Beyond a few textbooks global in scope, the literature of geology more often expressed the history of a state or at most a subcontinent. The latter works typically discussed limited areas in great detail, and though they sometimes provided a cross-sectional diagram of the strata, they rarely had more than a local sketch map. Wegener therefore had to work from the descriptions in the texts treating the locale or the exposure and, from a latitude and longitude or the name of a town, find a way to plot the description, or the “center” of the distribution—which might actually be quite scattered and have no discernible center—on a globe or a map.
An example of the difficulty of extracting this information comes from one of Wegener’s important sources, the two-volume treatise Das Salz: Dessen Vorkommen und Verwertung in sämtlichen Staaten der Erde (Salt: its occurrence and exploitation in all countries of the world) (1906–1909) by Josef Ottokar Freiherr von Buschmann (1854–1921).38 This 1,200-page compendium of saltworks around the world, prepared by a finance minister, was considerably more interested in the cost per unit weight than in the geological age of the deposits or their particular mineralogy. Organized by national sovereignty, with deposits located only by the name of the nearest town, without a single map or illustration, and with an index that covered only the volume for Europe (and not the more useful volume for the rest of the world), it was extremely difficult to use—often indicating only in passing that a certain deposit in India was Miocene and one in New York State was Silurian.
Buschmann put tremendous effort into the survey, and if much of the information was of considerable antiquity, it was all that was available. It laid out schematically, in a way that one might discover over many long evenings of reading, what information existed on various deposits of sea salt, rock salt, gypsum, and other economic minerals of this group. Sometimes Wegener had to extract the information very indirectly—that a certain salt mine was near Mount Safed-Koh in Afghanistan, reached by going east out of town from Kabul,39 or that in the western part of the Karroo in South Africa, in an area called Graff-Reinert, 322 kilometers (200 miles) from the coast, there were salt lakes at an elevation of 1,524 meters (5,000 feet). With the aid of an atlas and a geological handbook, one might be able to infer with some hazard a geological age for such deposits, but it was very boring and taxing work.
The burden of finding good data was immeasurably lightened by one particular series, the Handbuch der Regionalen Geologie. This ambitious series, designed and edited by the German stratigrapher and paleontologist Gustav Steinmann (1856–1929) and his younger colleague, the structural geologist Otto Wilckens (1876–1943), had begun appearing in the 1890s, and by 1921, twenty-one of the projected fifty-eight parts had appeared, roughly one per year.40 The authors of each volume were recognized specialists who had been field geologists, typically for many years, in the regions they covered.
The handbooks, all edited and published in Germany, nevertheless were written in German, English, or French, depending on the author. The volume for West Africa was in French, the volume for North America in English, and the volumes for Syria, Arabia, and Mesopotamia in German. Moreover, field areas covered by the authors did not always correspond to their national or imperial domains: Kurt Leuchs (1881–1947), who wrote the volume on Central Asia, was an Austrian geologist; Robert Douvillé (1881–1914), who produced the volume on Spain, was a French paleontologist; Otto Nordenskjöld (1869–1928), who produced the volume on Antarctica, was a Swedish geologist and oceanographer.41
Some of the handbooks were so extensive that they had subeditors; the more intensively studied a country or region, the more likely it was to have very local experts. For instance, the volume entitled The British Isles and the Channel Islands, edited by J. W. Evans (1857–1930), had thirteen contributors. This particular volume, written in English and with exclusively English authors, had the strange destiny of having been published in Germany, by a German publisher, in the middle of the First World War (1917); it was not available for review in England until 1920–1921.42
If these volumes had a bias, it was the bias of explorers, geological travelers, and prospectors (economic geologists) in general: a strong focus on economically valuable and exploitable minerals; but all of the volumes were brought into line and balance by the general editor’s insistence on a very strict format. Both the bias and format were very beneficial to Wegener: if there was coal, limestone, salt, or gypsum, the authors typically covered these deposits in detail.
Each volume began the same way, with an introductory essay titled “Regional Boundaries and General Character,” accompanied by a sketch map of the area covered. The treatment was then divided into detailed studies of subregions. Each of these sections began with a “Morphological Overview,” discussing the latitude and longitude, area covered, typical topography, presence or absence of mountains, maximum and minimum elevations, presence or absence of volcanic action, and so on. Then followed the “Stratigraphy and Petrology,” presented from oldest to youngest using conventional geological time markers (codified in the late nineteenth century) giving the typical rock type and categorizing the fossil contents by species, where appropriate. Stratigraphic rocks came first, then eruptive and plutonic, again by time period. Finally, there was a section titled “Tectonics and Evolutionary History.” The word “evolution” here did not mean biological evolution as in the origin of species, but the more general sense of “developmental evolution,” that is, geological history.
