Contextualizing the Cartographic Origins of Continental Drift: Antonio Snider-Pellegrini’s La Création et ses Mystères Dévoilés (1858) and Nineteenth-Century Transnational Scientific Networks

In the early twentieth century, American earth scientists were united in their opposition to the new--and highly radical--notion of continental drift, even going so far as to label the theory "unscientific." Some fifty years later, however, continental drift was heralded as a major scientific breakthrough and today it is accepted as scientific fact. Why did American geologists reject so adamantly an idea that is now considered a cornerstone of the discipline? And why were their European colleagues receptive to it so much earlier? This book, based on extensive archival research on three continents, provides important new answers while giving the first detailed account of the American geological community in the first half of the century. Challenging previous historical work on this episode, Naomi Oreskes shows that continental drift was not rejected for the lack of a causal mechanism, but because it seemed to conflict with the basic standards of practice in American geology. This account provides a compelling look at how scientific ideas are made and unmade.

The extraordinarily wide distributional ranges of aquatic flowering plants have long stimulated phytogeographical discussion. Although aquatic plants occur rarely among the angiosperms, they represent a disproportionately large number of taxa with broad distributions including various intercontinental disjunctions that are manifest even at the species level. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, long‐range dispersal by waterfowl was the prevailing explanation for widespread aquatic plant distributions. This explanation gradually fell into disfavor as biologists raised doubts as to the ability of waterfowl to transport propagules across the extensive transoceanic distances between the continents on which an assortment of aquatic taxa now reside. During the twentieth century, the development of biogeographical displacement theory, i.e., “continental drift,” steadily began to supplant dispersal as the preferred explanation for discontinuous angiosperm distributions. Our study assesses the ...

The research dives into similarities between historical events in the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries, drawing connections to Borys Hrinchenko’s inspirations which resonate with contemporary efforts in resisting russian occupation, emphasizing the struggle for Ukrainian independence, identity, and freedom through primarily ideological, cultural, national, and linguistic means. The article highlights the leading pedagogical ideas of the scientific and journalistic heritage of Borys Hrinchenko, a prominent Ukrainian linguist, writer, poet, playwright, publicist, critic, ethnographer, educator, and public figure of the late nineteenth – early twentieth centuries. The author focuses on various aspects of the scientist’s contributions, including ethnographic research and methodological systematization of Ukrainian folk art, social endeavors aimed at common societal objectives, educational perspectives, and pedagogical intentions. Additionally, the emphasis is on humanizing personal and social interactions among individuals through the promotion of universal moral ideals and spiritual values, among other aspects. The article provides characteristics of educational concepts related to the national upbringing of Ukrainian youth within Borys Hrinchenko’s scientific and journalistic heritage. It outlines the pedagogical discussions on intergenerational transmission in the realm of Ukrainian studies during the specified period. The author attempts to reinterpret the eminent thinker’s persona in intrinsic harmony with well-known figures from the intellectual elite of that era. Significant attention is devoted to the alignment of creative concepts between Borys Hrinchenko and Ivan Franko. The article highlights Kamenyar’s extensive praise for Hrinchenko, mentioning his resilience challenging criticism, often hostile, and his consistent profound love for Ukraine and “sincere democracy” in all his writings. Specific examples are presented to illustrate Hrinchenko’s aimed critique of Khrystyna Alchevska’s idleness, particularly in the context of russifying Ukrainian schools and publishing her books in russian. The research offers an entirely different interpretation of the critical perspective on certain intellectuals’ scientific and literary works from the relevant period. This perspective was aimed at the promotion of Ukrainian studies and national education. The article explores certain aspects of Hrinchenko’s role as a teacher in a rural school, drawing from historical and scholarly references. It emphasizes the strong connection between two generations of the Ukrainian national movement – Borys Hrinchenko and Dmytro Doroshenko – by analyzing their common efforts. The author highlights their effective collaboration in developing the Ukrainian independent press, public engagement, educational initiatives, and shaping the Ukrainian people’s national consciousness and identity.

