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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    Meanwhile in 1859 Darwin’s Origin of Species had given a great impetus to the study of geographi¬ cal distribution and caused a parting of the ways in its treatment, especially in the mapping of the world into regions or other divisions. Whilst some writers were, and are, satisfied to express by their realms, regions, or zones the recent, actually existing, sta¬ tistic similarities and differences of the faunas of the various countries, other workers, more appreciative of evolution, tried to apply genetic principles to the selection of their divisions, which they rightly con¬ sidered as original centres of creation and subsequent dispersal. Haeckel, the foremost apostle of ‘ Darwinism ’ in Germany, has given us in his Generelle Morphologie, 1866, the terms 0ecology, the relation of organisms to their environment, and Chorology, their distri¬ bution in space. The 14th chapter of his History of Creation, 1868, is devoted to the distribution of organisms, with the emphatic assertion that ‘not until Darwin can chorology be spoken of as a separate science, since he supplied the acting causes for the elucidation of the hitherto accumulated mass of facts.’ One of the earliest writers to grasp the new situation was Pucheran1 in France. He pleaded that 1 Pucheran had already, in 1865, insisted upon the essential unity of the faunas of Europe, Asia and Africa, and on the necessity of
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