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

526
EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
discuss the situation that confronts us if we are not allowed
to postulate sunken continents or land bridges.
If we cannot find an acceptable mechanism to account for
the creation and destruction of land bridges (or sunken conti-
nents) we are forced back upon the ingenious '
'sweepstakes"
idea, which has been much overworked, as an explanation
of the distribution of species. This idea arose because it was
observed that sea birds, or migratory birds, may carry the
seeds of plants or the eggs of insects from continent to conti-
nent, and that some species manage to cross, by chance,
bodies of water on floating objects such as logs or even ice.
By conveniently ignoring about nine tenths of the evidence,
this idea has been given considerable importance. Even
the idea is no
though many species have migrated in this way,
substitute for land bridges. Nor, it may be added, is one land
bridge, at Behring Strait, able to do the work of explaining
the infinite number of plant and animal migrations in all
climatic zones in all geological periods. Many land bridges
are required, and for these an explanation is necessary. The
theory presented in this book, however, can explain the creation
and destruction of land bridges (and sunken continents),
and therefore it can explain the distribution of species across
large bodies of water.
The impoverishment of certain island faunas and floras as
be understood as follows. Some
compared with others may
of these islands may have rich faunas and floras because, in
recent time, they have had land connections with adjacent
continents. This would be true of the Philippines, of Java,
of Sumatra, and of numerous other islands in that area,
whose former continental connections with either Asia or
Australia have been argued for by Wallace (446) and others.
It is not a question of showing that the species in these
islands came from the continents; it is simply true that there
were land connections, and that the species wandered back
and forth; we don't know where they originated.
An island like Java can have a rich fauna and flora not only
because of having had rather recent connections with the