Reconstructing the City, Constructing the State: Government in Valparaíso after the Earthquake of 1906

The scientific realism/antirealism debate in contemporary philosophy of science is about theoretical knowledge, that is, knowledge that is supposed to be about so-called “unobservables.” This includes theoretical entities, such as neutrinos and genes, as well as theoretical processes, such as natural selection and continental drift. Is theoretical knowledge in science possible? In general, scientific realists tend to think that science can (and does) yield theoretical knowledge, whereas antirealists tend to think that science cannot (and does not) yield theoretical knowledge (that is, knowledge about unobservables). To put it another way, scientific realists tend to argue that we have good reasons to believe that our best scientific theories are approximately true because, if they were not even approximately true, they would not be able to explain and predict natural phenomena with such impressive accuracy. On the other hand, antirealists tend to argue that the impressive success of our best scientific theories does not warrant belief in the approximate truth of our best scientific theories. This is because the history of science is a graveyard of theories that were once successful but were later discarded.

This work presents research that we intended to publish jointly with Maarten de Wit on the importance of Hans Keidel in the definition of the Gondwanides and in his pioneering proposal of correlation between the Sierras de la Ventana mountain system in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and its counterpart in the Cape System in South Africa. Keidel's proposals were used by Wegener in the 1920 second edition of his ‘Theory on Continental Drift’. Keidel's role and his ideas of correlation were recognized and strengthened by du Toit's fieldwork in 1923 in the Sierras de la Ventana and which he left behind in his field notebook. Du Toit has the credit of being the first to carry out fieldwork on both continents. His observations and his precise correlations confirmed Keidel's hypotheses through his 1927 publication and his book on the Wandering Continents. It is noteworthy that after Wegener's death in 1930, du Toit defended the Theory of Continental Drift for years almost alone. The work is documented with photographs from du Toit's trip to South America, the originals of which have been lost in the devastating 2021 fire at the Jagger Library at the University of Cape Town.

Inductivist theories of science dominated the landscape of the philosophy of science in nineteenth century Europe. This paper explores their vocation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century India. In the first half of the nineteenth century British Indologists and educationists introduced scholars at the Oriental colleges in India to Francis Bacon's Novum Organum Scientiarum. Baconian inductivism was simultaneously interpreted as a methodology that highlighted the distinctiveness of the method of the modern sciences, as well as its similarities with the constellations of knowledge in South Asia. The paper attempts to show that in the second half of the century and later, inductivism as formulated in the writings of William Whewell and J.S. Mill sets the stage for the debate on the inductive nature of the sciences in India. Two Bengali scholars, the philosopher B.N.Seal and the social scientist Benoy Kumar Sarkar, turn to the writings of Whewell and Mill as resources as well as offering a `Kuhnian exemplar’ to mine the history of Indian philosophy for cognitive homologues in order to reconstruct the specific nature of `the exact and positive sciences of the `Hindus’. In other words, the corpus of writings of Whewell and Mill, notwithstanding the differences amongst them, provides these two South Asian writers with a lens to embark on a comparative history of philosophy and present the knowledge systems of India as scientific.

From outer space to Earth—The social significance of isolated and confined environment research in human space exploration

By combining digital humanities text-mining tools and a qualitative approach, we examine changing concepts in forestry journals in Sweden and the United States (US) in the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Our first hypothesis is that foresters at the beginning of the twentieth century were more concerned with production and less concerned with ecology than foresters at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Our second hypothesis is that US foresters in the early twentieth century were less concerned with local site conditions than Swedish foresters. We find that early foresters in both countries had broader—and often ecologically focused—concerns than hypothesized. Ecological concerns in the forestry literature have increased, but in the Nordic countries, production concerns have increased as well. In both regions and both time periods, timber management is closely connected to concerns about governance and state power, but the forms that governance takes have changed.

Becoming John Glenn in the Words of John Glenn

Political ideology at the end of the nineteenth century in the early twentieth century in Vietnam has contributed significantly to creating a special change in the thinking of the Vietnamese nation. The basic content in the political ideology at the end of the nineteenth century in the early twentieth century in Vietnam was shown in a rich, diverse and profound way in many different aspects, but the most general focused on questioning. It is important to strengthen national self -enhancement, raise the people's intellect, foster the people's strength, spread democratic and civil rights. The proper awareness and evaluation of economic and political and social conditions in Vietnam at the end of the nineteenth century of the early twentieth century with the formation of political ideology in the late nineteenth century XX in Vietnam is essential, making an important contribution to better understanding of the political thought content of thoughts in Vietnamese history. The article is to analyze and clarify economic and political and social conditions in Vietnam at the end of the nineteenth century of the early twentieth century with the formation of political thought in the late nineteenth century in the early twentieth century in Vietnam Male. The article is structured with 3 parts: (1), economic conditions at the end of the nineteenth century in the early twentieth century with the formation of political thought in the late nineteenth century in the early twentieth century in Vietnam; (2), Socio -political conditions at the end of the nineteenth century in the early twentieth century with the formation of political ideology in the late nineteenth century in the early twentieth century in Vietnam; (3) Some comments are drawn.

