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.