Dead on Arrival - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 68

ents.” 4 This early meeting produced perhaps the most balanced consideration of
continental drift of any for the next four decades. Several speakers were favor-
able, pointing out the evidence that supported the theory while duly noting oth-
er evidence that did not. Dr. Harold Jeffreys, whom we will meet again, observed
that the mechanisms that had been proposed as the cause of drift were “very small
and quite insufficient.” It would be difficult for the continents to plow through the
ocean floors, for the floors were the stronger, said Jeffreys. 5
That year the Geographical Review carried a criticism of Wegener's second edi-
tion and of two articles by his father-in-law Köppen, written by Harry F. Reid.
He identified the pair as “meteorologists stationed at the Marine Observatory at
Hamburg” who had “apparently worked more or less in conjunction.” Reid dis-
missed their argument and their methods, saying that “science has developed by
the painstaking comparison of observations and, through close induction, by tak-
ing one short step backwards to their cause; not by first guessing at the cause and
then deducing the phenomena.” 6
The theory fared no better at the meeting of the Royal Geographical Society on
the afternoon of January 22, 1923. The British geologist Philip Lake (1865-1949)
said that not only was “Wegener's world not an ordinary one” but that his methods
were improper. 7 It is “easy to fit the pieces together if you alter their shapes,” said
Lake, “but your success is no proof that you have placed them in their original
position. It is not even a proof that the pieces belong to the same puzzle, or that
all the pieces are present.” 8 Glossopteris is found in rocks from Kashmir, Afgh-
anistan, northern Russia, and Siberia, according to Lake, far from the continents
that Wegener had rearranged into Gondwanaland. He summed up: “The geological
features of the two sides of the Atlantic do not unite in the way that Wegener ima-
gines, and if the continental masses ever were continuous they were not fitted as
Wegener has fitted them” (187-194).
On the other side of the ocean, American geologists were awakening to the im-
plications of the theory. At the 1922 meeting of the Geological Society of Amer-
ica, Harvard's Reginald A. Daly (1871-1957) spoke about continental drift. His
remarks were extemporaneous, so we have only his abstract to go on. The title of
his talk was “Earth's Crust and Its Evolution.” Daly concluded that the Earth has a
“thin, solid crust on a elastico-viscous substratum,” allowing him to sketch a the-
ory of continents and ocean basins “based on the general idea in the Taylor-We-
gener hypothesis.” 9
In the briefly reported discussion that followed, Prof. W. H. Hobbs said, “As I
have listened to Professor Daly's paper I have thought that if he were not such a
brilliant geologist what a fine trial lawyer he would be.” Hobbs remarked that the