IT is one of the ever-wise provisions of nature, that every land has a vegetation and an association of animals peculiar to itself, that every sea and every zone of ocean is peopled with life found nowhere else. There is such a wealth of conception in the forms of organic life, that there is no need of their repetition in distant lands. The palms and the reef corals never wander from the tropics; the humming-birds are as peculiarly American, as the Mississippi or the Andes. It is specially the province of modern science to explain the phenomena of nature on known natural laws and forces, and with this view no phenomena are more interesting than those of the geographical distribution of species. The subject, in its full extent, would involve a solution of the much-vexed question of the origin of species; but whether species now living were derived from their relatives of a former geological age, or were independently created, we will not question in the present article, only taking species when they first appeared as they now exist, and contenting ourselves with some of the more prominent forces which bind them to peculiar habitats, or tend to diffuse them over wider or different areas. These secondary causes, which act in the geographical distribution of species, are either inorganic or organic. Of the former the most important are the influences of topography, temperature, ocean currents, winds, and humidity; of the latter, animals themselves, and man,-for in this respect man must be separated from the mere brute animals as wielding a very different influence. The inorganic forces are so interwoven, they so act and react upon and limit each other, that
ABSTRACT
PUBLICATION RECORD
- Publication year
1868
- Venue
American Naturalist
- Publication date
1868-03-01
- Fields of study
Biology, Geography
- Identifiers
- External record
- Source metadata
Semantic Scholar
CITATION MAP
EXTRACTION MAP
CLAIMS
- No claims are published for this paper.
CONCEPTS
- No concepts are published for this paper.
REFERENCES
- No references are available for this paper.
Showing 0-0 of 0 references · Page 1 of 1