188 
MAJOR EARTH FEATURES 
province, such as the east half of Tethys represents, we need not 
expect differences in the sediments on the north and south coasts. 
We must, however, expect these, if we remove Gondwanaland 
44 degrees to the south, out of the realm of Tethys, and especially 
during that time when the Indian mass was broken away from 
its union with the African block and surrounded on all sides by 
the abyssal depths of the Indian Ocean, which opposed impassible 
barriers to any addition of neritic faunal elements from Tethys. 
A very strong objection to Wegener’s hypothesis therefore exists 
in the similarity between the united sedimentary zones of Gond¬ 
wanaland and Eurasia occurring in the mountain‘chains of the 
Himalayas, of farther India, and of southern China. 
Since Wegener brings the folding of the Himalayas into a 
casual relationship with the uniting of the Indian mass to Eurasia, 
he must of necessity ascribe this union to the earliest possible 
division of Tertic time, since the principal folding of the Hima¬ 
layas falls in the epoch of the deposition of the Siwalik beds. 
It has been shown above that that union must have been existent 
in the time of the Late Jurassic (cf. the spread of Megalosaurus 
to Victoria). Tertic land vertebrates, which are apparently older 
than the Siwalik fauna (Manchhar and Bugti fauna), point like¬ 
wise to the faunal exchange between anterior India and Europe 
during a period long previous to the principal foldings of the 
Himalayas, and make the association of the latter with the hori¬ 
zontal movement of a continental platform completely untenable. 
Since Australia must on the one side have been torn loose from 
the Indian mass at the beginning of the Cenozoic era, and on the 
other side remained united with Antarctica until the Quaternaric 
era, the single Antarctic land connection which was at all likely 
for Tertic time, i.e., that between South America and Australia, 
seems to be untenable for the followers of the Wegener hypothe¬ 
sis. 
Wegener sees a main argument in support of the supposed 
coming together of the southern continents into a region centering 
around the south point of Africa, in the thereby assured possi¬ 
bility of explaining the Permian Ice Age. “We only need to 
place the south pole in the now very much limited realm of ice 
in order to remove from this occurrence all that is inexplicable.” 
This optomistic assumption I cannot share, in view of the ap- 
