XVII 
GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS 
By Hans Gapow, M.A., Ph.D., F.R.S. 
Strickland Curator and Lecturer on Zoology in the University of Cambridge. 
THE first general ideas about geographical distribution may be found 
in some of the brilliant speculations contained in Buffon’s Histoire 
Naturelle. The first special treatise on the subject was however 
written in 1777 by E. A. W. Zimmermann, Professor of Natural Science 
at Brunswick, whose large volume, Specimen Zoologiae Geographicae 
Quadrupedum..., deals in a statistical way with the mammals; im- 
portant features of the large accompanying map of the world are the 
ranges of mountains and the names of hundreds of genera indicating 
their geographical range. In a second work he laid special stress 
on domesticated animals with reference to the spreading of the 
various races of Mankind. 
In the following year appeared the Philosophia Entomologica 
by J. C. Fabricius, who was the first to divide the world into eight 
regions. In 1803 G. R. Treviranus' devoted a long chapter of his 
great work on Biologie to a philosophical and coherent treatment of 
the distribution of the whole animal kingdom. Remarkable progress 
was made in 1810 by F. Tiedemann? of Heidelberg. Few, if any, of 
the many subsequent Ornithologists seem to have appreciated, or 
known of, the ingenious way in which Tiedemann marshalled his 
statistics in order to arrive at gener: al conclusions. There are, for 
instance, long lists of birds arranged in accordance with their 
occurrence in one or more continents: by correlating the distribu- 
tion of the birds with-their food he concludes “that the countries of 
the East Indian flora have no vegetable feeders in common with 
America,” and “that it is probably due to the great peculiarity of 
the African flora that Africa has few phytophagous kinds in common 
with other countries, whilst zoophagous birds have a far more 
independent, often cosmopolitan, distribution.” There are also 
remarkable chapters on the influence of environment, distribu- 
tion, and migration, upon the structure of the Birds! In short, 
1 Biologie oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur, Vol. u. Géttingen, 1803. 
2 Anatomie und Naturgeschichte der Vogel. Heidelberg, 1810. 
