2s 
FIFTEENTH REPORT. 
Among the “many bonds of union” which, as Mr. Taylor says, show 
that Africa and South America were formerly united, is the faunal and 
tloral evidence in favor of a former land connection between Africa 
and Europe and northern South America, along some such lines as 
have been proposed by von lliering. Ortmann, Scharff and others. While 
this instance is only one of several, it is particularly applicable in the 
present discussion and 1 have developed this phase of the subject in a 
separate paper. 
But Mr. Taylor's theory is unsatisfactory in several ways. 
For instance, 1 cannot see that there is any place in it for coastal 
matching together between Africa and North America. As T have 
demonstrated, and it is easy to verify, the convex northwestern coast of 
Africa fits into the concave southeastern coast of North America in a 
manner not less significant than the matching together that is possible 
between North America and Greenland on the one hand and Africa and 
Soui h America on the other. There are no mountain structures available 
to take care of crustal creep in this particular instance. We may pass 
over related difficulties on small scale in Madagascar, Borneo and other 
islands, confining our attention to the major features. 
In the Atlantic, if we could overlook the above objection, the general 
evidences of separation might be held to favor his theory almost as much 
as they do that of loss of mass, but. on a broader view, a seemingly 
insurmountable difficulty arises in the peculiarly reciprocal conditions 
in the Atlantic and Pacific. In the latter, we find the coastal evidences 
of movement set in a radial or rotating arrangement with the Austra- 
lian focus ;is a centre and everything indicates converging crustal move- 
ment toward that centre as contrasted with the separations, the widening 
of the Atlantic rift, which lie opposite to it upon the globe. Mr. Taylor 
believes that, associated with a change in the earth's oblateness, there 
was outflow of mass from high latitudes toward low the world around, 
but the lines of motion that he figures, if depicted upon the globe would 
do about as well for convergence toward the Australian focus as my 
own. The flow of mass was not alone away from the Greenland horst 
and from the south polar regions toward the north, it was away from 
flu* whole Atlantic ocean north and south and toward the focus men- 
tioned. TIis theory makes no provision for this peculiar distribution 
of deforming force and it does not seem as if anything can explain it so 
efficiently as does the loss of mass in the region toward which the 
continental sheets moved. If there is nothing more involved than what 
he says, all of those peculiar features which T have pointed out in the 
Pacific hemisphere in this connection have to be disregarded. 
There still remains the broad objection that crustal corrugations and 
overthrusts are inadequate to account for the amount of crustal move- 
ment indicated on the globe. 
Suppose we take the case which is easiest for the theory, the 560 
miles of separation between Greenland and Labrador. Draw a repre- 
sentative line southwest from Greenland, on a great circle, in the di- 
ced ion of the crustal creep of North America. Prolonged, this line 
strikes the Australian focus. It might be claimed that we have the 
whole distance from Labrador to the Australian coast in which to 
account for the 560 miles of creep. Reference to Mr. Taylor's figure 7, 
however, discloses the fact that he concedes that the foldings from the 
