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&i;`It's a big, broad-ranging volume, an encyclopedic treatise on the distribution of all types of animal across all parts of the planet, and one of the last great landmarks of old-fashioned biogeography in the tradition that stretches forward from Johann Reinhold Forster. It bears a closer resemblance to works such as &i;Island Life&o; and &i;The Geographical Distribution of Animals&o; published eighty years earlier by Alfred Russel Wallace, than to the new wave biogeographical studies that came immediately after it. [It] differs in several ways from the later works; the most apparent of those difference is that it's a descriptive book written in plain English prose. It contains a few simple diagrams, a few maps, but no outburts of statistical abracadabrizing, no tirades of hieroglyphic calculus, almost no mathematics at all. It makes easy reading for those of us who are mathematically impaired.'&o; - David Quammen, in &i;The Song of the Dodo&o;.