Sometimes, in a way very useful for Wegener, the volumes would conclude with comparison with nearby regions outside the coverage of the book. For instance, Nordenskjöld’s Antarktis (1913) contained an outline chart comparing West Antarctica with South America, from the Jurassic through the postglacial period, giving the names of the principal formations and whether the “facies” (type of rock) was transgressive or regressive—meaning whether the oceans were advancing or receding at that time—and where the history of these two regions was identical and where it was different.43
Because Wegener intended to draw a separate map for each period of geological history, the organization of these volumes of the series allowed him to dip into all the volumes and attend only to what they had to say about the Carboniferous, the Jurassic, or the Eocene. This was the very opposite end of the spectrum from Buschmann in terms of ease of use.
Wegener liked the design of the handbook so much that he adapted and copied it as the format for his work. Let us consider as an example chapter 3 of Die Klimate der geologischen Vorzeit, “Klimagürtel im Mesozoikum” (Climate bands of the Mesozoic).44 Wegener treated the three standard time intervals of the Mesozoic in turn: the Triassic, the Jurassic, and the Cretaceous. For each of these sections, he considered the evidence in the same order: (1) traces of ice, (2) coal, (3) salt, gypsum, desert sandstone, (4) plant fossils, (5) animal fossils. Within each of these time divisions he considered the geographic regions in the same order: North America, Europe, Asia, and then South America, Africa, Oceania, and the polar regions.
The approach was unflinchingly empirical. Köppen and Wegener were subsequently criticized for having asserted that the climate zones of the past were like those of the present in every period of the past, including the presence of glacial ice, but this criticism is certainly not supported by the text. Examination of this chapter on the Mesozoic shows no attempt whatever to describe or map traces of glaciation. For the Triassic, Wegener said, “Unambiguous traces of ice in the Triassic are unknown.”45 For the Jurassic, Wegener wrote, “traces of ice are unknown.”46 For the Cretaceous, he wrote, “We must accept it as likely, that nothing like a polar climate in the modern sense is required to explain the data.”47 In Wegener’s work on past climate, as in his work on atmospheric layering and continents and oceans, theory had to give way to data.
Response to Wegener’s Work, 1922–1924
Beginning in 1918, Wegener collected every reference that pertained to his work directly, or to the question of isostasy, and referen
ced them in the interleaved sheets bound into a copy of his 1915 book. Of these, there is one brief notice concerning Wegener’s work in French, from 1914, and three articles in English, on questions of isostasy, Earth contraction, and displacement of the pole, all of which appeared in 1914, and none of which mention Wegener. There are two references in Dutch, both of which mention Wegener and appeared during the war, and then one in Danish from 1917 (Andreas Lundager) and one in Swedish from 1919. Wegener had asked Hans Cloos in January 1920 whether he knew of anything else, so Wegener did not depend solely on his own search, and his notes appear to be a fairly complete list of literature discussing the displacement hypothesis. Thus, with the exception of three passing references to his work appearing in the scientific literature of neutral countries during the war, one of which was written by a close personal friend, there was no discussion whatever of the hypothesis of continental displacements outside the German-speaking world.48
The principal reason for this lack of discussion was the outbreak of the war itself and the severing of intellectual contact after 1914 between the English-, French-, Italian-, and Russian-speaking worlds on the one hand and the German-speaking world on the other. As we know, direct telegraphic communication between Germany and the United States was deliberately cut by the United States. Within the latter anti-German feeling reached near-hysterical levels during the war; in all of the Allied countries, possession of materials produced in Germany after 1914 became cause for suspicion and in some places was actually illegal. The combination of the inability to write back and forth with German colleagues and increasing hostility to things German rendered an open discussion of Wegener’s hypothesis impossible anywhere outside Germany for the duration of the war, as Wegener had himself anticipated.
A second reason for this lack of consideration was structural. The German academic community was larger than the establishments of most of the Allied countries taken together, and vastly greater than those of the United States and Great Britain. American universities began granting doctoral degrees only in the 1870s; as late as 1930 there were only a handful of universities in the United States where one could obtain a PhD degree in geology. This meant that in the Allied countries, early in the war, most ordinary scientific enterprise gave way to scientific war work, leading to the postponement of ordinary scientific discourse. This was not so in Germany or the other Central Powers; as we have seen, Wegener was able to publish books on scientific subjects throughout the war, and only near the very end of the war did the pace of ordinary scientific publication slow down, and then for economic reasons (a shortage of paper) rather than ideological ones. The German home front characterized the war in terms of the defense of Germany’s cultural superiority; much of this superiority was academic and scientific, and thus the vigorous prosecution of scientific research during the war coincided with Germany’s war aims and was abundantly supported by the government in consequence.
This second reason may seem a redundant restatement of the first, but it is not and had the following consequence: since Wegener’s hypothesis was widely discussed and argued about in Germany during the war, debate inside Germany was one cycle ahead of the debate in the rest of the world, and this lag time persisted throughout the 1920s. When Wegener read criticisms of his work, he did not respond to them in print except by revising the book into a new edition; when he saw critics of his work repeating statements he or others had already refuted, he referred them to the relevant literature (as he had done with Penck in Berlin in 1921) or just ignored them, waiting for his supporters to carry forward the corrections in other forums. This sometimes led to a situation, especially in the gap between the very forceful advocacy of the 1920 volume and the much more cautiously worded and better organized 1922 volume, where critics were busy refuting points that Wegener no longer claimed, or pointing out structural defects in the organization of the book which no longer existed.
