Abstract
WHILE the interest attaching to Sir William Dawson's Presidential address at Birmingham is still fresh, I wish to be allowed to offer a few observations on that part of it which deals with the geological age of the North Atlantic Ocean. The President in referring to those writers who, like Mr. Crosby in America, Mr. Mellard Reade and myself in Britain, maintain that the North Atlantic and the American continent have in the main changed places in Palæozoic times, makes the following statement. Admitting the correctness of the facts as to the swelling out of the Palæozoic sediments in the direction of the Atlantic seaboard, he endeavours to account for these very striking phenomena thus: “I prefer, with Hall, to consider these belts of sediment as in the main the deposits of northern currents, and derived from Arctic land, and that, like the great banks of the American coast at the present day, which are being built up by the present Arctic current, they had little to do with any direct drainage from the adjacent shore.” Now, in reading this passage it occurs to me that Sir W. Dawson must have felt he had a very questionable case when he attempted to support it by such an hypothesis. To liken the great sheets of sediment which spread themselves sometimes over half the North American continent south of the Great Lakes to the banks heaped up along the Atlantic coast is a point of analogy in which, probably, he will find few to concur. The Palæozoic sediments are certainly not banks, but sheets originally spread over the sea-bed, and distributed according to certain recognised laws of increase and decrease of thickness.
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HULL, E. The Geological Age of the North Atlantic Ocean. Nature 34, 496 (1886). https://doi.org/10.1038/034496a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/034496a0
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