How did Wegener’s solution to this problem fare in the hands of Karl Andrée? In 1917 Andrée, working parallel with Dacqué, wanted to simplify the permanence debate by giving prominence to Wegener’s ideas on geophysics. On the other hand, he expressed a view shared by almost all geologists who had any sympathy for Wegener, that Wegener represented an extreme position, and that he was overstating a good case. Andrée nonetheless began his discussion of Wegener with a forceful advocacy. Whatever our reservations and criticisms of his views on paleogeography, Andrée wrote, all geologists must be grateful to Wegener for his presentation of geophysics, a presentation that clearly describes, more vividly than anyone has ever described them before, the actual geophysical conditions and forces governing the largest features of Earth’s crust: continents, mountains, and oceans.77
Wegener has made it clear, Andrée insisted, that in order to explain the great surface features of Earth, we must turn away from molecular forces and toward the “cosmic body forces,” understanding that the surface shapes of the lithosphere (the outer crust) are governed not simply by fracture at the surface but by flow processes deep within Earth. Wegener, said Andrée, was following in the footsteps of reputable geological theorists, including Otto Ampferer and Bailey Willis (and Andrée himself), in emphasizing the importance of flow for any hypothesis of continent and mountain building. If further research would be required to determine the extent to which geologists must follow Wegener, “taking Wegener’s hypothesis totally ad acta [that is, shelving it or filing it away] would mean turning a blind eye to all the advances of modern geophysics.”78 Andrée went on to say that even if we do not go so far as to accept broad horizontal migrations of continental blocks throughout their full thickness, some amount of drift and displacement by some mechanism, at least in earlier periods of Earth history, is clearly required to reconcile the evidence at our disposal.79
Having given this ringing endorsement of Wegener’s geophysics, Andrée turned to Wegener’s paleogeography and paleontology and proceeded to take issue with every major conclusion in Wegener’s book. The proposed drifts were probably “impossible.”80 South America and Africa had not been connected up to the Tertiary, and if there had been any drift, it had to be before the Triassic. South America and North America could not have drifted away at different times. The account of the creation of the Indian Ocean by India’s movement northward contradicted the fossil evidence. Neither the Andes nor the Himalayas could have been created by folding up the leading edge of a drifting continent or by collision between two continental masses.81 Pole wander as an explanation for Southern Hemisphere glaciation does not fit the evidence for the rest of Africa and Australia.82 Finally, a drift of North America away from Europe could not be the reason for the creation of the Atlantic Ocean, because this would presuppose a land bridge between Alaska and Siberia that, until the Tertiary, would have stretched over 35° of longitude.83
Most of the issues Andrée raised had already been raised the previous year by the Viennese geologist and paleontologist Carl Diener (1862–1928), and most of the criticisms of Wegener laid out in Andrée’s paper are taken directly from that work.84 Perhaps Andrée felt he needed some heavier artillery in dealing with Wegener’s confident paleogeography. Diener had taken a doctorate in 1883 and was a tireless field worker. Throughout the later 1880s and the 1890s he traveled across Europe and Asia, as well as to the Rocky Mountains in North America, the Himalayas, Spitsbergen, the Urals, the Caucasus, Siberia, Hawaii, and much of Canada. This extensive field experience gave him great credibility, as did his position (since 1906) as the professor of paleontology at the University of Vienna. He was internationally well connected, a member of many scientific associations, and an influential teacher and writer.
However well established Diener was, his (and Andrée’s) criticisms of Wegener consist mostly of assertions of opinion and obiter dicta, referenced to those paleontologists with whom Diener happened to agree, and referenced to the geology of Sueß, who had been, throughout Wegener’s work, a principal foil for his own views—his “Ptolemy.” Diener was simply reasserting the minimalist version of correlation against those paleogeographers, cited by Wegener, who held the maximal position (such as Theodor Arldt). Moreover, though accepting some notion of lateral displacement of continents at an early stage of Earth history (read: “wherever he needed it to fill a hole in the story”), Diener gave no clear mechanism for such drift—at the same time that he criticized Wegener for lacking a mechanism for his own drift. Moreover (and this spoke against the coherence of Andrée’s paper as well), Diener was thoroughly resistant to taking geophysics seriously, which was the one point of agreement between Andrée and Wegener.
