Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  Oldham was followed in turn by Frank Debenham (1883–1965), a geologist on Scott’s “Terra Nova” Antarctic Expedition, who had at this time just founded, at Cambridge, the Scott Polar Research Institute. Debenham congratulated Lake (his closest colleague in the room) for his “explosion” of Wegener’s theory, adding that Lake’s labor in demolishing Wegener had been much aided by Wegener himself: “he is not only a very bad advocate, but he changes his ground so peculiarly.” After criticizing the Atlantic fit, the connection to South America, the Greenland measurements, and other points, he concluded, “However I believe we are all ready to be kind to the germ of the theory, in fact most people are rather anxious that something of the sort should be proved, and we have to thank Prof. Wegener a great deal in bringing it forward in offering himself as a target for bullets. Geographers and geologists generally, I think, have looked with a short vision up to the present day at a good many of the problems. We imagine we know all about the ordinary processes of the minor features of Earth.… But larger areas have been somewhat neglected.”58

  Harold Jeffreys (1891–1989), a young mathematician and geophysicist in the tradition of Sir George Darwin, brought up the question of mechanism and argued that Wegener’s mechanisms were not only inadequate but also ridiculously so. Even he was willing to concede that there may have been forces, owing to changes in Earth’s rotation through geologic time, “perfectly capable of splitting up continents as much as you want. Whether there has been a split, of the kind that this would give is a matter for the geologist to settle.”59

  The next speaker was Sir John Evans (1857–1930), a fellow of the Royal Society and president of the Geological Society. He observed,

  Dr. Lake has made a damaging attack upon the very elaborate theory Wegener has constructed.… I agree with what Dr. Lake has said about the absolute failure of Wegener to prove his case by demonstrating the continuation of the lines of mountains and foldings from one continent to another.… Nevertheless, I think that there is evidence of the drifting of continents the one from the other, and that the distances which now separate South America from Africa are very much greater than was formerly the case.… I think that, however open to criticism Dr. Wegener’s views may be he has done a service in directing attention to these important problems which I believe it will repay our time and trouble to study.60

  Charles S. Wright (1887–1975), another member of Scott’s Antarctic Expedition, as well as a glaciologist and oceanographer, echoed what was increasingly the emergent theme of the discussion:

  There is only one thing I would like to say other than to congratulate Mr. Lake on his clear exposition. I do not think the method of criticism is quite the right one. With a hypothesis that touches so many sciences, I think the only effective attack is a criticism of the hypothesis treated as a whole, not on a few points of detail. Moreover, the hypothesis is intended as an explanation of facts. As Mr. Lake points out, these include some fictions, but one must still compare this hypothesis with any others which are in the field in regard to their capacity for explaining these same facts. This is, I believe, the only fair method of criticizing Wegener’s proposals.61

  The discussion was then concluded by the president, the Earl of Ronaldshay (Lawrence Dundas, 1876–1961), who had just returned from having served as governor of Bengal. He thanked Lake and noted humorously,

  The impression left on my mind by the discussion is that geologists, as a whole, regret profoundly that Professor Wegener’s hypothesis cannot be proved to be correct. If that statement had not been made so emphatically and so frequently this afternoon I should have been inclined to judge, from the vigor and vim of the speeches with which they destroyed the theory, that their satisfaction had lain in a somewhat different direction. What the general feeling no doubt is, is this: that some theory of this kind is required to explain facts which have long been known to geologists, and while they feel bound to condemn this particular hypothesis as being one which is not capable of meeting this long felt want, they still hope that some other hypothesis of a kindred nature will be discovered which will satisfy their requirements.62

  This meeting in January 1923 was the second symposium to be held on the subject of Wegener’s work in England; the previous September the Geological Section of the British Association, meeting in Hull, was “the theater of a lively but inconclusive discussion on the Wegener hypothesis of the origin of continents.”63 W. B. Wright (1876–1939), who was at the meeting and very impressed (favorably so) by Wegener’s argument, wrote up a summary of the discussion which appeared in Nature the following January.

  Sir John Evans, who spoke in favor of drifting continents at the March 1923 meeting in Cambridge, had prepared an exposition of Wegener’s theory, to be read at the meeting in Hull. Evans was away from England at the International Geological Congress in Belgium in August and September 1922, but his prepared remarks were a careful exposition of Wegener’s theory. The discussion immediately followed the reading of Evans’s paper, and Wright said that “the discussion brought forth a great diversity of opinion regarding the validity of the hypothesis, almost the only point on which there seemed to be any general agreement being an unwillingness to admit that the birth of the North Atlantic could have occurred at so late a date as the quaternary.”64 Wright also mentioned that P. G. H. Boswell (1886–1960) had announced at the meeting that “the forthcoming English edition of Dr. Wegener’s book will afford an easy means of becoming acquainted with the leading features of the subject.”65

