schmidt: herpetology 611 



Herpetology at University Museums 



As a contemporary of Baird, and thus at the beginning of our century of her- 

 petology, Louis Agassiz (b. 1807, d. 1873) appeared upon the New England scene 

 and set in motion the greatest of university research museums, the Museum of 

 Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Among Agassiz' varied interests, the turtles 

 held high place; but this was equally, perhaps more, for their embryology than 

 for their systematics. The prestige of Agassiz in America, as teacher and as 

 exemplar of the "savant," was something America greatly needed. It had been 

 only too easy to poke fun at the impractical and ridiculous, or even ludicrous, 

 Rafinesque, and naturalists of sounder mind have been ridiculed by the practical ; 

 one may recall with shame the portrait of a naturalist set forth in the last of the 

 Leatherstocking tales, 27ie Prairie. Agassiz was no such naturalist — farmer and 

 merchant and stagecoach driver, woman of fashion and bluestocking, college pro- 

 fessor and schoolboy, all instantly fell under the spell of his greatness, which 

 consisted, in fact, in his ability to convince them all of the greatness of natural 

 history. An idea of the prestige of Agassiz at Cambridge in the eighteen-fifties 

 is to be gained from the examination of the four volumes of his Contributions to 

 the Natural History of the United States of America, with their superb litho- 

 graphic illustration, and from the list of private subscribers who made possible 

 the publication of so ambitious a work. The reader should not miss the bit of 

 "inside dope" happily preserved by Dallas Lore Sharp in "Turtle eggs for Agas- 

 siz" (in The Face of the Fields, 1911). 



Agassiz left a research museum as his greatest legacy to his adopted country, 

 under the direction of his son Alexander, in many little known respects a greater 

 man than his father. Louis Agassiz had himself accumulated great herpetological 

 collections for the new Museum of Comparative Zoology — collections from the 

 Amazon, for example — literally by the barrel. The zoologist who fell heir to these 

 riches, Samuel Garman (b. 1843, d. 1927), after some notable contributions to the 

 herpetology of North America, the West Indies, and the Galapagos, turned his 

 attention more and more to studies of fishes. No full time herpetologist appeared 

 at the "M. C. Z" until Thomas Barbour (b. 1884, d. 1946) took over the curator- 

 ship of the division in 1910, while still a graduate student at Harvard. He became 

 director in 1927. His interest in foreign travel, and especially in animal geog- 

 raphy, had been whetted by diligent boyhood reading of Wallace and Bates, Belt 

 and Hudson. After a prolonged wedding trip through the East Indies in 1906, 

 he devoted himself more and more to the West Indies and Panama. In the Canal 

 Zone he was perhaps more than any other person responsible for the preservation 

 of Barro Colorado Island as a natural laboratory — and as a living exhibit of the 

 tropical forest made accessible to the biologists of the United States (and of the 

 world) — either for a glimpse of its magnificent plants and animals, or for pro- 

 longed study. Barbour's large frame and booming voice, together with the pres- 

 tige of his wealth and influence, made him a dominant figure wherever he ap- 

 peared. It was necessary to know him more intimately to appreciate his generous 

 and soft-hearted and often emotional side. Wealth could not save him from bitter 

 and undeserved blows of fate. His herpetological work suffered from a readily 

 forgivable overconfidence in his own powers. He literally worshiped Leonhard 

 Stejneger, and joined him happily in the production of the successive editions of 