Nevertheless, if this “minimalist position” had certain contradictions, it at least took Wegener seriously and as worthy of engagement. As Dacqué had pointed out, Wegener’s position was not halfway between two existing positions (North American and European) but one of four possible positions conjugating the two variables of geophysics and paleontology; Wegener’s opposition, as it turned out, had already existed before his early papers had been written; it was, in some paradoxical sense, waiting for him to appear.
To Diener’s and Andrée’s seriousness and intellectual engagement, we may contrast another early opponent of Wegener: Max Semper (1870–1954), a geologist and paleogeographer at the University of Aachen, and a student of Karl von Zittel (1835–1904). It is from Semper that descends the polemical approach to Wegener as a “scientific outsider,” “ignorant of geology,” a “reckless” mischief-maker ignorant of geological methods, given to wild speculations, absurdly unprepared to discuss geological matters. Semper’s 1917 attack on Wegener, entitled “What Is a Working Hypothesis?,” was one of the most intemperate pieces ever written about continental displacement.85
Semper was what in the modern world is known as a “methodologist,” a scientist who believes that progress—or lack of progress—in science is largely a matter of adherence to good methods (on the one hand) or failure to follow strict inductive procedures (on the other). Semper had developed, before he encountered Wegener’s work, the sense that geology was not making progress as a science because of its poor grasp of scientific methods. He had developed a sequential view of stages of accumulation of data in which a working hypothesis was something just above the level of empirical data, somewhat below the level of a “synthesis,” and far below the level of a general theory. To a large extent these views were extrapolated from the published opinions of Zittel, whose history of geology and paleontology followed the ideas of the British geologist Archibald Geikie. Geikie believed that German geology had stalled in the eighteenth century because it had let grand theory overwhelm empirical evidence. Certainly there was a case to be made that extensive fieldwork would yield more results concerning the history of Earth than theorizing following the intensive examination of a single locale. However, Semper went far beyond this and attempted to formalize a hierarchy of theory building.
Semper had already applied his theoretical ideas to what he saw as a lack of progress in the study of ancient climates (especially the anomalous distributions of Northern Hemisphere animal and plant remains in the Tertiary) and in geology generally, in papers published in 1910 and 1911. Writing in 1917, he took exception to the work of Wegener as exactly the sort of approach to the subject which would cause grave trouble for geology and had caused it trouble in the past. It is not that Semper’s views on this matter were atypical; most early twentieth-century geologists were much more attuned to the accumulation of data than to its interpretation on a large scale, and it is not at all clear that they would even have understood the process that physicists call “data reduction.” Indeed, North American geologists, led by the Chicago geologist Thomas Chamberlin (1843–1928), spent a lot of time talking about a method of “multiple working hypotheses,” whereby one evaluated ensembles of fieldwork according to several different explanatory theories, supposedly reserving judgment. It w
as a method more preached than practiced, mostly used as a rhetorical device to attack anyone who had very definite theoretical ideas different from those of the advocates of “multiple working hypotheses.”
Thus far, many geologists might have followed Semper in his strictures on Wegener, had he not appended to them a series of absurd and contradictory views: that we didn’t know what the ocean floors were made of, that they might be made of iron, that it didn’t matter whether Greenland was drifting or not, that geophysics was irrelevant, that synthetic treatments of geological data were a terrible way to go at theory building, that a working hypothesis that involved synthetic data from different geologists was an illegitimate approach to the subject. Finally, at the end of an increasingly personal and nearly hysterical attack, he had written, “Geologists must never forget to inscribe over their doorways: O Holy St. Florian, protect this house and burn another.”86 This apparently obscure phrase was a popular saying, the figurative meaning of which is “not in my backyard!” The implication, quite retrograde, was that geophysicists should have no role in geological theory. If this sounds initially absurd, it is not. The creation of geology as a separate science in the nineteenth century demarcated this study from astronomy and physics, to create a separate space for a historical science, descriptive and inductive in character. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, with geology well established everywhere, the demarcation served less to legitimize geology as a science than to absolve geologists of the necessity to consider physical, astronomical, and geophysical approaches and theories, all of which were increasingly necessary to interpret the data at hand.
