326 Geographical Distribution of Animals 
different from that which was upheld by L. Agassiz. As Murray 
himself puts it: “To my multiple origin, communication and direct 
derivation is essential. The species is compounded of many influences 
brought together through many individuals, and distilled by Nature 
into one species; and, being once established it may roam and spread 
wherever it finds the conditions of life not materially different from 
those of its original centre.” This declaration fairly agrees with 
more modern views, and it must be borne in mind that the application 
of the single-centre principle to the genera, families and larger groups 
in the search for descent inevitably leads to one creative centre for the 
whole animal kingdom, a condition as unwarrantable as the myth of 
Adam and Eve being the first representatives of Mankind. 
It looks as if it had required almost ten years for The Origin of 
Species to show its full effect, since the year 1868 marks the publica- 
tion of Haeckel’s Natiirliche Schoepfungsgeschichte, in addition to 
other great works. The terms Oecology (the relation of organisms 
to their environment) and Chorology (their distribution in space) 
had been given us in his Generelle Morphologie in 1866. The 
fourteenth chapter of the History of Creation is devoted to the 
distribution of organisms, their chorology, with the emphatic asser- 
tion that “not until Darwin can chorology be spoken of as a separate 
science, since he supplied the acting causes for the elucidation of the 
hitherto accumulated mass of facts.” A map (a “hypothetical sketch ”) 
shows the monophyletic origin and the routes of distribution of Man. 
Natural Selection may be all-mighty, all-sufficient, but it requires 
time, so much that the countless aeons required for the evolution of 
the present fauna were soon felt to be one of the most serious draw- 
backs of the theory. Therefore every help to ease and shorten this 
process should have been welcomed. In 1868 M. Wagner? came to 
1 Murray, The Geographical Distribution of Mammals, p. 14. London, 1866. 
2 The first to formulate clearly the fundamental idea of a theory of migration and its 
importance in the origin of new species was L. von Buch, who in his Physikalische 
Beschreibung der Canarischen Inseln, written in 1825, wrote as follows: ‘‘Upon the con- 
tinents the individuals of the genera by spreading far, form, through differences of the 
locality, food and soil, varieties which finally become constant as new species, since owing 
to the distances they could never be crossed with other varieties and thus be brought back 
to the main type. Next they may again, perhaps upon different roads, return to the old 
home where they find the old type likewise changed, both having become so different that 
they can interbreed no longer. Not so upon islands, where the individuals shut up in 
narrow valleys or within narrow districts, can always meet one another and thereby 
destroy every new attempt towards the fixing of a new variety.” Clearly von Buch explains 
here why island types remain fixed, and why these types themselves have become so 
different from their continental congeners.—Actually von Buch is aware of a most 
important point, the difference in the process of development which exists between a new 
species b, which is the result of an ancestral species a having itself changed into b and 
thereby vanished itself, and a new species c which arose through separation out of the 
same ancestral a, which itself persists as such unaltered. Von Buch’s prophetic view seems 
to have escaped Lyell’s and even Wagner’s notice. 
