ABSTRACT
The molluscan provincial concept in the tropical western Atlantic For over 150 years, marine biologists, malacologists, and oceanographers have recognized that the shallow water marine molluscan faunas of the world are distributed in a pattern of distinct, geographically denable areas. Intensive shell collecting by nineteenth-century naturalists in the English, Spanish, French, and Dutch tropical island colonies resulted in the discovery of an overwhelming number of spectacular new species and genera. These new taxa supplied the rst evidence for the existence of larger biogeographical patterns. As more data poured into Europe in the late 1800s and, later in the United States in the early 1900s, these geographical patterns became better dened. Building on this new pool of information, the European and American pioneer molluscan biogeographers, in recognizing latitudinal distributions, were actually planting the seeds for the development of the science of marine ecology. The evolution of the thought processes that resulted in our present understanding of western Atlantic marine biogeography is as fascinating as the subject itself.
