SCHMIDT: HERPETOLOGY 619 



papers published during the past century are by obscure persons who are never 

 heard of again, or by men who later became noted in nonmorphological fields. A 

 few, however, stand out because of the number or importance of their studies. 

 Owen himself carried over into the post-1850 period. The first volume of his 

 Anatomy of Vertebrates, which covers amphibians and reptiles, appeared in 1866 

 when Owen was sixty-two years old. St. George Mivart (b. 1827, d. 1900), an 

 isolated half-mystical figure who for many years was Lecturer in Comparative 

 Anatomy at St. Mary's Hospital in London, contributed several careful descrip- 

 tions of the skeleton and muscles of amphibians and lizards before he turned his 

 attention exclusively to mammals. William Kitchen Parker (b. 1823, d. 1890) 

 was a British physician with a passionate love of nature that expressed itself in 

 a series of meticulous monographs, illustrated with plates drawn by himself, on 

 the structure and development of the skull and pectoral girdle of various amphib- 

 ians and reptiles. Parker was greatly handicapped by the fact that he could not 

 read German. 



That remarkable Swede, Gustaf Retzius (b. 1842, d. 1919), could hardly have 

 failed to contribute to our knowledge of the morphology of amphibians and rep- 

 tiles. Retzius was the son of the distinguished anatomist and anthropologist, 

 Anders Adolf Retzius, who in turn was the son of a distinguished natural scien- 

 tist. Retzius was a friend of the great German anatomist, Johannes Miiller. His 

 work was almost wholly descriptive, painstakingly detailed, and illustrated largely 

 by himself. The tremendous Das Gehororgan der Wirhelthiere (2 vols., 1881- 

 1884) contains meticulous descriptions of the auditory apparatus of many am- 

 phibians and reptiles. Later, after he had turned his attention to the structure of 

 sex cells, he described the spermatozoa of many amphibians and reptiles. 



The outstanding descriptive work of this era is Die Anatomie des Frosches, 

 which was addressed to physiologists rather than anatomists. The first edition of 

 this famous work, by Alexander Ecker (b. 1816, d. 1887) and Robert "Wiedersheim 

 (b. 1848, d. 1923) , appeared in three parts between 1864 and 1882. Both Ecker and 

 Wiedersheim were at the University of Freiburg, where Ecker was Professor of 

 Human and Comparative Anatomy and Wiedersheim Extraordinary Professor. 

 A second edition, completely rewritten by Ernst Gaupp (b. 1865, d. 1916), also of 

 Freiburg, appeared in three parts between 1896 and 1904. An English edition of 

 the first German edition, translated by George Haslam, was published in London in 

 1889. Other frog anatomies during this era were by Mivart (1874) and A. M. 

 Marshall (1882) in England, and by S. J. Holmes (1916) in America. It is ex- 

 traordinary that a comparable work on a salamander did not appear until 1934, 

 when TJie Anatomy of the Salamander [Salamander maculosa], by Eric T. B. 

 Francis, was published in England. Still more remarkable is the fact that no 

 modern descriptive anatomy of any reptile has ever appeared. 



The most ambitious compendium of accumulated data on the morphology of 

 amphibians and reptiles appeared in Bronn's Klassen und Ordnungen des Thier- 

 reichs. The herpetological volumes, running to more than 2,800 pages and 223 

 lithographed plates, were published between 1873 and 1890. They were compiled 

 by Christian Karl Hoffmann (b. 1841, d. 1903) of the University of Leiden. 

 Although now sadly out of date, Hoffmann's is still the only general compilation 

 of anatomical data for amphibians and reptiles. 



The classical treatise on the embryology of an amphibian is Goette's folio 



