The Plan of the Earth and its Causes1

Abstract

IN a passage in the “Novum Organum” Bacon pointed out resemblances between the continents of the Old and New Worlds, which he thought showed that their shapes were not due to chance, but to the action of a common cause. Similar coincidences have been repeatedly noticed by geographers, who have accordingly been led to the belief that the distribution of land and water on the globe is based on a definite plan. Any such plan can only be recognised in broad outline, since geographical shapes depend on an intricate series of local accidents. Topographical form depends on such inconstant, incalculable factors that the stages of its growth are often untraceable. The missing links of geographical evolution are as numerous as those of organic evolution. Nevertheless, belief in the existence of a fundamental geographical plan is as old as geography. It was expressed in some of the earliest classical maps; it possessed the minds of mediæval cartographers, and led to their fantastic wheel maps; and it was popularised in the first half of the present century by the teaching of Humboldt and Élie de Beaumont. But with the growth of Lyellism and its doctrine of the interchange of land and sea under the influence of local variations in level, the idea fell into discredit.