SCHMIDT: HERPETOLOGY 617 



snake. His contribution to systematics in the fauna of the American Southwest 

 consists in reviewing genus after genus in terms so much more exact than in any 

 earlier work as to be beyond comparison. These studies have supplied secure 

 foundations for further studies in any direction, which is a major function of 

 taxonomic zoology. 



Regional Schools op Herpetology 



With the Boulengerian Catalogues available, independent schools of herpetol- 

 ogy could grow up in South Africa, Australia, and South America. In the Union 

 of South Africa the existence of a great number of regional museums greatly 

 furthered the independent growth of herpetology focused on the rich fauna of 

 the region. At the Albany Museum in Grahamstown, John Hewitt's papers begin 

 in 1909, and two books by Walter Rose of Cape Town, Veldt and Vlei (1929) and 

 The Reptiles and Amphibians of Southern Africa (1950), afford an introduction 

 to this fauna at the popular level. Among numerous able students, Vivian F. 

 FitzSimons (b. 1901), at the Transvaal Museum, took the lead with his volume 

 on The Lizards of South Africa (1943). A Guide to the Snakes of Uganda (1938), 

 by Captain Charles R. S. Pitman, with excellent colored plates, ingeniously 

 financed by subscription, represents still another competent work by an amateur. 



In Australia an independent center of herpetology grew up at the Australian 

 Museum in Sydney under J. R. Kinghorn. The existence of the museums of the 

 several states in Australia has furthered publication and popularization, as in 

 South Africa. 



In South America, herpetology has flourished mainly in the Argentine at 

 Buenos Aires and in Brazil at Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, with immigrant 

 scholars from Europe, and with European and North American trained native 

 students. j\Iiguel and Kati Fernandez, in the Argentine, have produced an excel- 

 lent account of life histories of frogs, and Bertha Lutz, drawing upon her own 

 and her father's notes, has taken the step from taxonomy to ecology at Rio. The 

 work of Afranio do Amaral, long director at the Instituto Butantan, has been 

 mainly on lizards and snakes. The extraordinary life history of Darwin's frog, 

 in which the tadpoles are brought to maturity in the vocal sac of the male, was 

 worked out by Karl Pflaumer in Chile between 1926 and 1930 ("Beobachtungen 

 an Rhinoderma darwinii," Zool. Garten [1934], n.s., 7:131-134). The Brazilian 

 group of herpetologists is especially strong at the half-century mark in 1950. 



Tlic Philippine fauna, after the acquisition of the islands by the United States 

 in 1898, became tributary to the United States National Museum, and was further 

 exploited herpetologically by the active collecting and publication of E. H. Taylor 

 — quite in the pattern of the European colonies, but with the summary volumes 

 published by the Philippine Bureau of Science. 



The independence of Chinese herpetology from European and American cen- 

 ters was forecast before the drawing of the "Bamboo Curtain" by the work of 

 C. C. Liu, beginning in 1930 and culminating in his large work on The Amphib- 

 ians of West China (1950). Dr. Liu had the advantage of close relations with his 

 American herpetological colleagues, and could build on the work of his teacher 

 Dr. Alice M. Boring (b. 1883) and on the contributions to the herpetology of 

 China of Clifford H. Pope. 



