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Hi/ A . .t 



BUFO FOWLERI PUTNAM IN MISSOURI 

 C. H. Danforth 



At a meeting of the Boston Society of Natural His- 

 tory on August 2, 1843, Dr. Andrew Nichols exhibited a 

 toad which had been captured by S. P. Fowler, Esq., of 

 Danvers, Massachusetts, immediately after it had ut- 

 tered its strange call. In a letter accompanying the 

 specimen Dr. Nichols stated that he had long been fa- 

 miliar with the call of this toad, and from his account, 

 which is summarized in the report of the meeting, there 

 can be little doubt that the specimen was a representa- 

 tive of the form which has subsequently come to be 

 known as Bufo fowleri. The short paragraph in which 

 the incident is recorded^ is probably the earliest refer- 

 ence to an individual of the species to be found any^vhere 

 in the literature. However, Dr. D. H. Storer, who was 

 present at the meeting pronounced the specimen to be 

 ''the Bufo lentiginosus- of Shaw" and the species seems 

 to have received no further notice from the Society for 

 nearly forty years. 



But Mr. Fowler apparently was not satisfied with 

 the identification and continued his observations through 

 many seasons, finally sending a collection of specimens 

 and field notes to Professor F. W. Putnam who described 

 the species, in manuscript, conferring upon it the name 

 fowleri in honor of its first collector. Putnam apparently 

 never published his description, but in 1875 Cope^ listed 

 "Bufo lentiginosus fowleri" and in 1882, Mary H. Hink- 

 ley* described the tadpoles of Bufo americanus Le Conte 



1. Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., vol. 1. p. 136, 1844. 



2. It may be recalled that the northern form, B. americanus Le 



Conte, was not recognized as different from the southern 

 B. lentiginosus Shaw until some years later than this. 



3. Checklist of North American Batrachians and Reptiles. Bull. 



U. S. Nat. Museum, No. 1, 1875. (Page 29) 



4. Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., vol. 21. 