"Beneath the Earth's dark keel":Tolkien and Geology Gerard Hynes (bio) "O Valar, ye know not all wonders, and many secret things are there beneath the Earth's dark keel" (Lost Tales I 214). So Ulmo explained the Earth's structure to the Valar. It is curious that they, having materially participated in the making of the world, should be uncertain of its form, but Tolkien was himself uncertain how to depict Arda, at this stage (c.1919) and for decades afterwards.1 Henry Gee has rightly observed that it is unsurprising Tolkien was interested in the earth sciences given his own view of his profession: "I am primarily a scientific philologist. My interests were, and remain, largely scientific" (Gee 34; Letters 345). Tolkien, like any educated person of his generation, was exposed to and to a degree internalized both the scientific method and the scientific worldview. For example, in "On Fairy-stories" Tolkien chose to use a geologic metaphor when discussing the preservation of ancient elements in fairy-stories: "Fairy-stories are by no means rocky matrices out of which the fossils cannot be prised except by an expert geologist" (OFS 49). As Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson note in their commentary, "The geologic comparison here is both timely and intentional: geology and mythology being coeval disciplines arising in roughly the same period and out of the same human impulse to dig into origins" (OFS 106). The same could, of course, be said of philology. Further, Tolkien was a reader of science fiction and well aware of the expectations it engendered in readers in terms of coherent world building (see Gee 23-41). Given Tolkien's insistence that Middle-earth is our Earth (Letters 220, 239, 283, 376) the inclusion of geological references is part of the "hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun" (OFS 65) which is, according to Tolkien, fantasy's essential foundation. But scientific understanding and the theories and discoveries on which it is based develop and change. The importance of scientific developments, and geology in particular, to Tolkien's account of the shaping of Middle-earth has been emphasized by Karen Wynn Fonstad, Alex Lewis and Elizabeth Currie, Henry Gee and Kristine Larsen (Larsen, A Little Earth of His Own, Shadow and Flame).2 The geology Tolkien knew was not static in any way; new discoveries apparently influenced him as he revised his legendarium. The most far-reaching development in geological theory in the twentieth century, though it took most of Tolkien's scholarly lifetime to establish itself, was continental [End Page 21] drift and Tolkien's writing displays an awareness of and receptivity to it.3 Both Robert C. Reynolds and William Sarjeant have offered explanations of the topography of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age in terms of plate tectonics, but both articles are primarily descriptive and do not address the question of Tolkien's knowledge of geology, particularly the evidence for continental drift developing across the drafts of his legendarium.4 Indications of a growing concern with geological accuracy and a familiarity with continental drift emerge side by side in Tolkien's writings as they developed. Though Tolkien's geology would always have a strong catastrophist element, in the 1930s Tolkien began to incorporate into it a uniformitarian underpinning of geologic time as well as a dynamic theory of geological change. 5 The general uniformitarian consensus in geology in the second half of the nineteenth and opening decades of the twentieth century understandably formed the basis of Tolkien's treatment of geologic time. But the particular form geological change took in his developing presentation of Middle-earth in deep time may be in part the result of Alfred Wegener's then revolutionary theory of continental drift. Briefly put, "continental drift" proposes a lateral movement of land masses across the Earth's surface over geologic time. The notion of continental drift was suggested as early as 1596 in the third edition of Abraham Ortelius' Thesaurus Geographicus where he noticed the symmetry of the African and American coasts and reinterpreted Plato's Critias as referring not to Atlantis sinking but to...

