden 

 under the basaltic layers. He thinks that this assumption is supported by pend- 

 ulum observations, the force of gravitation being greater over the islands than 

 over the open ocean where, of course, a sial cover is incompatible with his dis- 

 placement theory. 



Wegener's theories were taken up by Du ToiT and presented in a modi- 

 fied form {(Si); I shall quote his attitude toward the festoons. 



As Wegener has observed, they are all comparable in size, regular, linked to- 

 gether en echelon and convex to the Pacific; each shuts off a large portion of sea and 

 fronts an oceanic deep, while the concave side bears a row of volcanoes. To Suess we 

 owe the conception of the development of successive arcuate asymmetrical fold-waves mi- 

 grating outwards from the more stable "Amphitheatre of Irkutsk", which led to progressive 

 expansion of Asia towards the Pacific. While the hypothesis has since had to be ap- 

 preciately modified, its fundamental ideas have been brilliantly confirmed by subsequent 

 investigations . . . Significant are the oceanic fossae that immediately front the convex 

 sides of the arcs — foredeeps subsiding in advatice of the outward-moving geoantoclines 

 and incidentally tracts of marked coastal instability (pp. 186-187). 



How far did this outward-movement, these advance-folds proceed? Does Du 

 TOTT allow all the Pacific island chains to be linked up here.^ When the great 

 WNW' swing of Asia is replaced by an expansion toward the Pacific, the system 

 of rifts in the ocean floor, over which the island chains as claimed by most 

 geologists were formed, did not exist, because there was no tension to account 

 for them; instead, series of ripples were crumpled up on the floor. The transfor- 



