Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Swiss botanist Augustin Pyrame de Candolle (1779-1841) emphasized
the distinction between “stations” (habitats) and “habitations” (botanical
provinces):
By the term
station
I mean the special nature of the locality in which
each species customarily grows; and by the term
habitation,
a gen-
eral indication of the country wherein the plant is native. The term
station
relates essentially to climate, to the terrain of a given plant;
the term
habitation
relates to geographical, and even geological, cir-
cumstances…. The study of stations is, so to speak, botanical topo-
graphy; the study of habitations, botanical geography. (de Candolle
1820:383)
According to this author, explanations for the former depend on physical
causes that are acting in the present, whereas those for the latter depend
on causes that existed in the past. De Candolle believed that the distinction
between stations and habitations was important and that the confusion
between them limited the study of the geographic distribution of plants (Nel-
son and Platnick 1981). Nelson (1978a) identified them with ecological and
historical biogeography, respectively.
British naturalist Charles Lyell (1797-1875) was the first to articulate the
classic dispersalist model developed later by Darwin and Wallace (Bueno-
Hernández and Llorente Bousquets 2006). Lyell believed that the number
of living species was in equilibrium, so when some species became extinct,
others had to be created in one region or another. Lyell's concept of “cre-
ation” means creation according to natural laws and processes (Nelson
and Platnick 1981). Lyell's (1830-1833)
Principles of Geology
opposed rap-
id catastrophic changes, which he thought were based on interpretations
of the Bible, proposing that gradual changes through time accounted for
fossil remains of extinct species, and he emphasized environmental condi-
tions to explain the creation and extinction of species (Bueno-Hernández
and Llorente Bousquets 2006; Humphries and Ebach 2004). He connected
fossils and contemporary patterns, bringing to biogeography a sense of his-
tory and evolution (Briggs 1995).
