The J. H. B. Bookshelf

Abstract

Because the subject of biogeography cuts across so many scientific disciplines, one might wonder whether it would be possible to offer a unified account of its history. But Janet Browne has done exactly this, and her coherent portrayal of biogeographical thought from Linnaeus to Darwin adds a new dimension to preand early evolutionary history of biology and geology. She begins with the seventeenthand eighteenth-century conception of the distribution of animals over the earth from Noah's Ark, and with Linnaeus' and Buffon's differing views on single versus multiple points of creation. With the work of Alexander yon Humboldt and Alphonse de Candolle in the early nineteenth century and their new statistical methods of "botanical arithmetic," the study of plant distribution became a science. At the same time geologists like Georges Cuvier and Adolphe Brongniart were turning to fossil distribution studies, and de Candolle pioneered the field of paleobotany. Browne explains how among geologists biogeographical data were interpreted as processes, whereas taxonomists looked instead for patterns of distribution. As the question of the origin of species assumed increasing importance in the nineteenth century, it became a central issue in biogeography. Nontransmutationists such as Edward Forbes, Louis Agassiz, and Joseph Hooker (in his early work) attempted to account for representative species through nonevolutionary means. But for Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin the notion of organic change played a key role in their perceptions of geographical distribution. In the last two chapters of her book Browne discusses Wallace and Darwin in detail, adding a new perspective to the development of their evolutionary theories. With their work the separate strands of biogeographical research in botany/zoology and in geology/paleontology were interwoven within a new specialized field of natural history. Browne's study is extremely readable, and its major themes are well