SCHMIDT: HERPETOLOGY 621 



Outside Europe the outstanding example of a special anatomical "school" is 

 probably the extensive work in South Africa, by various authors, on the cranial 

 anatomy of amphibians studied by means of serial sections. This work, which 

 falls in the second quarter of the twentieth century, is traceable to C. G. S. de 

 Villiers, who was a student of Arnold Lang in Ziirich. 



The third great drive of morphological research is to provide a basis for 

 taxonomy. This, of course, involves studying many representatives of a group — 

 often every available genus. Two quite different goals are involved. One is to 

 distinguish the groupings into which species, genera, or families may be parti- 

 tioned; this is essentially analytical. The other is to determine the interrelation- 

 ships among these groupings; this is essentially synthetic. 



Although he was not an anatomist, G. A. Boulenger is chiefly responsible for 

 the breakdown into families among the Rcptilia that is in use today. Boulenger, 

 in turn, drew heavily on Friedrich Hermann Stannius (b. 1808, d. 1883), a Ger- 

 man comparative anatomist who, after studying under Johannes Miiller, was 

 professor at Rostock. The second edition of Stannius' Ilandhucli der Anatomie 

 der Wirhelthiere (1854), which is set up in a taxonomic rather than an organ-sys- 

 tem framework as the first (1846) edition w^as, is repeatedly cited by Boulenger. 

 Cope is Boulenger's counterpart for the Amphibia, and the modern arrange- 

 ment of families of salamanders and frogs is essentially that of Cope, sharpened 

 and refined by a host of later workers. H. H. Wilder made the important dis- 

 covery of lunglessness in certain salamanders in 1894. G. E. Nicholls, who was 

 Professor of Biology at Agra College, Agra, India, discovered the importance of 

 the vertebral column in classifying Salientia (1916). And G. K. Noble drew the 

 soft anatomy, especially the thigh musculature, into a general review of the clas- 

 sification of these animals (1923). Noble's work is further important for its 

 emphasis on interrelationships rather than mere partitioning. 



Edoardo Zavattari, of the Zoological Museum of the University of Turin, pub- 

 lished in 1910-1911 a 122-page monograph on the hyoid muscles of lizards, de- 

 scribing and illustrating the patterns in a wide selection of species. This, plus 

 earlier analytical work on the skeleton by Cope and others, and on the body and 

 limb muscles by Fiibringer, Gadow, and Maurer, formed the basis for a general 

 review of the classification and interrelationships of the lizards by C. L. Camp 

 (1923). 



The foundation of the modern classification of turtles was laid by Boulenger. 

 This was refined chiefiy by the voluminous work of Georg Baur and Friedrich 

 Siebenrock, both of whom were active but not very imaginative anatomists. Bou- 

 lenger was also responsible for the framework of the modern classification of 

 snakes. Boulenger's classification has been improved and corrected by many later 

 workers. A brief review of the comparative anatomy of snakes and its implica- 

 tions was published as recently as 1951 by Bellairs and Underwood in Biological 

 Reviews. 



The outstanding student of the eye of reptiles was Gordon Lynn AValls 

 (b. 1905), who built on the earlier work of the German, Victor Franz. Walls, 

 formerly at Wayne University at Detroit and now at the University of California, 

 emphasized the profound differences between the eyes of snakes and lizards, and 

 made this the basis for his theory of the origin of snakes from noctural lizards. He 

 described, among other things, the existence of physiologically yellow lenses that 



