On anomalies in zoological and botanical geography
Publisher Information: 1864.
Wallace, Alfred Russel (1823-1913). On anomalies in zoological and botanical geography. In Natural History Review (1864): 111-123. Whole number. [4], 156, vi, 627-631pp. plus 8 leaves of advertisements. 223 x 146 mm. (uncut and partly unopened). Original printed wrappers, a little worn and chipped, small split in upper spine. Very good copy.
First Edition. Up to about 1860 Wallace explained the present similarities between plant and animal species in regions now separated by water (such as Britain and continental Europe) by postulating, along with Edward Forbes and other naturalists, that land extensions between these regions had existed in the recent geological past. By 1863 he had abandoned this position, adopting instead Lyell’s uniformitarian view that the Earth’s topography had not altered substantially over time. This change was based on Wallace’s analysis of the global distribution of species, which convinced him of the theoretical as well as the descriptive validity of the six zoogeographical regions outlined in ornithologist Philip Sclater’s “On the general distribution of the members of the class Aves” (Proceedings of the Linnean Society 2 [1858]). Wallace’s altered position was first made explicit in the present paper, which “treated several cases of apparently anomalous distributional patterns that had been advanced as objections to Wallace’s extension of Sclater’s ornithological regions. Wallace refined his argument that the six regions represented ‘a true Zoological and Botanical division of the earth’” (Fichman, p. 53). “The conversion of Wallace to a position that made him a forceful opponent of the extensionist tradition and the preeminent defender of the doctrine of the permanence of the continents and oceans was a crucial development in nineteenth-century evolutionary science” (ibid., p. 52). Fichman, An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace (2010).
Book Id: 43044Price: $750.00