The Earth's Shifting Crust by Charles Hapgood - wire of information

CONTINENTS AND OCEAN BASINS 13
feeling that there was something artificial about the idea
they therefore continued to speculate about former conti
nents.
Should you ask, How did all this activity on the part o
the biologists and paleontologists strike the geophysicists
I can answer that it did not strike them at all. This can b<
explained partly by the fact that geophysicists generally d<
not read books on paleontology, and vice versa. So far as tin
geophysicists were concerned, the speculations of the paleon
tologists could be discounted as the insubstantial imagining
of persons unacquainted with geophysics. To study the bio
logical literature allegedly supporting these speculations was
of course, not the function of geophysicists. It was outsid<
their field, and, moreover, beyond their competence. Th<
connection between these sciences was a distant one. The re
lations between them were cool, to say the least.
4. Geologists Allied with Biologists
It would have been a sad thing for the biologists and paleon
tologists had they not been able to find allies in the sever<
struggle in which they were engaged (without, for the mos
part, being aware of it). But find allies they did. For it soor
developed that the geologists would not be content with th<
limitations on continental change imposed by the geophysi
cists. They could not be satisfied with land bridges. Fron
purely geological studies of the stratified rocks of many land
throughout the world came quantities of evidence insistently
suggesting that the continents and ocean basins could no
have had the permanence demanded by existing concepts ir
geophysics.
To begin with, there is an extraordinary contradiction ir
the very fact that, while continents are supposed to have beer
permanent, nearly all the sedimentary beds that compos<
them were laid down under the sea. There is no denying thi