256 THE EVOLUTION OF CONTINENTS. 
THE EVOLUTION OF CONTINENTS. 
BY CHARLES B. WARRING, Ph.D. 
The evolution of which I shall speak to-night, has 
nothing to do with the formation of mountains, valleys 
and plains, the surface features of the continents. It 
preceded them, and bears to them the reiation that the 
foundation does to a building. It presented the same 
problems ages before the first mountain was lifted, or 
the first valley eroded, which it presents to-day. 
If the water could be removed from the oceans, the land 
would appear as two immense plateaux, with numerous 
smaller ones, occupying all together about sixty miilion 
square miles. These plateaux would be seen to rise 
quite abruptly ten thousand feet and more above the 
great valleys which separate them, and which are now 
the receptacles of nearly all the water on theglobe. The 
existence of such enormous masses rising to such a 
great height above the general level, in apparent viola- 
tion of that law of hydrostatics—the surface of fluids 
must be level—presents the first of our problems, for al- 
though the continents and ocean bottoms are solid 
enough now, there was a time when they were fluid. 
Then, of course, the surface was level; the problem is 
how to get from the level surface to one presenting such 
immense elevations. 
Another problem confronts us when we consider the 
contour of the land. There is a remarkable parallelism 
between the shores of the Atlantic, while the opposite 
is true of the shores of the Pacific. If we could move 
South America over to Africa, its eastern angle would 
fit surprisingly into the gulf of Guinea, and the two 
coasts thence southward would almost coincide. The 
great western projection of Africa fits into the recess be- 
tween North and South America. Thence northward 
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