''Par l'examen attentif des formes actuelles des mers et des continents
nous sommes arrives ainsi non seulement a determiner d'avance dans
leures grandes lignes l'origine, la forme et l'etendue de l'Antarctide,
mais aussi a une decouverte d'une importance capitale, la plus grande
peut-etre de ce siecle, car elle tendrait a bouleverser toutes les
donnees actuelles des differentes branches de la science, c'est-a-dire
a la decouverte de la dilatation planetaire."
Roberto Mantovani, 1909, p. 597
''Roberto Mantovani, violinist and scientist, born in Parma on March 25, 1854. He was part of an orchestral team reaching the volcanic Réunion Island in 1878. During his stay on the island, Mantovani had the occasion of observing the huge volcanic fractures on the Indian ocean shore near the town of Saint Denis. He argued that, on a global scale, all the continents might have undergone the same disjunction processes as the volcanic flanks. The global fractures are today the oceans.
His more famous paper, quoted later by Wegener, was published in 1909, in a popular magazine 'Je m’instruis'. The paper contains the first suggestive mapping of the breakup of the Pangea continent based on geological arguments. The great novelty in the 1909 paper was the mapping of the Pacific view: dotted lines were drown between pairs of geographical points which once were in contact while today are separated by the huge extension of the Pacific basin. The idea was that the corresponding points were in contact before the expansion of the Earth. The enlarging of the huge fractures formed all oceans. We had to wait the sixties to find the same kind of lines in the Indian and Atlantic oceans in plate tectonics.''
Giancarlo Scalera: Roberto Mantovani an Italian defender of the continental drift and planetary expansion, May, 2003
L’Antarctide in: Je m’instruis. La science por tous, 38, 1909, pp. 595-597, Paris, Librairie A. Pigoreau; in 4to; hardback; marbled covers. Fine condition.
Price: US $99,000.00