Revaews 844 cantend toeclipse thecomplexities ofmonolithic notions of'French' culture and identity. Thisvolume refuses categorically tofall into that trap. Christopher Whyte's consideration ofCorbiere andGoodsir Smith underlines, for instance, theBreton aspectsof theformer's work;MicheleDuclos'sdiscussion ofKenneth White similarly stresses theCeltic dimension ofthepoet'sengagement with francophone culture; andfinally, DavidKinloch, inhisfascinating discussion ofMichel Tremblay inScots translation, describes howtheMontreal-Edinburgh axisofthis transfer reconfigures cultural relations byshort-circuiting Paris andLondon. In Kinloch's version, the'New Alliance'is no longer bi-polar butsubject potentially toa series ofpostcolonial exchanges. Hisarticle concludes with a poetic vision ofcontemporary Scottish culture, dynamic andopentoavariety ofreciprocal relationships: 'pareille a lafleche deZenon, quifile dela source a la cible, presente a tout moment etpourtant toujours enmouvement, transformee parchacun des instants desonvolvers l'Autre, instants qu'elletransforme enretour' (p.240).This is verydiffierent from thestatic, introverted tartan exoticism whichis often propagated outwith Scotland, andunderlines therealinterest oftheessays inthis volume for those working onissues oftranslation andinter-cultural contact. The concluding bibliographical essay byPaulBarnaby issobering, however, for itreveals thatJanice Galloway, JeSTorrington, andIainCrichton Smith areyet toappear in French translation andthat only onenovel byeachof James Kelman andAlasdair Gray isavailable toFrench readers. A useful companion volume would reverse the subjectof thisvolumeby considering theCaledonianinfluence on modern Francophone literature. UNIVERSITY OFGLASGOW CHARLES FORSDICK Eraveling <17zeoy: France and the United States. Ed.byIEME VAN DERPOEL andSOPHIE BERTHO. Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: AssociatedUniversityPresses- I999. I77pp £28 The interrelationship between travel and theory continues to attract sustained attention ina variety offields. CarenKaplan,for example, hasrecently explored thecomplex debtofcontemporary critical theory to figures ofmobility and displacement (inQuestion ofEravel, Durham, NC, andLondon:DukeUniversity Press, I996),whereas James Clifford, focusing on etymology, hassuggested that theorizing isalways a 'practice oftravel andobservation' ('NotesonTheory and Travel', Inscriptions, 5(I989),I77-88(p. I77)).ItisEdward Said,however, whohas developed themost coherent ideaoftravelling theory, exploring theways inwhich theories aretransformed asthey shift between places andhistorical moments. Said's work hasnotonly inspired thetitle ofthis volume; hiscontribution, that ofa selfconfessed 'participant observer', alsoconcludes this collection ofeight essays (based onpapers delivered ata conference inI994),whose authors track theregeneration and reconfiguration ofAmerican academicculture in thesecondhalfofthe twentieth century in response to thetransatlantic crossings ofFrench critical thought. In thefiveyearsbetween theconference and thisvolume's publication, the subject oftheory anditsimplications for academic practice wereemphasized as a result oftheso-called 'Sokalaiair' andthepublication ofImpostures intellectuelles (Paris: OdileJacob,I997). Said'sessay inparticular isa cautious andconsidered contribution to theserecent debates;qualifying criticism as performance not prescription, he warnsagainst theinstrumentalization, decontextualization and depoliticization oftheory. IemevanderPoel'suseful introduction alludes more MLR,96.3,200I 845 directly toSokal andBricmont, but undermines their claims tonovelty ororiginality. Sheoffiers a more attenuated, comparative account oftheemergence ofcontemporary theory inFrance andtheUSA,whilst focusing oninstitutional andcultural divergences between thetwocountries. The individual essays which follow are deliberately discrete, exploring issues oftransit andcultural specificity from avariety ofperspectives. Thereisno consensus onthenature oftheory's intercontinental travel, with contributors variously describing theFranco-American relationship as 'dialogue', 'appropriation', 'modification', 'enhancement', 'influence', 'importation ',or a morecomplex form of'continental drift', thisfinalnotionsubtly illustrated byChristine vanBoheemen-Saaf, for whom deconstruction 'eventually imported asradically other haditsroots inaspects ofanAnglo-American tradition' (p.56). The essays tendtofocus on thethinkers initially involved intheI966Johns Hopkins conference onstructuralism, with several alsodevoted toLacanianand feminist theorists. French postmodernists (for example,Jean Baudrillard andPaul Virilio) andFrancophone postcolonialists (for example, Frantz Fanon andEdouard Glissant) freighted totheUnited States viaParis arenotreferred to,although Said makes itclear that the volume's subject is'extremely close andessentially unfinished' (P. I34),andhence inneedoffurther elucidation. Thiscollection ofessays offiers, nevertheless, aninvaluable source for future, more comprehensive studies ofFrench theory's transatlantic travels and theimplications of theseforcontemporary intellectual history. UNIVERSITY OFGLASGOW CHARLES FORSDICK Heterographies. Sexual Diffierence inFrench Autobiography. ByALEX HUGHES. Oxford and NewYork: Berg.I999.Vii + I86PP. £42.99. Alex Hughes's new monograph incorporates some ofher previously published work, butalsoprovides fresh insights intoa genre thatinrecent years hasenjoyed a renaissance ofcritical attention: writing oftheself. I deliberately eschew theword 'autobiography! since, despite itspresence inthetitle ofHughes's excellent study, herfocus exceeds thetype ofcontractually veridical text, famously typologized by Philippe Lejeune's LePacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil,I975),inwhich author and narrator/protagonist cohere unproblematically, andinwhich a pactismadebythe author truthfully totell the story ofhis/her life. ForHughes alsoexamines examples of'autofiction', a term coined bySergeDoubrovsky todenote 'a narrative mode that flags itself upas fictional whilst featuring a first-person narrator/protagonist possessed ofa nameandstock oflife-experiences identical tothose oftheauthor' (Hughes, pp.III-I2). GivenHughes's admirable meticulousness, I am slightly puzzled bythelackofreference to'Le pacteautobiographique (bis)'(Poetique, 56 (I983),4I6-34), wherein Lejeune, whilst notrevoking hisoriginal definition of autobiography, didsignificantly concede that 'isolee desoncontexte, citee comme une "autorite", elle pouvaitparaltre sectaire et dogmatique, lit de Procuste derisoire' (p.4I7). However, this isa minor objection, almost entirely eclipsed bytheadmirable erudition, subtlety, andcritico-theoretical range ofHughes's disquisition intothe roleplayed bygender, sexuality anddiXerence inthelife-writings ofSimone de Beauvoir, MarieCardinal, Serge Doubrovsky, Marguerite Duras,HerveGuibert, Violette Leduc,andJean-Paul Sartre. A distinctive structural and ideological feature ofHughes's monograph isitsdivision intochapters which self-consciously andilluminatingly yoke writers ofboth genders, teasing outthe obvious divergences ...

