Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Studies on the Variation, Distribution, and Evolution of the Genus Partula: The Species of the Mariana Islands, Guam and Saipan
The present volume is the second to be completed in a series of detailed analytical studies on the genus Partula. The first volume1 dealt with the species of Tahiti, the largest and best-known member of the Society Islands, Situated in southeastern Polynesia. The studies on the representatives of the genus that inhabit Tahiti may well be designated fundamental, both because the Society Islands constitute the present headquarters of the whole genus, and also because the investigations in question served to develop the methods by which the subjects of variation, distribution, and evolution in the case of other island associations may be analyzed, to the extent that time and opportunity may determine.
While it had been expected that the second volume to be prepared would deal with the species of Moorea - an island adjacent to Tahiti in the Society Group that expectation has not been realized, first on account of the Great War and its prior claim on the services of the writer, and second because the field-work in that and other islands of the headquarters group remained to be completed. Mean while, in 1920, an occasion presented itself for a study of Guam and its neighbors in the Mariana Group, located in the western Pacific Ocean. The opportunity was seized because, with the foundation laid in the studies of the genus at its head quarters, it was thought that an investigation of an outlying territory would serve to bring into clearer relief such basic principles of ecology, distribution, and relation ship as were common to widely-separated areas which might be somewhat unlike in secondary details. The event has justified the decision, in ways that will be described in subsequent sections of the present volume.
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