The wanderings of animals / by Hans Gadow.

  • Hans Friedrich Gadow
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The wanderings of animals / by Hans Gadow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    transgression of the sea. Thence the creatures dis¬ persed, multiplying, migrating and accommodating themselves, each according to its kind, in a country which possessed the greatest variety of physical features, where snow-clad mountains arise from a semi-tropical lowland. That at least some of these wanderings wrought change in the emigrants is clearly expressed by the statement that Noah’s children, presumably all Semites, became the founders of the white and black races of mankind. The environ¬ mental conditions in Africa made Ham’s descendants melanistic. It was a crude way of accounting for things, and yet, if we honestly condense all our up- to-date knowledge into one sentence, the result would not be very much superior. At best our treatise is a Romance of Land and Water. CHAPTER I HISTORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION The first general ideas about geographical dis¬ tribution may be found in some of the numerous speculations contained in Bufion’s Histoire naturelle, the brilliant style of which greatly enhanced the interest taken in natural history. The first special treatise on the subject was, however, written in 1777