remain approximately constant. But this is, however, all that the arguments quoted really prove.
Whilst we must thus totally reject the contraction theory, we need only reduce the doctrines of the land-bridges and the permanence of oceans and continents to the conclusions that can be legitimately drawn from the arguments advanced for them, so as to reconcile both these apparently so opposite doctrines by means of the displacement theory. The latter says: Land connections there were, not through bridging continents which sank later, but by direct contact; permanence not of separate oceans and continents as such, but of the oceanic and of the continental areas as a whole.
In the following chapters the main grounds which indicate the correctness of the displacement theory will be exhaustively treated.
