ABSTRACT

Modern biogeography is best viewed as a broad interdisciplinary subject with many sub-fields, such as: zoogeography; phytogeography; and historical biogeography. Biogeography has produced some of the big questions of science and has deservedly attracted a number of distinguished scientists, such as Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Russel Wallace. The famous geologist Lyell put forward his opposition to the supernatural explanation of biogeographical distributions in the second volume of his Principles of Geology. In marine biogeography, Edward Forbes’ treatise The Natural History of the European Seas remains a classic description of major marine biogeographical regions which he defined as the Arctic, Boreal, Celtic, Lusitanian, and Mediterranean provinces. Geographers in particular were to take to ecological biogeography because it gave them a way of integrating biological phenomena, environment, and man. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, British naturalists had little reason to think that different geographical areas would be occupied by different species.