  The English translation of Wegener’s third edition, announced by Boswell in September 1922, was almost certainly arranged for Wegener with Evans’s help and that of P. G. H. Boswell himself. When the translation finally appeared in 1924, J. G. A. Skerl (b. 1898), the translator, thanked Boswell, C. P. Chatwin (1897–1975), and especially Evans, who, he said, “has smoothed away many difficulties, and considerably enhanced its [the translation’s] value.”66 Evans reviewed the translation both before and after Wegener and wrote the introduction to the volume. In his introduction, appearing in 1924, Evans concluded his favorable summary of Wegener’s work with the following statement: “I have elsewhere criticized some of the details of the author’s conclusions. It would be out of place to repeat these criticisms here. My only care has been to ensure that in this translation he should be allowed to state his own case in his own way.”67

  Evans’s comment that Wegener should be allowed to “state his own case in his own way” reflects Evans’s conviction that Wegener had been pretty thoroughly misrepresented both at Hull and at Cambridge in 1922 and 1923, and that many of the objections of particular specialists concerning particular pieces of evidence might well look different and less decisive in the context of the entire theory and the evidence for it. One senses that Evans agreed with the position of Charles Wright, the Antarctic glaciologist, who had argued at Cambridge that the appropriate way to judge such a theory is not by nitpicking this or that minor flaw, but by looking at the ensemble of facts which the theory claimed to explain and comparing with other theories that claim to explain the same facts.

  We have no record of how Wegener responded to these debates, or if he even saw them, though his relationship with Evans makes it quite likely that he did. Based on what we know about his published response in 1921 in Berlin to the criticisms of Koßmat and Penck, it is likely that in spite of the severity of the criticism over details in the British discussions, Wegener would have been extremely pleased by the outcome.

  His main point was always to establish the idea of continental displacements as a working hypothesis. This certainly seems to have been achieved in Great Britain, and even his severest critics thanked him for bringing the idea forward. Moreover, Charles Wright had pointed out, as had R. D. Oldham, that the question was never whether Wegener was right or wrong, but whether the continents move, and that the appropriate mode of criticism was the comparison of Wegener’s theory with all other theories of similar scope which claimed to explai
n the same facts. Many of the detailed criticisms of Lake and others would have been of small concern to Wegener since he had already responded to most of them in detail: he was accustomed now to the rhetorical tendency of geologists to cite those authorities who supported their position while ignoring those whose publications supported Wegener’s view. Finally, a number of the speakers in the January 1923 symposium claimed British priority for the idea, and it is an unfailing marker of a theory in the ascendant when others claim they “had the idea first.”

  Since most (not all—Lake was a geographer) of the speakers in the 1923 forum on Wegener’s theory at Cambridge were geologists, this is perhaps an appropriate place to say something about geology and geologists. First of all, geology is the most nationalistic of the sciences, because the mapping of each nation-state and imperial dominion is the responsibility of a government-sponsored geological survey, and thus a large proportion of a nation’s geologists are at one or another time in the pay of their government. In Britain this meant getting approval from superiors before publishing anything at all, even if prepared on their own time, and this led to a profound conservatism and resistance to new ideas. Secondly, geologists, whether they worked for surveys or not, tend to be fiercely proprietary about their “field areas” and are quick to assert ownership of “their rocks” as their entrée into any larger theoretical debate in which these rocks play a role. In this they are similar to anthropologists, fiercely proprietary about “their people,” meaning the subjects of their ethnological inquiries.

  Geologists tend to “work small,” as Frank Debenham had suggested at the Cambridge meeting, and are unaccustomed to dealing with hypotheses of large scope and scale. This is partly because of the tendency to frame geology as a science in which one’s curiosity about local details has no lower bound, right down to the grain size and even the molecular structure of component minerals in the rocks in the specific strata in the specific locales the geologists claim as their “field areas.”

  Finally, geologists are faced with the paradox that while the published literature represents the official record of their science, they tend to be distrustful and even contemptuous of geological writers who “work by the book” rather than with “boots on the ground.” Even Evans, vastly more sympathetic to Wegener both in general and in detail than most of the other British commentators in these years, noted that Philip Lake’s distrust of Wegener’s evidence for the tectonic character of northern South America was well merited, and that Evans was in a position to know, because he had collected the data himself in 1905.68

  These issues concerning geology as a science came to the fore in another spirited and consequential defense of Wegener’s ideas and even more of his approach, in August of 1922, when the International Geological Congress, a triennial event, met in Brussels, Belgium. The keynote address for the congress was to be given by the Swiss geologist Emile Argand (1879–1940), a student of the great Swiss proponent of the nappe theory, Maurice Lugeon (1870–1953). Argand was an astonishing polymath, with a legendary capacity for understanding complex three-dimensional geological structures and rendering them as multicolored tectonic maps. This capacity was recognized as early as 1913, when his cartography resulted in his being awarded the Spendiaroff Prize at the International Geological Congress meeting in Toronto.69

  Argand had been working since that time to extend the mode of analysis used to understand the Alps to comprehend the geological evolution of Eurasia generally, and beginning in 1915 he had developed an approach that he called tectonique embryonnaire (embryotectonics), in which he sought to understand the history of a region by successively unfolding (mentally) all the deformations a region had experienced back to the original flat surface and mapping every intermediate interval of change, a technique known in English as “palinspastic” mapping. This led him to the organic analogy, in which one added the dimension of time to geologic structures as an essential part of the imaginative work of geological interpretation, and he understood fully that his ideas in this area would require a revolution in geological thought and practice.70

