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Show IN EARLY HISTORY OF MODERN WORLD All Continents United, Is Theory. The Pacific ocean resembles a great pond, while the Atlantic ocean resembles a great river. This Is one of the interesting pieces of evidence brought forward to support the Wegener Weg-ener hypothesis the theory that all the continents were once united into in-to a single continent. Dr. Harlow Shapley, famous Harvard Har-vard astronomer, has suggested sinking sink-ing a three-mile shaft Into the earth as a means of testing the Wegener hypothesis. The evidence for the theory is summed up by Edwin Tenny Brewster Brew-ster in his interesting book, "This Puzzling Planet." "Contrast the Atlantic ocean with the Pacific," he writes. "There are marked and curious differences between be-tween the two, though these are a good deal obscured by our ordinary maps and are best to be looked for on a globe. "The Pacific is a round basin, a sort of gigantic pond, but the Atlantic Atlan-tic is a sort of gigantic river that winds from the top of the earth to the bottom, always of about the same width. "In fact," Brewster continues, "if one went by the shape of the coast on the two sides of the Atlantic one might well say that South America has cracked off from Africa, the eastern extension of Brazil once occupying occu-pying the gulf of Guinea, the western west-ern end of the Sahara belonging to the Caribbean region, Greenland jammed up against the west coast of Norway and Newfoundland one of the British isles. "If one could push the two Americas Ameri-cas eastward and a little north, so that Greenland lay against Canada on one side and Norway on the other, with Newfoundland and the British isles pushed into the North sea, the fit would be surprising. "There really is not a little reason for thinking that the uniform width of the Atlantic and the remarkable fit between its two sides is something more than accident. There is a good deal of evidence to show that during most of geologic time, and up to what for a geologist is rather a recent re-cent date, North and South America Amer-ica actually were parts of Europe-Asia-Africa but cracked loose and floated off." The horse and the elephant are two good examples which support the theory of land bridges or an original orig-inal united continent, David Dietz comments, in the New York World-Telegram. World-Telegram. Fossil remains of the horse are found in certain rock layers lay-ers slightly older in Europe. The fossil elephant appears first in Africa and later in North America. Brewster believes the evidence is better for the Wegener hypothesis. "The coal points very much to this theory," he writes. "The coal of Pennsylvania, New England and Nova Scotia is of the same age as that of the British isles, France, Germany Ger-many and Spain, and is altogether very like it "Moreover, throughout these two coal districts, through the entire length of the Appalachian mountains on our side of the ocean and in Scandinavia Scan-dinavia on the other, the mountain ridges run northeast and southwest, as If they were all parts of the same system, and In various ways the rocks match surprisingly. |