Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
terpretation of fossil distributions. In
Summa Contra Gentiles
Saint Tho-
mas Aquinas (1225-1274) defended the physical existence of the Garden
of Eden and discussed the secondary dispersal from Mount Ararat, where
Noah's Ark landed after the Deluge.
In the sixteenth century, new attitudes toward knowledge developed dur-
ing the Enlightenment, when the invention of printing by movable metal type
and global exploration provided better conditions for the development of
biogeography. Spanish Jesuit Joseph d'Acosta (1540-1600) tried to explain
the presence of the human species in the New World. In
Historia Natural y
Moral de las Indias
(1590) he examined alternative explanations and con-
cluded that the Americas should be connected, in some place, to the Old
World, postulating the existence of the Bering Strait, discovered in the eight-
eenth century (Papavero 1991). German Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher
(1602-1680) calculated the dimensions of Noah's Ark necessary to accom-
modate a pair of the 310 animal species that were known at that time. By
the beginning of the nineteenth century, the idea of the Ark was almost
completely abandoned because of the increasing numbers of species that
were discovered and described, but the concept of the Deluge was still en-
trenched (Briggs and Humphries 2004). Matthew Hale (1609-1676) erected
theoretical land bridges to explain how animals had reached the New World
from the Old. These bridges subsequently disappeared, and the New World
species were transformed after living for some time in a new area (Briggs
1995).
Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) inaugurated classical biogeography. He was
one of the first authors to provide an explanation of the geographic distri-
bution of living beings in accordance with the topic of Genesis. In his
Ora-
tio de Telluris Habitabilis Incremento,
Linnaeus (1744) situated the Garden
of Eden on a tropical island, under the equator, which was the only land
emerging from the primordial sea. All the animals and plants inhabited this
paradisiacal island, which bore a variety of ecological conditions arranged in
elevational and climatic zones; those needing a cold climate lived near the
peak of a high mountain, and those needing a warmer climate inhabited the
lowlands. After the Deluge, as the waters receded and the lands expanded,
species dispersed to the areas where they have remained. Linnaeus's the-
ory clearly comprises two fundamental biogeographic ideas: a small center
