ABSTRACT

What is new in Lyell is obviously neither an interest

in geographical distribution and its laws, nor efforts on

behalf of gradual geological change. Rather what Lyell

offered was the first systematic attempt to argue from

present plant and animal geography to a gradual rather than

sudden exchange of new species for old in the recent past

and present. No such arguments were, of course, appro­

priate until stratigraphical paleontology had established

that past exchange of species. Likewise, no one before

Lyell had Lyell*s reasons for studying present geographical

distribution, because no one before Lyell had sought a

systematic alternative to Buckland's and Cuvier’s response

to the stratigraphical records of past changes in organic

and inorganic geography.