THE PACIFIC ZONE 93 



the necessity of adopting the marvelous suggestion of Suess — and a sug- 

 gestion of Suess must be carefully considered even if it be marvelous — 

 that, as the ice flowed from Canada to Cincinnati, the earth-masses have 

 flowed from the Stony Tunguska across the broad reaches that later sank 

 to be the Pacific toward the magnetic north pole in Boothia Felix, fol- 

 lowing and perhaps causing the lines of magnetic declination.* 



In " Das Antliz der Erde " Suess, without asking the question why, 

 announces the fundamental distinction between the Atlantic and Pacific 

 coast types. He pictures the mountain chains around the whole Pacific 

 moving toward that ocean, while around the Atlantic and Indian oceans 

 the structures break off at the water. I had expected that his promised 

 fourth volume would be an expansion of Mr Osmond Fisher's brilliant 

 chapter explaining the Pacific as the scar where the moon was torn off, 

 on Darwin's hypothesis ; the Atlantic and Indian oceans as the fissures 

 left as Australia and the Americas floated out toward the chasm, and 

 the mountain chains about the Pacific as the last inflowing of earth 

 matter to heal the scar, as wood grows in around a pruned branch.f 

 The above suggestion of Suess involves a different but equally remark- 

 able hypothesis. 



PRINTS TORSION MAP AND DARWIN'S LINES OF WRINKLING 



We must examine Prinz's interesting torsion map % (figure 7) in con- 

 nection with the tetrahedral ideas. We can not at first avoid the criti- 

 cism that the most remarkable torsion line on the globe, the east Asiatic 

 coast, is ignored entirely, and emphasis put on the unimportant chain 

 of the Ladrones instead. 



In the second place, we consider the curved band representing the 

 Mediterranean zone to be the equator, all the curved bands above and 

 below become parallels of latitude, and are thus brought into intelligible 

 relation to the motion of the earth ; and most of the oblique lines are 

 then brought into the position of meridians and the apparent obliquity 

 in the main disappears. 



Moreover, if we redraw the map and emphasize all the northeast and 

 southeast lines, as is done in the original for the supposed torsion lines, 

 it becomes almost as good a map to illustrate Darwin's hypothesis of a 

 tidal equatorial drift of the earth crust moving westwardly more rapidly 

 at the equator than in middle latitudes.§ 



* See appendix to this paper 96 for a reprint of Suess' article. 



f Physics of the Earth's Crust, 1889, p. 336. 



JSur les similitudes que presentent les cartes terrestres et planetaire (Torsion apparent des 

 planetes par W. Prinz). Ann. de l'observatoire royal de Bruxelles, 1891, p. 304. See also Dana's 

 Manual, p. 395. 



§ Loc. cit., p. 85. 



XIII— Bull. Geol. Soc. Am., Vol. 11, 1899 



