201 
Willis . —Age and Area . 
than hitherto, and it will be seen that they are successful, and that their 
results have bearings upon many problems of distribution. 
There were many minor criticisms brought up at Hull, and in reviews 
of my book and elsewhere, and some of these will be dealt with in later 
papers. 
The Criticisms of Mr. C. Tate Regan (with a Note on 
Distribution of Family Names). 
According to the very careful report of the papers and discussions 
made by my friend Mr. G. Udny Yule, and according also to my own notes, 
Mr. Tate Regan ‘questioned whether areas gave a true hollow curve; he 
thought that the curve was probably modal, and appeared J-shaped owing 
to the grouping of the lower portion. He did not consider that hollow 
curves had any particular significance; you could obtain them from all 
sorts of data, e. g. from the numbers of occurrences of surnames in the 
London Telephone Directory. He emphasized the importance of sterility 
and of isolation in evolution. Dr. Willis’s views did not explain adaptation, 
which could only be explained by selection of slight favourable variations.’ 
It will be seen that this is much less a defence of Natural Selection and 
the other features of the Darwinian theory than an attack upon Age and 
Area. That Mr. Tate Regan himself holds the general principle pro¬ 
pounded in Age and Area is clear from the following extract from the 
chapter on Geographical Distribution in his book (4) upon ‘ The Fresh¬ 
water Fishes of the British Islands’, 1911, p. 271 : ‘ The fact that species which 
have a very wide and a very similar distribution on the mainland of Europe 
and Asia have very dissimilar distributions in the British Islands can only 
be explained by supposing that our islands were connected with each other 
and with continental Europe comparatively recently, when our eastern, and 
probably our southern, streams were tributaries of continental rivers and 
received from them the fishes which they contained ; only nine or ten of 
these had reached Ireland before it became a separate island, and the dis¬ 
tribution of the rest in Britain at varying rates according to circumstances 
has not yet proceeded long enough to spread them all over the island.’ 
This paragraph (which I threw upon the screen at the meeting of the 
British Association at Hull) is so clear a statement of Age and Area that, 
had I not made a brief preliminary statement four years earlier, I should 
feel inclined to ascribe priority to Mr. Tate Regan. His phrase ‘ at varying 
rates according to circumstances’ so clearly expresses what I have tried 
once again to make clear above—that no two species travel at the same 
rate, but that all follow as closely as possible Age and Area, spreading 
twice as far in twice the time (when the time is long)—that I should like to 
have Mr. Tate Regan’s permission to adopt the phrase for future use. The 
sentence that concludes the quotation gives the rest of the proposition of 
