MAJOR EARTH FEATURES 
191 
the coast regions of anterior India, which were at that time united 
to South Africa, around Australia, Antarctica, South Africa, and 
South America, to California, would be unnatural, in view of the 
complete absence of marine Early and Mid Triassic beds in all 
the region mentioned. A no less strong argument against the sep¬ 
aration of Alaska from eastern Asia by a deep sea lies in the 
distribution of the Late Triassic Pseudomonotis fauna, which 
has everywhere been imbedded in sediments of ‘a very shallow 
sea. The circum-Pacific geosyncline of Haug, which lasted 
throughout Jurassic and Early Cretacic times, has as an unavoid¬ 
able corollary an outer continental zone, in no place broken 
through by a deep sinking. 
If we postulate a union between North America and the Euro¬ 
pean continental block across western Ireland, lasting until Late 
Tertic time, we must therefore assume a breaking up of the 
connection between Alaska and the eastern Asiatic peninsula, and 
the creation of an opening 35 degrees in width in the region of 
the Behring Sea. Now Alaska, as Suess has shown, and as is 
.coming out still more clearly from the newer work of competent 
American geologists, is built up precisely after the pattern of 
the Asiatic island chain. It belongs, in structure, decidedly to 
eastern Asia, and forms a unit with the latter, at least in the 
same measure as Laurentia does with Fennoscandia. The unity 
is self-evident, not only in the contemporaneous and similar 
mountain-making events, which we may place in the period after 
the separation of Europe from North America, but also in the 
similar distribution and appearance of the older sediments be¬ 
ginning with the Devonic, so that a tearing apart of Alaska from 
the eastern Asiatic peninsula means the breaking up of a natural 
unit. 
Furthermore, Wegener’s fundamental postulate of the splitting 
off of the two American continental masses from that of the 
Old World with the origin of the Cordilleras, is contrary to the 
structure of Central America and the West Indies. Costa Rica 
and Panama are also fragments of a continental mass and do not 
show the Andean structure at all. Why, we may reasonably ask, 
is the folded coastal shelf lacking here, and why do the Andes 
bend sharply away from the western edge of the continental mass 
and proceed through northern Colombia and Venezuela eastward 