  In 1916 Argand had obtained and read a copy of the first edition of Wegener’s book. This was, strictly speaking, an illegal act. In Switzerland, as elsewhere in Europe and North America, anti-German feeling was strong during the war, and it was prohibited at that time to read or possess—in public or in private—materials printed in Germany. In Wegener’s hypothesis of mobile continents Argand found a theoretical structure that, as Albert Carozzi has remarked, “led to a complete change in Argand’s thinking. It provided him with a new doctrine—‘mobilism’—that satisfied to a much greater extent the space and time requirements of his synthesis than the concept of the general contraction of Earth.”71 In spite of the prohibition on reading German materials, Argand gave a public address in November 1916 on Wegener’s ideas, in Neuchatel, Switzerland.

  On 10 August 1922, Argand gave the inaugural address to the International Geological Congress. His title was La Tectonique de L’Asie (Tectonics of Asia), and he spoke for several hours, providing a synthesis of global tectonics explicitly in light of Alfred Wegener’s hypothesis of continental displacements. The address was too long, many of the delegates did not understand French, the acoustics of the room were terrible, and his tectonic map of Eurasia—the basis of his presentation—was barely visible.72 Nevertheless, it was a stunning defense of Wegener—not vague thanks for producing an incorrect theory that might help to give birth to a correct theory, which seems to have been the view from England. Rather, he argued, “We have theories by the dozen, but their very number decreases the chance of agreement among them. Today, it seems that the dispute is focused on the theories that imply the fixism of continents and the hypothesis of large-scale drifting (dérive) of continents as visualized and powerfully presented by A. Wegener.”73

  Argand went on to develop an extremely interesting theoretical argument. He said that “fixism” and “mobilism” were not themselves theories but attitudes, and that “fixism” was a negative element common to several theories, essentially the absence of a position on how mobility of continental elements takes place. Fixism, Argand said, generally asserts the contraction theory, refuses to accept the implications of isostasy and the differentiation of ocean and continental crust, and embraces the inertial predisposition to see everything “encrusted” in place, changing in time vertically but not horizontally.74

  On the other hand, he continued, continental drift addresses the question of mobility in a way that gives a much better account of the phenomena of geology while coming into a sound alliance with modern geophysics. He concluded his remarks on Wegener (but not his whole address) with the following judgment:

  The validity of the theory is nothing else but a capability of accounting for all the known facts at the time it is presented. In that respect, the theory of large-scale continental drift is of flourishing validity. In its incipient stages, it was aiming at the absolute; subsequently it gained a lot of strength and flexibility without sacrificing anything of its rational structure: on the contrary, it became enriched and increasingly in harmony with the vision that leads to the whole. This work of clarification and of improvement is very obvious throughout the sequence of works by A. Wegener. Strongly documented at the meeting points of geophysics, geology, biogeography, and paleoclimatology, it has not been refuted. One has to have searched at length for objections, and particularly to have found a few, in order to estimate properly the kind of immunity that distinguishes it, and that originates from a great flexibility combined with a great richness in operational possibilities. One thinks one has found a decisive objection and that after another one the whole theory will collapse. In fact, nothing of that sort happens; one has only forgotten one or several mechanisms. It is the protean resistance of a plastic universe.… Therefore, it is quite true to speak of the validity of this theory in the sense mentioned previously.75

  Here Argand captures the inertial, conservative, local, verti
cal predisposition of geology, only partly overcome by the nappe theory in the Alps. Argand was among the first geologists to unite the spatial and temporal dimensions of the world, not in terms of a layer cake successively built up and torn down or folded in place, but in a picture of a restless and dynamic Earth constantly in motion both up and down and laterally on a scale of thousands of kilometers, an Earth that was not a series of still photographs but a moving picture, in which the still photos must be assembled into a movie and put in motion: Earth was not only kinematic but cinematic.

  Argand’s defense of Wegener was both powerful and poignant—powerful given the podium he used to defend Wegener and his ideas, and poignant because all scientists of the Central Powers had been excluded from this congress: there were no Germans, Austrians, or representatives of the other lands for which German was the principal scientific language. It was an act of considerable intellectual independence and moral courage for Argand to speak as he did in defense of a German idea in that venue at that time. It is quite likely that the inspiration for a French edition of Wegener’s third edition was born at this meeting and may even have come from Argand: Swiss paleontologist Manfred Reichel’s (1896–1984) translation of Wegener into French, like that of J. G. A. Skerl into English, would appear in 1924.76

  Argand had developed a picture of the tectonic evolution of Asia, but he found himself with a pile of discrete facts and no motor to drive them into a dynamic unity. The idea of “mobility” was for Argand a motive, an inspiration to move forward. Nothing that he saw in Wegener made him reorganize the facts at his disposal: Wegener’s work provided a dynamical motif and a context in which to develop his own insights.