612 A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



the Check List. His autobiographical A Naturalist at Large (1943) gives a vivid 

 view of "T. B.'s" immensely interesting personality. Barbour placed the curator- 

 ship of the herpetological collection more and more in the hands of a young Eng- 

 lishman, Arthur Loveridge (b. 1891), already with long experience in Africa. 

 Since 1924 the collections have benefited from Loveridge's competent field work 

 in Africa and Australia. Loveridge's published work has caught up some of the 

 accumulations of knowledge since the time of Boulenger's Catalogues. 



While Curator of the Zoological Museum at the University of Michigan, Alex- 

 ander G. Ruthven (b. 1882) had occupied himself with studies of local herpetol- 

 ogy, and in 1906 had engaged on an active field expedition, with an essentially 

 ecological outlook, in New Mexico, under the auspices of the American Museum. 

 He then addressed himself to the revision of an American genus of snakes, Tham- 

 nophis (the garter snakes), the taxonomy of which had been left in hopeless con- 

 fusion by Cope. Perhaps mainly encouraged by Stejneger, Ruthven undertook 

 the study of what then seemed an enormous material, drawing upon Raymond 

 Pearl for advice as to biometric method and, by 1908, producing a measure of 

 order in what proved to be, by example, a work of the most crucial influence in 

 subsequent herpetological studies in America. This was his Variations and 

 Genetic Relations of the Garter-Snakes published as Bulletin 61 of the United 

 States National Museum. 



By limiting his field to a single well-defined genus, Ruthven set a pattern for 

 further revisionary studies that lent themselves to a new mode in herpetology, 

 the Ph.D. thesis. The University of Michigan itself, under Ruthven 's directorship 

 and rejuvenation of its museum program, became the leading center of herpeto- 

 logical training at the level of the university graduate school. Such university- 

 fostered research is clearly the major herpetological phenomenon in America 

 during the first half of the twentieth century. The succession of herpetologists 

 in the University Museum at Ann Arbor was via Helen Thompson Gaige, long 

 herpetological editor of the journal Copeia, to Norman Hartweg and Charles F. 

 Walker, witli the continuing association of L. C. Stuart. In another direction 

 the Michigan School, derived directly from Ruthven 's regime at the University 

 Museum, leads to the scholarly Frank N. Blanchard (b. 1888, d. 1937) and to his 

 aid and friend, Howard K. Gloyd (b. 1902) who subsequently became director 

 of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, which tlius developed as a center of her- 

 petological studies and publication. William H. Stickel (b. 1912) of the United 

 States Fish and Wildlife Service affords another example of the competent train- 

 ing of the students who came under Blanchard 's influence. 



During Ruthven's regime the reorganization of the University IMuseums 

 (Paleontology, Botany, and Anthropology were combined with the Museum of 

 Zoology) as a separate university department was realized, both in organization 

 and in a separate new building. That the separation of the museum from the 

 teaching departments associated with it is of vital importance is shown by the 

 fate of departmental collections in colleges and universities the country over. 

 That fate has been neglect, dispersal, sale, or total loss, as the heads of depart- 

 ments changed. Revitalized museum programs in universities, or the establish- 

 ment of new ones, in more or less conscious imitation of the museum developments 

 at Harvard and Michigan, have been almost a sign of the times, though some 

 universities have continued to dispose of their collections, which have frequently 