Today, continental drift is an established truth that was advocated by Alfred Wegener in the year 1912. However, the journey of this theory towards its universal acceptance was not straight forward. In the beginning, it was thought to be merely an alternative to the biblical flood and land bridges to explain parallelism among the continents. There were technological gaps in gathering pieces of evidence in favour of the theory. But as a result of the constant perseverance of a group of truth finders, both in the field and laboratory, from the end of the 1970s, the continental drifting no longer remains a hypothetical proposition but has become an unequivocal reality. Herein, authors have tried to focus on the devotions of those truth-seekers for the continental drifting in brief.

Important differences are discernible between oil basins wholly of Tertiary origin (like some Californian basins) and basins of Mesozoic origin nonethless producing from Tertiary rocks (like the Maracaibo basin). Both sets of basins differ in multiple ways from productive Palaeozoic basins. It is suggested that the differences are due primarily to distant migration, which has enabled oil in older sediments to become pooled far out on the forelands, in shelf sediments and non-orogenic traps, whereas Tertiary oils are still in their basins of origin and in traps of orogenic generation. Combinations of Mesozoic and Palaeozoic oil are much rarer than combinations of Mesozoic and Tertiary oil. It is suggested that this has two causes: the spacing of orogenic episodes, which left the first half of Mesozoic time essentially quiescent, and the introduction of a totally new basin-creating mechanism during late Mesozoic time. This involved the creation of extensional basins consequent on continental drift. As oil geologists have been traditionally resistant to the drift hypothesis, it is very likely that there are more new oil provinces still to be found in Mesozoic rocks than in either Tertiary or Palaeozoic. It is also likely that the familiar association between Tertiary oil basins and Tertiary orogenic belts has obscured the fact that the Mesozoic extensional basins opened up by drift continued to be basinal during the early Tertiary; the Gulf Coast is the familiar exemplar. Wherever a large delta was built outwards over the Tertiary breakover between continental and oceanic crust, equally good prospects should be provided. But if the locales are far removed from the Alpine orogenic belts, they will lie well off shorelines defined by the postglacial rise of sea level. The ideal source sediment is deduced to be one that characterizes many oil provinces and is conspicuously rare or absent in other regions -- a dark-coloured, phosphatic pelite or marl, with organic remains almost entirely planktonic or nektonic and almost wholly microscopic except for fish remains.