The essential theoretical question here was clearly not whether geophysics had a role in geology; much more at issue in 1917 was the question of continental permanence. After, for instance, Wolfgang Soergel (1887–1946) gave his inaugural lecture at the University of Tübingen in 1916, he expanded his already-published critique of Wegener’s notion of the splitting and drifting of continents into a book entitled The Problem of the Permanence of the Oceans and Continents.87 Soergel was one of the original three “anti-Wegener” writers named by Dacqué in his letter to Wegener in May 1917.88 Dacqué had planned to respond to all three of these: Semper, Diener, and Soergel; in the end, he responded only to the last named. Semper had disgraced himself to a certain extent with his intemperate fury, and Diener and Soergel were exponents of the same “minimizing” theme, which attempted to rule out further consideration of Wegener’s hypothesis by chipping away at the paleontological evidence for former continuity, to the point where Wegener’s solution became an isolated and unwelcome attempt to solve a nonexistent problem.
When Dacqué reviewed Soergel’s “anti-Wegener” book in 1917 (wartime paper shortages kept the review on hold until 1918), he seemed less a proponent of Wegener than someone with a judicious interest in clarifying the “permanence problem.” Nevertheless, he insisted that Wegener could not be dismissed and that the problems he had raised would not go away by themselves.
It simply would no longer do to wave away isostasy and geophysics, reassert the contraction theory, insert land bridges and island arcs when needed, and make them disappear when they were no longer necessary, though both Diener and Soergel had done just this. Moreover, Wegener, in Dacqué’s view, had solved an associated problem that neither the sunken continents theory nor the minimal land bridge theory dealt with: the Wasserfrage, or the “water question.” Where, in the land bridge theories of recently created oceans or of gradually deepening oceans, did all the abyssal ocean water come from? Only two theories seemed to have a reasonable answer: the North American theory of extreme permanence, and Wegener’s theory. The problem “went away” in the North American version because there had always been deep oceans. The problem went away in Wegener’s theory because Earth was originally covered with a global ocean and the continents grew over time, split, and moved apart, simply rearranging the geometry of continents and oceans and revealing more of the simatic floor. Of these two theories, the “extreme” version of the permanence theory and the theory of continental displacements, Wegener’s was still the more reasonable once paleontology was seriously considered. Dacqué thus arrived at a position like that of Andrée: Wegener’s theory might push things too far, but those who opposed it would still have to “get serious” about the geophysical problems facing their own alternatives and deal realistically with the remaining paleontological data.89
It would be wrong to see the long debate over Wegener’s displacement theory as one of continental “mobilism,” as opposed to another stance called “fixism”; these terms were introduced in the 1920s by Émile Argand (1879–1940). This division is true up to a point: Wegener insisted on the lateral mobility of whole continents, while other thinkers insisted with equal force that the continents remain locked in their current positions relative to one another on the surface of the globe.
Yet it is now clear that this “mobile” versus “fixed” argument was originally only one aspect of a debate (with multiple dimensions) about the permanence of continents and oceans, irrespective of their motion or fixity. All of Wegener’s early opponents accepted some version of polar wandering as a solution to otherwise anomalous distributions of animals and plants in the geological past. Large-scale displacement of Earth’s pole of rotation—again and again through geological time—is clearly a “mobilist” idea.
Some of Wegener’s opponents also accepted a primordial lateral displacement of continents, most often in the context of the hypothetical partition of the Moon from Earth and the sliding of remaining continents toward the “hole” created by the Moon’s departure. Some others, including those later most strongly opposed to Wegener, allowed for contemporary or recent displacement and deformation of continents, albeit local and modest in extent, by flowing currents of molten rock in the subcrust. Still others, also opposed to Wegener, and vigorous in their defense of continents fixed in place, allowed for folding and overthrusting within the margins of continents, making way for massive lateral displacements—hundreds and even thousands of kilometers of intracontinental mobility.
