SLIDING CONTINENTS

Not to be outdone by the science of biology, which has held the limelight for the past half-century through its discovery of the origin of man, geology is making a bid for prominence with a brand new theory of the origin of continents. The other day Professor Wegener of the Austrian University of Graf, while training his hyper-scientific powers of observation on a map of the Atlantic, noticed that the American coast line would fit into the Afro-European one as exactly as the pieces of a picture puzzle. From this interesting phenomenon, he deduced the theory that they had indeed so fitted at one time. Therefore he concluded that the continents were originally one piece of land, and attached Australia to the west coast of Cochin-China to make the picture complete.

Explanations being now in order. Professor Wegener pointed to the well-known sliding propensities of continents to account for their present state of mutual aloofness, thus causing great offence to Professor Jeffrey, who had based his story of the origin of the earth on opposite premises. Scientific discoveries, however, thrive on opposition, and Professor Wegener is not alarmed by the objections of a few conservatives.

Moreover, the uni-continental theory has too many historic possibilities to be lightly tossed aside. It is at once the key to the vexatious problem of the migration of the Indians from Asia to America and the mysterious disappearance of the fabled Atlantis, which Plate mentions as being just beyond the Gates of Hercules in his time. Perhaps in the future when American history is no longer honeycombed with patriotic myths, school-children in addition to learning that the Pilgrims did not and on Plymouth Rock, will also be taught that Columbus sailed west, not because he thought the World was round, but because a Mendelian instinct inherited from Cro-Magnon ancestry, showed him that there was land in that direction.