Reviews

Aubréville, A.: Essais sur la distribution et l’histoire des Angiospermes tropicales dans le monde. Adansonia 9 (1969) 189-247. This paper deals with many problems also discussed in van Steenis’s land bridge theory. Aubréville also rejects long distance dispersal and ’reluctantly’ accepts Wegener’s Eocene supercontinent as providing the necessary migration routes. He also postulates that the Eocene equator was far displaced, not making clear whether this is his own idea or somebody else’s. He bases this apparently on the ’tropical’ character of the floras of the European Eocene, of which he is firmly convinced. Aubreville does not realize that Dutoit already in 1937 has rejected Wegener’s Eocene reconstruction as necessitating an ’absurdly late date’ for the main drifting movement. To my knowledge nobody else has since accepted this reconstruction. In Aubreville’s reconstruction of continents + equator, movements of 60 cm/year are necessary to get everything in place in time, which is more than 10 times faster than what is admitted as possible and likely by geologists (cf. E.R. Deutsch in SEPM, Spec. Publ. 10, 1963).