The early twentieth-century debate over the question of permanence of continents and oceans not only contained this broad range of ideas about mobility and fixity in the horizontal sense but included an equally great variety of ideas of vertical mobility: up and down movements of the continents in place, progressive and permanent sinking of large blocks of former continents to make abyssal oceans, permanent gradual deepening of the oceans through time via contraction of Earth, and intermittent vertical elevation of mountain ranges caused by Earth contraction.
While large numbers of geologists, geographers, and paleontologists subscribed to various versions of the “mobility” of one or another aspect of Earth, they did so with reluctance and out of necessity. What made Wegener different was that he enjoyed the idea of mobility, and his theory contained mobility of every sort, all of it continuous throughout history, and much of it so rapid as to be inconsistent with the majestic cadences of geological imagination: the coral building up the reef, the raindrop hollowing out the stone. Wegener had Earth’s pole of rotation in constant motion in response to the splitting and drifting of the continents, which also proceeded continuously, as did the gradual increase in continental elevation and the gradual decrease in lateral extent of continental surfaces.
The range of opinion concerning Wegener’s theory in 1917, from Semper at one extreme to Dacqué at the other, was about how far one had to move toward “mobilism” to solve geological problems that would not go away otherwise. At Semper’s end of the spectrum, geologists were willing to throw out huge accumulations of paleontological data suggesting former connections between continents, in order to avoid most or all forms of lateral mobility. At Dacqué’s end of the spectrum, there was a hopeful (if cautious) embrace of the possibility of continental displacements as a unified solution to a large array of geological and geophysical problems for which all other existi
ng solutions appeared inadequate.
Here, in 1917, is where the matter rested: four different “solutions” to the problem of the permanence of continents, of which Wegener’s was one, and the only one to which the name of a single theorist was attached. To attack Wegener was, therefore, not always to engage the details of his theory, or even to try to understand him, as much as to express animosity toward the notion of extensive, varied, and, above all, rapid lateral displacements with which Wegener’s name was already becoming associated. An attack on Wegener was sometimes also an attempt to head off a geology anchored in the new geophysics and governed by large-scale correlations rather than local details. Even an ardent exponent of the new geophysics (and a professor of paleontology) like Andrée measured the situation thus: it was not “how much of Wegener” one should accept, but how little, while still achieving a workable resolution of the problem of the “permanence of continents and oceans” to which Wegener had offered a challenging new solution.90
While his defenders tussled with his detractors on the issue of continental permanence, Wegener was working long hours to reorganize the domestic weather service. He was exhausted and chronically undernourished because he could not remember to walk to the dining hall (some distance from his office) in time for the meal service in the afternoon and evening. Bread rations were small, and he typically ran out of bread by the middle of the week. Overwork and lack of proper nourishment sapped his health, and within a few weeks of his arrival in Jüterbog he contracted dysentery, and in his weakened condition he could not get well. He continued to work; this was not his first experience with exhaustion and illness, but he began to lose weight and strength.91
While Wegener was languishing in Jüterbog in July of 1917, Else and Hilde had left Marburg and gone to stay with Wegener’s parents, as they had the previous year. Food was increasingly scarce and expensive in all German cities, and the kitchen garden and preserved food at Zechlinerhütte were, once again, a powerful attraction. Else found her mother-in-law unchanged: still paralyzed on one side, barely able to speak, and spending most of her days sitting in silence. Sister-in-law Tony was still tirelessly caring for her and for Richard, the more so since illness had struck the family again: Alfred’s father was dying of esophageal cancer. He had been hale and hearty the previous fall, but in the spring of 1917 his illness had progressed rapidly. He was thin, could barely eat, and had difficulty staying warm even while sitting in the summer Sun.92
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