According to Taylor, long back in the past there were two great landmasses, one at the northern-hemisphere known as Laurasia and the other at the southern-hemisphere known as Gondwanaland.
He supposed that in course of time these landmasses (which he pictured as being continuous sheets of sial) started spreading outwards towards the equator, more or less radially from the polar-regions, much as a continental ice-sheet would do.
His assumptions of continental-drift were mainly intended to explain the formation of Tertiary mountains.
Taylor concentrated his view on the sudden start of mountain building at the beginning of tertiary in contrast to the quieter period of mid-cretaceous and suggested that this was due to the sudden increase of tidal action of the moon which was captured by the earth in late- cretaceous and the increase in the tidal force was sufficient to increase the rate of rotation of the earth and also dragged the continents away from the pole.
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In support of his assumptions he cited the location of most of the tertiary mountains which are found more or less towards the equator side of the continental masses.
Taylor’s assumptions, in fact, fail to justify the exact happenings; for example, tidal forces never increase the rate of rotation of the earth; besides, the equatorial movement of continents as assumed by Taylor fail to explain the drifting of South America from Africa. As such, Taylor’s hypothesis did not receive much attention.