Milestones of Science Books

WEGENER, Alfred.

Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane.

Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1915.

1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. Item #002233

8vo (210 x 136 mm). iv, [2], 94 pp., 20 illustr. in text. Three-quarter cloth over marbled boards, with titled paper label and shelf-mark label to spine, interior clean and unfoxed, library ink stamps to title-page. Provenance: Handels-Hochschulkurse der Stadt Nürnberg. -----

DSB XIV, 217; Norman 2192 (journal issue). - First edition in book form of the famous work on the continental drift, the mainwork of Wegener. The text appeared first in Petermanns Mitteilungen 1912. Later editions appeared in 1920,1922 and 1929; foreign editions after 1922. Wegener began his university career at the physical institute of the University Marburg in 1909, where he worked until 1919. After his habilitation in the fields of astronomy, meteorology and cosmic physics in Marburg, he became the director of the local observatory in 1910 and in parallel worked as a lecturer at the physical institute. Wegener became widely known for his pioneering theory on continental drift, which he published in two papers in 1912, both entitled "Die Entstehung der Kontinente" (The origin of continents).. Although it was thought ludicrous at first, it has since been confirmed and is now quite acclaimed. In 1915 he published a book-length extension of his work on continental displacements now entitled "Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane." Because of the First World War, Wegener's book went unnoticed outside Germany. In 1922, however, a third (revised) edition was translated into English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish, pushing Wegener's theory of continental drift to the forefront of debate in the earth sciences. The present first edition is much rarer than the journal issue.

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