Although Wegener's theory was formed independently and was more complete than those of his predecessors, Wegener later credited a number of past authors with similar ideas: Franklin Coxworthy (between 18), Roberto Mantovani (between 18), William Henry Pickering (1907) and Frank Bursley Taylor (1908). The hypothesis that the continents had once formed a single landmass before breaking apart and drifting to their present locations was first presented by Alfred Wegener to the German Geological Society on 6 January 1912.
Dana was enormously influential in America - his Manual of Mineralogy is still in print in revised form - and the theory became known as Permanence theory. This has been proved with respect to North America from the position and distribution of the first beds of the Silurian - those of the Potsdam epoch - and this will probably prove to the case in Primordial time with the other continents also". In his Manual of Geology, 1863, Dana says "The continents and oceans had their general outline or form defined in earliest time. Writing in 1889, Alfred Russel Wallace remarks "It was formerly a very general belief, even amongst geologists, that the great features of the earth's surface, no less than the smaller ones, were subject to continual mutations, and that during the course of known geological time the continents and great oceans had again and again changed places with each other." He quotes Charles Lyell as saying "Continents, therefore, although permanent for whole geological epochs, shift their positions entirely in the course of ages" and claims that the first to throw doubt on this was James D. by earthquakes and floods" and went on to say: "The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three. suggested that the Americas were "torn away from Europe and Africa. Abraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus.