History of Ecological Sciences, Part 61B: Terrestrial Biogeography and Paleobiogeography, 1840s–1940s

Abstract

Biogeography is a strange discipline. In general, there are no institutes of biogeography; there are no departments of it. There are no professional biogeographers—no professors of it, no cura- tors of it. It seems to have few traditions. —Nelson 1978 And the term “biogeography” was only coined in 1891, by a geographer, not a biologist (Ratzel 1891:9). Part 61A (Egerton 2018) explained that, after modest growth during the 1700s, Alexander Hum- boldt brought plant geography into botanical prominence with his South American study, Essai sur la géographie des plantes (1807), and that August de Candolle achieved a practical synthesis in his ency- clopedia article, Géographie botanique (1820). Animal geography also progressed. Eberhard Zim- mermann produced an early synthesis in two treatises (1777, 1778–1783), but sparked less follow- up by others in zoology than Humboldt’s and de Candolle’s works sparked in botany. There was some cross- stimulation between plant geography and animal geography. Keir Sterling compiled a very use- ful collection of 28 articles, Selections from the Literature of American Biogeography (1974), all but one of which fall within the time range of this Part 61B; Selections contains an 11- page (unnumbered) introduction in which Sterling provided an indication of how the individual articles fit in a larger context. This subject would require a book- length survey to encompass all its aspects, but McIntosh (1985:107–110) gave a brief summary. A discussion of North America’s four migrator flyways will be in part 62.