184 
MAJOR EARTH FEATURES 
Pacific Ocean, but maintained its connection with Australia until 
the Quaternaric times; while the union of Australia with anterior 
India must have been broken through at least during Jurassic 
time^. 
The folding of the South American Andes and the Himalayas 
was brought by Wegener into genetic relationship with the break¬ 
ing through of the; South Atlantic and with the joining of the 
peninsula of anterior India with Eurasia.^^ The shelf which 
formed the free shore of the separated continental mass, with 
its thick sediments, was pushed up in folded mountains. If we 
accept this premise of Wegener’s, then we arrive at the conclusion 
that the Triassic and Jurassic sediments of the Himalayas and 
the Salt Range must have been deposited, not where they are 
to-day, but between the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, 
and that the mediterranean zone of Tethys started in the Indian 
Ocean. The latter, under this hypothesis, must, during the whole 
Mesozoic era, have covered that area which now is occupied by 
the East Indian masses and which at that time still lay alongside 
of South Africa. 
The radical differences between the vertebrate faunas negative 
with great finality a union of South America with Africa lasting 
into Middle Tertic times.^® Not only had South America built 
up a special development center for the mammals, isolated from 
the neighboring regions, from the earliest Eocene on, but this 
differentiation among the older vertebrates reached back at least 
to Permian times. If South America were really connected along 
its east coast directly with the west coast of Africa, how can we 
explain the complete absence in South America of the rich Per¬ 
mian and Triassic reptilian and Stegocephalian fauna of South 
Africa? In both realms the same life conditions existed during 
the Anthracolithic period, and during the Late Carbonic Period 
the Lepidodendron flora of the northern hemisphere spread on the 
one side so far as Tete on the Zambesi River, and on the other 
side to Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil, and was later succeeded by 
the Glossopteris flora, which already in the Permian times had 
[14 The Andes, however, appear to have been folded at the close of Cretacic times, 
and their present elevation is due to vertical uplift in Pleistocene time. These facts 
do not fit in with Wegener’s time-origin of the South Atlantic.] 
[15 Most American paleontologists have given up all connections between these lands 
at any time in the Cenozoic era.] 
