Age and Area: A Study in Geographical Distribution and Origin of Species

Abstract

TO determine the value of Dr. Willis's book is not easy. The author delivers his message with enthusiasm and emphasis. “Age and Area,” he reiterates, provides a penetrating and wholly new light on evolution. His supporters, four of whom contribute chapters to the book, endorse this opinion and tell us it is all right. Table after table exhibits special phenomena on which Dr. Willis relies. These tabulations seem to have been scrupulously made, and they certainly demonstrate some remarkable and novel results. The book is written with perfect sincerity and a conviction almost naive. Whatever its worth may prove to be, it is an honest attempt. So imposing an array must produce an effect in the mind even of the critical. But there are disquieting features. Repetition of the bald assurance that Age and Area is the true faith should be unnecessary. A judicious advocate would leave that conclusion to flow more quietly from the evidence. When, for example, we read, “As one of our leading ecologists says in a letter to me, and underlines, ‘this will be strongly in favour of your Age and Area hypothesis,’ “we remember seeing testimonials like that elsewhere and in more mundane application. But though the reader's scepticism is thus instantly aroused, the matter is worth careful attention, for to have hit on a new method of investigating even a part of the theory of evolution is no common achievement, and that the author has done this cannot in fairness be denied.

Age and Area: A Study in Geographical Distribution and Origin of Species.

By Dr. J. C. Willis. With chapters by Hugo de Vries, H. B. Guppy, Mrs. E. M. Reid, and Dr. James Small. Pp. x + 259. (Cambridge University Press, 1922.) 14s. net.