James Perrin Smith

“ In the age of the Coal Measures we find further evidence of continued invasion of the Mississippian Sea by immigrants from the western European Tethys, in the faunal zone of Gastrioceras Listeri. This group was common in the shallow epicontinental expansion of the old Mediterranean Sea, and reached America along the shores of the Poseidon Ocean, the Paleozoic ancestor of the modern Atlantic, and into the Mississippian basin through the Gulf of Mexico, up into Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, etc. ”

“ In the epoch immediately following, the Columbites zone, is seen the same provincial, or restricted distribution of inhabitants of the seas. The Columbites fauna is found in Idaho, in northern Siberia, and in Albania, but not in India, nor the Oriental Tethys. At this time the Arctic Sea was the center of dispersion, and immigrants went southwestward to Albania, and southeastward to Idaho, but did not reach the Indian waters, in which a different group of inhabitants lived. ”

“ The Upper Cretaceous is signalized by the closing of the Bering portal, and the wide distribution of a tropical fauna from the Indian waters westward to the Mediterranean waters, and eastward through Japan, around the North Pacific shore-line to California. This same fauna was also distributed from the Mediterranean westward through the Poseidon Sea to Mexico, and southward into South America. ”

“ No one man, nor group of men, is qualified to make a dogmatic statement as to the origin of continents and seas, such as that quoted above from Holy Writ. There is ample room for differences of opinion, starting from the same facts. ”

“ The Meekoceras fauna is distributed from Spitzbergen, down to India, eastward to Timor in the Indian Archipelago, with a southward arm of the sea extending down to Madagascar, connecting with the Pacific, stretching along the Siberian coast at Wladiwostok, and then across to Idaho and California in the Great Basin Sea. ”

“ The other group advocates the idea of constant change in the position of land masses and oceanic troughs. To them the grand features of the earth do not bear the marks of hoary antiquity, but are youthful characters, due to rather modern diastrophism of the crust. ”