SCHMIDT: ANIMAL GEOGRAPHY 773 



Suess, Das Antlitz der Erde (in which Gondwana Land was first so named) laid 

 off the earth's surface in broad and bold tectonic outlines. Suess' ideas received 

 support from the most eminent of geologists, as in Neumayr's later editions of 

 the Erdgeschichte, Emil Ilaug's Traits de Geologie, and in Britain from J. W. 

 Gregory. With such notable geological precedent, any specialist on any group of 

 animals felt free to explain disconnected distributions by hypotheses of tongues 

 of land extending over any water barrier that might separate even the species of 

 a single genus; and such liypotheses can only be described for the era between 

 1880 and 1915 as "untrammeled." 



The bridges became ever more complicated — R. F. Scharff, for example, 

 thought that eastern and western Australia had been connected with Antarctica 

 by two separate land corridors. Tongues of land were thought to be of short 

 duration, lasting just long enough for the author's purpose and not so long as 

 to allow additional and confusing emigrations and counteremigrations to 

 take place. 



During the era of land-bridge speculation eminent specialists in various fields 

 became proponents of this or that pattern of connection between the southern 

 continents. The great botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker had been impressed with 

 the relations of the plants of southern South America, New Zealand, and Tas- 

 mania in the course of his early exploring voyage with the Erebus and Terror, 

 from 1839 to 1843. The remarkable and distinctive Araucarian pines found in 

 southern South America and in the islands near New Zealand, and the antarctic 

 beech NotJiofagus, found in Chile, New Zealand, and Tasmania, present to bot- 

 anists exactly the kind of geographic relations that had led zoologists to speculate 

 about direct land connections across existing oceans. The Swiss zoologist Riiti- 

 meyer, in an essay on the origin of the animal life of Switzerland, published in 

 1867, makes the suggestion of the former existence of a vast Antarctic continent, 

 connecting all of the southern continents and New Zealand, and this idea received 

 support from T. H. Huxley in 1870. The Antarctic and Pacific continents then 

 expand and contract in the minds of F. W. Hutton (1873), Theodore Gill (1875), 

 Hermann von Ihering (1891), H. 0. Forbes (1893), Charles Hedley (1895), 

 H. F. Osborn (1900), and A. E. Ortman (1901). 



All of this land-bridge history is essentially independent of the geological 

 theories of a Gondwana Land. Ideas of land bridges were integrated with the 

 ideas of zoogeographers by Theodor Arldt, in Die Entwicklung der Kontinente 

 und ihrer Lehewelt in 1907 (2d ed., 1936-1938). There is a little popular sum- 

 mary of the subject by Hans Gadow, in The Wanderings of Animals (1913). 



Throughout all of this era of "land-bridge building," a few zoogeographers 

 held to the basic assumption of the permanence of the existing continents and the 

 distinction between oceanic and continental islands. Darwin wrote skeptically 

 about "those who make continents as easily as a cook makes pancakes." Against 

 much polemical sniping, Wallace held firm to his original position. Georg Pfeffer, 

 almost alone among malacologists, held out against the too easy explanations of 

 direct and multiple land connections. Anton Handlirsch took up the polemic 

 cudgels and showed how disgracefully superficial and how incredibly arbitrary 

 and thoughtless had been the "creation" of land bridges. By mapping the hypo- 

 thetical connecting land areas proposed by his colleagues, he showed that almost 

 every bit of existing ocean bottom had been raised and lowered. As the fore- 



