Dead on Arrival - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 69

Wegener theory had received not too little attention but too much. Professor A. P.
Coleman accused Daly of having a “poetic imagination,” no compliment intended,
and Professor J. A. Udden saw no reason to suppose the Earth has a glassy zone at
depth. 10
The first of the three speakers at the April 18, 1923, meeting of the Washington
Academy of Sciences was Frank Taylor. Once again he appealed to capture of the
Moon by the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous, which he claimed would produce
tidal forces strong enough to move continents. Daly also spoke, providing “A Crit-
ical Review of the Taylor-Wegener Hypothesis.” Wegener's theory led to “trouble
in accounting for many facts,” Daly noted, indeed, “so obvious are [Wegener's] lo-
gical inconsequences and his failure properly to weigh ascertained facts that there
is danger of too speedy a rejection of the main idea involved.” 11
Daly wondered whether “a better statement of the hypothesis can be made.”
He summarized the geophysical evidence and concluded that contraction, erosion,
lessening of the Earth's rotational velocity, and deformation of the “geoid” could
have broken up “a Paleozoic continent” and compelled “the sliding of the frag-
ments.”
Echoing Taylor, Daly ended: “Whether or not this sliding hypothesis can be
showntobemorevalid that Wegener'sdrifthypothesis, geologists havegoodreas-
on to retain the root idea.” 12 This qualified endorsement of mobile continents was
the closest any prominent American geologist would come to endorsing continent-
al drift for the next forty years.
Germanic Pseudoscience
By the early 1920s, Thomas Chamberlin was approaching his dotage. He was
well along in bequeathing to his son Rollin the mantle of geological authority he
had so long worn as well as the czardom of the family's proprietary Journal of
Geology . But no one who claimed geological authority could let continental drift
go unanswered. Chamberlin's vehicle was an imaginary conversation between the
Dromio twins, separated at birth in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors . 13 In
coded language designed to amuse, Chamberlin ridiculed Taylor's and Wegener's
theories, though never by name. As Robert Newman writes, “In his earlier conten-
tion with Lord Kelvin, TCC had directed his ire straight at his target. Wegener was
beneath acknowledgement.” 14
Edward Berry took another swipe at drift in 1924, this time in a four-paragraph
topic review in Science . 15 Berry titled the review “Germanic Pseudo-Science”;
from there it went downhill. The author of the “pretentious-looking publication”