196 
MAJOR EARTH FEATURES 
mains of which are seen to-day in Madagascar, the Mascarenes, 
Laccadives, and Maldives. 
The alleged proofs for the existence of an equatorial, or south¬ 
ern, continent extending over the whole of the South Atlantic 
and the Indian Ocean will not stand under rigid criticism. For 
the maps which show a preponderance of continents over sea- 
basins in the southern hemisphere during Triassic times, and 
which misled Gregory into his hypothesis of the turning around 
of the tetrahedral form to agree with the main lines of the 
earth's surface, we can, with greater justice, substitute another 
interpretation which harmonizes better with the teaching of a 
certain permanence of the present sea-basins. 
The overwhelming majority of geologists have adopted the 
opinion of Suess that the Pacific Ocean is a very old one, which 
has remained the greatest ocean of our planet ever since Cambric 
times. A contrary view has found its chief representative in 
Haug.^^ Haug on purely theoretical grounds, has arrived at the 
opinion that during the Mesozoic era a continent must have 
occupied the greater part of the present Pacific Ocean. He sees, 
in the geosynclines, labile zones of the earth’s crust, having great 
piles of marine sediments, which always are laid down between 
great continental masses, and believes, therefore, that the great 
circum-Pacific geosyncline of the Mesozoic times demands a 
continent on its inner side. 
The only support for the existence of such a Pacific continent 
is given by Burckhardt’s proof of a land west of the Chile- 
Argentinian Cordillera in Jurassic times. However, his Jurassic 
studies show only the necessity of postulating an island lying 
parallel to the Andes between 25° and 40° S. latitude, and not 
of an extended South Pacific continent. We may there, with 
Andree, {loc. cit., p. 25), refuse to accept Haug’s Pacific conti¬ 
nent, and regard it as an entirely hypothetical one. 
We started out with the most geocratic period of the earth’s 
history in order to establish the maximum losses that the conti¬ 
nents could have suflfered in comparison with the sea-basins. It 
has been shown that the interchange between continental masses 
28 Plan of earth and its causes: Geogr. Journal, Vol. XIII, p. 246, 1899. 
29 Ges geosynclinaux et les aires continentales: Bull. Soc. G6ol. de France, 3d 
ser., T. XXVIII, pp. 6, 7, 657, 1900. 
30 Beitrage zur Kenntnis der Jura — und Kreideformation der Cordillere: Pal- 
aeontographica, G Bd., pp. 128, 136, 1903. 
