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north Russia and the American Continent were once joined)
It doesn't seem tactful to make such a move
At rather a delicate juncture, to prove
That once the U.S.--though in ages afar
Was once with what now is the U.S.S.R.
W.K.H.
From Punch, July 7, 1948.
"A geologist thinks that Britain is slowly tilting towards the south. Holiday
makers are asked not to crowd together on the end of Brighton pier."
To return seriously to the matter in hand, the following extracts are taken from the
work entitled The Origin of Continents and Oceans by Alfred Wegener, Professor of
Geophysics and Meteorology at the University of Graz, Austria.
In the introduction to the English translation, John W. Evans, C.B.E., F.R.S., President
of the Geological Society, makes the following observation:
One of the most interesting questions raised by Professor Wegener is the possibility of
actually detecting the relative movement of land masses at the present time by
instrumental means . . . . . In 1922, Lt.-Col. Jensen made a careful determination of the
longitude by means of wireless signals from Naven . . . . . he considered that this was a
confirmation of the westward movement of Greenland."
The reader will note the words `the relative movement of land masses' and `the
westward movement of Greenland'. These are words of a scientist who apparently had
no intention of relating his findings to the teaching of the Word. Professor Wegener calls
his views `The Displacement Theory' and draws attention to the similarity of the
contours of the coast line of Brazil and Africa.
"Not only does the great right-angled bend formed by the Brazilian coast at Cape San
Roque find its exact counterpart in the re-entrant angle of the African coast line near the
Cameroons, but also, south of these two corresponding points, every projection of the
Brazilian side corresponds to a similarly shaped bay in the African, and conversely each
indentation on the Brazilian coast has a complementary protuberance on the African.
Experiment with a compass on a globe shows that their dimensions agree accurately.
This new idea is called the theory of the displacement of continents, or more shortly, the
displacement theory, since its prominent component is the assumption of great horizontal
drifting movements which the continental blocks underwent in the course of geological
time and which presumably continue even today. According to this idea, to take a
particular case, millions of years ago, the South American continental plateau lay directly
adjoining the African plateau, even forming one large continental mass. This first split in
cretaceous* (* - Cretaceous = chalk like. A geological term for certain rock formations.)
time into two parts, which then like floating icebergs drifted farther and farther apart."
The reader will not fail to mark the figure employed here. How different from the
conception of a solid earth, and how near an approximation to the Scriptural teaching of
the earth spread out on sea and flood, is the figure `like floating icebergs', yet this figure
occurs in a scientific and non-Biblical treatise.