Das Prinzip geographischer Rassenkreise und das Problem der Artbildung

Abstract

IT has been apparent for a long time that an analysis of the vast assemblage of species and varieties that is the province of systematic zoology would be of first-class importance in evolutionary studies. In performing his task of providing the forms of animal life with names, the systematist was obviously collecting data on which important generalisations might be founded. The description of species and varieties and the recording of the minutia of variation, distribution, and nomenclature have always been viewed with some mistrust and disdain by the worker in other branches of zoology. We find even early students like Spallanzani and Gilbert White voicing such disdain. Nevertheless, Darwin, Wallace, Bateson, and others fully realised the value of systematics. They drew liberally on the data and were aware that certain general principles were becoming clearer in the growing mass of systematic descriptions.

Das Prinzip geographischer Rassenkreise und das Problem der Artbildung.

Von Bernhard Rensch. Pp. iii + 206. (Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1929.) 145O gold marks.