The Geographical Distribution of Animals With a Study of the Relations of Living and Extinct Faunas As Elucidating the Past Changes of the Earth's Surface

E-302. Very Good. Hardcover. Hardcover. 8vo. Published by Macmillan and Co, London, UK. 1876. Xv 503 pages; viii 607 pages pgs. Illustrated with wood engraved plates and maps. Bound in green cloth boards with titles present to the spine and seal present to the front board. Boards have shelf-wear present to the extremities (boards are scuffed and worn). Previous owner's name present to the reverse of the FFEP. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. The Geographical Distribution of Animals, was published in 1876 and served as the definitive text on zoogeography for the next 80 years. The book included evidence from the fossil record to discuss the processes of evolution and migration that had led to the geographical distribution of modern species. For example, he discussed how fossil evidence showed that tapirs had originated in the Northern Hemisphere, migrating between North America and Eurasia and then, much more recently, to South America after which the northern species became extinct, leaving the modern distribution of two isolated groups of tapir species in South America and Southeast Asia. Wallace was very aware of, and interested in, the mass extinction of megafauna in the late Pleistocene. In The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876) he wrote, "We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared". He added that he believed the most likely cause for the rapid extinctions was glaciation, but by the time he wrote World of Life (1911) he had come to believe those extinctions were "due to man's agency". EB; 8vo 8" - 9" tall .