Wegener's Displacement Theory. 341 



Having obtained the outlines of the masses of Sal he now 

 endeavours to fit them together. Maps, owing to their inevitable 

 distortion, cannot be employed. He uses a globe and transfers the 

 outlines to tracing paper cut and slashed to fit it. The method is 

 unsatisfactory, as anyone who has tried it will admit ; and it is 

 easier to obtain an accurate representation of the mass of Sal by 

 applying a sheet of plasticine to the globe and cutting it into the 

 shape required. 



With the liberty that he has allowed himself Wegener finds that 

 some of the masses fit together sufficiently well ; but he is not 

 satisfied. He considers what the shapes must have been before the 

 great movements of the Tertiary era, and he proceeds to flatten out 

 the folds of the Alps, the Himalayas, and other modern mountain 

 ranges. A little more freedom is now unavoidable, for even in the 

 best-known cases estimates of the effect vary widely, and in most 

 no estimate of any value can be made. He does not think that the 

 flattening out of the Alpine folds would obliterate the Mediterranean, 

 but he imagines that the unfolding of the Himalayas would produce 

 an elongated Indian Peninsula extending through nearly sixty 

 degrees of the earth's surface. He does not enter into details. 



He now fits Africa to South America and brings them both into 

 contact with Antarctica. Australia also is joined to the Antarctic 

 Continent, and Madagascar and the extremity of his elongated India 

 are wedged between Australia and Africa. In the north, Greenland, 

 eastern Canada, and north-western Europe come together, but a 

 wide space is left between the rest of North America on the west 

 and southern Europe and laorthern Africa on the east. 



These are the principal features in his reconstruction of the Sal 

 as it existed at the close of the Carboniferous period, after the 

 Hercynian folding. It brings the fragments of Gondwana Land into 

 the neighbourhood of the South Pole, and thus he accounts for the 

 Permo-Carboniferous glacial deposits of those fragments ; but he 

 has made it more difficult than ever to explain the existence of the 

 Gondwana flora in northern Russia. 



Undoubtedly it is the fitting of Africa to South America that makes 

 the most general appeal. The correspondence in their coast-lines 

 has often been noticed, and vague suggestions have been made that 

 they may have come apart from one another. The correspondence 

 is not so precise as casual observation indicates, for the angles of 

 the corners are not the same. If South America be fitted into the 

 Gulf of Guinea, either its eastern or its northern coast must separate 

 rather widely from the coast of Africa. It is the eastern coast that 

 fits most closely, and the fi.t is as good as could reasonably be 

 expected. But other coincidences, presumably accidental, may be 

 found upon the globe. If we take the Australian mass — excluding 

 the greater part of New Guinea, which is geologically distinct — • 

 and place it in the Arabian Sea, the fit is nearly as good, and in some 

 respects more remarkable. The north-western concavity of the 



