616 A CENTURY Of PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



response to the great interest in snakes on the part of the general public. This is 

 to no small degree a modern counterpart of the performances of the North Afri- 

 can and Oriental snake-charmers. It might be passed over without mention here 

 were it not that the Florida Reptile Institute, under the able showman E. Ross 

 Allen, has developed via a business of herpetological supply into ambitious her- 

 petological research. In the serpentaria of the institutes manufacturing antivenin 

 as a remedy for snake bite, the collections of living snakes yield a by-product in 

 the form of snake shows that correspond exactly in an inverted relation to those 

 of the snake farm, as in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Bangkok, Siam, or Port Elizabeth, 

 South Africa. 



The Amateur in ITerpetology 



Natural history has always been open to amateurs and self-education in this 

 field has often preceded book knowledge. The positions in public and university 

 museums are so few that the few actual professionals in herpetology have always 

 welcomed the aid of volunteer students. The enthusiastic amateur needs only to 

 follow the Huxleyan motto tenax propositi to be able to vie with professionals at 

 their own level. It is for the amateur and beginner that the general popular books 

 are written. Catherine C. Hopley's Snakes: Curiosities and Wonders of Serpent 

 Life (1882), written, curiously enough, by an Englishwoman caught in South 

 Carolina by the Civil "War, helped to set the pattern for Mary CjTithia Dickerson 

 and Raymond Lee Ditmars. 



At the more serious level, it may be remembered that the only education in 

 zoology available a century ago lay in the preparation for a medical career. Thus 

 medical men were long the principal leaders in herpetology as in natural history 

 in general. One may wish that the avocation of natural history studies had per- 

 sisted as a custom among medical men, to whom studies in the field would combine 

 recreation with the promotion of science, and to whom comparative anatomy 

 would be a readily opened book. A late exemplar of the happy combination of a 

 medical career with a life-long interest in herpetology was the distinguished and 

 remarkable Howard A. Kelly (b. 1858, d. 1943), Professor of Gynecology at Johns 

 Hopkins University. Among our colleagues of 1950 it is refugees with a Euro- 

 pean medical training that take up functional comparative anatomy. My two 

 American correspondents who pursue both herpetology as such and the practice 

 of medicine are Dr. Murray L. Johnson of Tacoma, Washington, and Dr. Fred- 

 erick A. Shannon, of Wickenburg, Arizona. 



The amateur who reaches the highest professional standards is likely to bring 

 a fertilizing element of originality to his work. The most conspicuous illustration 

 of the herpetological amateur turned professional in America is the career of 

 Dr. Laurence M. Klauber (b. 1883). Beginning with desultory collecting of living 

 snakes and lizards for the San Diego Zoo, he was led first to systematize his obser- 

 vations during automobile travel at night. As night collecting proved to be vastly 

 productive, often of species previously regarded as rare, Klauber began to build 

 a great personal collection; as this grew, he pioneered in methods of statistical 

 study of variation in snakes, a natural turn of interest on account of his mathe- 

 matical training as an engineer. In the last decade of our history he was at work 

 on a monographic account of that most distinctive of American snakes, the rattle- 