There is a third reason: one can see in English and more so in American scientific writing even before the war an emergent hostility to theories of broad scope if they emanated from Germany. Joseph Barrell (1869–1919), a geologist at Yale University and, of his generation, the one with the best understanding of physics and of the need for geologists to understand physical arguments, wrote an article for Science, published in September 1914, immediately after the outbreak of the war, concerning theories of displacements of Earth’s pole of rotation and their role in geological theory. He ended with the following observation:
In closing this article it seems appropriate to indulge in a brief moralization. This paper does not contribute any new facts, but was written to show the untenableness of certain hypotheses, emanating in this instance from Germany, and in danger of spreading in America.… A more respectful reception has been given in this country to these hypotheses because they were voluminously presented in German and backed by the prestige of a German professorship.… But if the writer is not mistaken, in Germany, preeminently the land for science, voluminous presentation is a fashion, and around the large body of high grade work is a larger aureole of pseudo-science than is found in either England or America.49
Here Barrell shows the idiosyncratic hostility to speculative theory characteristic of the United States, but not of the British Empire, and therefore not of the Anglophone world generally. One recalls Darwin’s famous remark in The Descent of Man: “False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done one path toward error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.”50
The early discussion of Wegener’s work in England after the war shows the “salutary pleasure in proving … falseness” mentioned by Darwin, which was very much a part of British intellectual life. In June 1922 the Cambridge geographer Philip Lake (1865–1949) wrote a letter to Nature, on “Wegener’s Displacement Theory,” in which he noted, “Wegener’s speculations have attracted so much attention that there must be many who would be glad to find some simple means of testing his fittings and coincidences for themselves.”51 He is no doubt referring to a four-page article by Wegener in the magazine Discovery for May 1922—Wegener’s first appearance in English.52 He then went on to suggest that Wegener’s technique of making tracing-paper cutouts (which appears only in the 1920 edition) was cumbersome and difficult, and Lake urged his readers to use modeling wax or plasticine instead to make shapes of continents to move about the globe. Lake seems to have done this himself and to have followed Wegener’s instructions that he test the fit of the continents. “This is not the place to discuss Wegener’s views, but the use of triangular compasses seems to show a rather high degree of plasticity is necessary in the masses of ‘Sial’ in order to produce the coincidences on which he bases his calculation of the probability that his theory is correct.”53
Six months later, in January 1923, Lake presented a paper before the Royal Geographical Society in which he set about to demolish Wegener’s theory. The criticisms he offered were not new—Lake had access to the criticisms of Semper, Diener, and Soergel. Indeed, he could not have missed them because they are repeated in Wegener’s 1920 and 1922 editions. Paying absolutely no attention to Wegener’s discussion of these criticisms, he went on to repeat them: the Atlantic fit is no good; the bimodal distribution could occur in any case out of a “single equipotential layer” and proves nothing about Earth. The use of the Glossopteris flora to rearrange the continents of the Southern Hemisphere doesn’t make the case, because Glossopteris flora is found in Siberia. These are all points to which Wegener had responded extensively in 1920 and 1922. Lake had read Wegener’s third edition, but the more cautious tone of the book seems to have made no impression whatever on his hostility to the idea, which he describes throughout as made up of nonexistent facts.54 He concluded, “From this brief account it will be clear that the geological features of the two s
ides of the Atlantic do not unite in the way that Wegener imagines, and if the continental masses ever were continuous they were not fitted as Wegener has fitted them.”55
The discussion that followed is recorded along with the paper in the Geographical Journal and makes interesting reading, as some of Britain’s most distinguished geoscientists were in attendance. The first speaker was stratigrapher and structural geologist George Lamplugh (1859–1926), who remarked,
It may seem surprising that we should seriously discuss the theory which is so vulnerable in almost every statement as this of Wegener’s. Yet Wegener’s hypothesis is of real interest to geologists because it has struck an idea that has been floating in our minds for a long time. Mr. Lake has touched many basal points at which the theory will not hold water, and other flaws present themselves to the specialist in various particulars. But the underlying idea that the continents may not be fixed has in its favor certain facts which give every geologist a predilection toward it in spite of Wegener’s failure to prove it.… We are discussing his [Wegener’s] hypothesis seriously because we should like him to be right, and yet I am afraid we have to conclude, as Mr. Lake has done, that in essential points he is wrong. But the underlying idea may yet bear fruit.56
Lamplugh was followed by R. D. Oldham (1858–1936), a geologist and seismologist who had worked for many years in India. Oldham told the group that he was surprised that people found in Wegener’s ideas a novelty, and he went on to describe in some detail the work of Osmond Fisher (which Wegener had discussed as early as 1912; Oldham had apparently not read Wegener). Oldham concluded by saying, “I should like to express a hope that in this discussion of Wegener’s theory we will remember that the important question is not whether Wegener is right or wrong in his specific conclusions, but whether the continental masses have throughout all times maintained their present position relative to the poles.”57
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