SCHMIDT: HERPETOLOGY 613 



gone to the large public museums. Notable herpetologieal centers at universities, 

 with teachers and graduate students in tliis field, have flourished at Cornell, 

 Rochester, California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisville, Texas, Tulane, 

 Colorado, Brigham Young, Utah, and the College of Puget Sound. 



Among university museums maintaining expanding research collections, the 

 high level of systematic studies at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the Uni- 

 versity of California at Berkeley requires mention. Joseph C. Grinnell, the great 

 first director, took part in studies on the amphibians and reptiles of California 

 and furthered the work of Charles Lewis Camp (b. 1893) on the California fauna. 

 Grinnell and Camp now have an able herpetologieal successor at Berkeley in 

 Robert C. Stebbins, Jr., and with Raymond C. Cowles at the University of Cali- 

 fornia at Los Angeles, Tracy Storer at the Agricultural College at Davis, and 

 George S. Myers and a group of active students at Stanford University, Califor- 

 nia, has produced and is producing an active herpetologieal group, which has 

 followed up the earlier work of van Denburgh, to be mentioned below. 



Herpetology in American Public Museums 



The larger public museums, with their dual organization as instruments of 

 public education and institutes of research, continue to be the major centers of 

 systematic herpetology. Such endowed museums are an especially American 

 phenomenon, though notably represented in Europe by the Natur-Museum of the 

 Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft, at Frankfurt am Main. At the 

 oldest of these in America, the museum of the Academy of Natural Sciences of 

 Philadelphia, herpetology unfortunately failed to receive support after the death 

 of Cope, whose herptological collections were left to the Academy. Arthur Erwin 

 Brown (b. 1850, d. 1910), of the Zoological Society of Philadelphia, served use- 

 fully as interim aid. Emmett Reid Dunn (b. 1894), from near-by Haverford 

 College, himself in some respects not unlike Cope in fertility of mind, has long 

 served the Academy as honorary curator of herpetology; but the Cope Collection 

 needed and deserved a full-time herpetologist as curator. The decline of herpetol- 

 ogy at the Academy came during the period of most active expansion of the field 

 in Washington and New York. 



The importance of the United States National Museum to American herpetol- 

 ogy has already been outlined. The American ^Museum of Natural History in 

 New York City came late to an independent Division of Reptiles. Its first curator 

 was Mary Cynthia Dickerson (b. 18G6, d. 1923), whose reputation was made by 

 her Frog Book (1906), with its competent photographic illustration by herself. 

 The slenderness of her subsequent herpetologieal output must be understood in 

 the light of her creation of the first significant museum magazine, the journal now 

 known as Natural History. Her herpetologieal importance must be weighted also 

 for her furtherance of the careers of a succession of young naturalists — Charles 

 Lewis Camp, Emmett Reid Dunn, Gladwyn Kingsley Noble, and myself. Noble 

 succeeded her as Curator of Herpetology, as I believe she had planned. 



G. K. Noble (b. 1894, d. 1940) had been exposed equally to the influences of 

 the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the laboratories of the Department of 

 Zoology at Harvard and to the anatomical and phylogenetic school of William 

 King Gregory at Columbia. He brought to the museum curatorship in New York 



