610 A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



of the morphology and evolution of the turtle group. He made a productive and 

 stimulating expedition to the Galapagos Islands in 1891, and joined the staff of 

 the University of Chicago in 1892. When Baur returned to Germany to die, 

 Stejneger took over the project for a major work on the turtles of North America. 

 As his time became absorbed in administrative duties, the turtle volume received 

 only desultory attention; but he was never able to bring himself to give it up, 

 and as result the great collection of these creatures at the United States National 

 Museum was unavailable to other students for forty years. The monographic 

 volume on turtles is still a desideratum. 



Stejneger's scholarly and critical mind was disturbed by the looseness of 

 description of species, the failure to designate type specimens and type localities, 

 and the indifference to orderly rules of nomenclature exhibited, in quite con- 

 trasting ways, by both Boulenger and Cope. He introduced into descriptive 

 herpetology the meticulous description of single specimens, which has proved to 

 be disastrous for a usable taxonomy in the hands of some of his followers. Stej- 

 neger never explicitly recognized the "newer theory of taxonomy as a system of 

 group concepts based on inferences about populations from samples."^" The 

 Boulengerian description of the species was a "paradigm" (to take over a gram- 

 matical term) ; and is implicit in Simpson's employment of the term "hypodigm"^^ 

 for the sum of type material available to the describer or redescriber. Malcolm 

 Smith comments on this problem in the first of his volumes of the Fauna of British 

 India. The lesson from Stejneger of careful designation of type specimens and of 

 type localities, the essence of his method, was an essential advance in descriptive 

 technique. 



The need for the establishment of uniform international rules of zoological 

 nomenclature seems to have come into focus at the Fourth International Congress 

 of Zoology, at Cambridge, England, in 1898. Stejneger attended this meeting on 

 the occasion of his first return to Europe, which had carried him to his birthplace 

 on museum business, and was elected a member of the first commission for nomen- 

 clature. He became increasingly involved in nomenclatural discussion and debate, 

 and in the succeeding meetings of the Zoological Congresses. 



The interest in nomenclature, and still more his treatment of its problems, 

 seem to reflect something of the legal training of Stejneger's youth. The most con- 

 structive herpetological result of this interest was the Check List of North Amer- 

 ican Amphibians and Reptiles, in which Thomas Barbour joined as junior author. 

 The five editions of this work, 1917 to 1943, witnessed a development of American 

 herpetology and a multiplication of American herpetologists quite beyond pre- 

 diction. 



Leonhard Stejneger was the last herpetologist who can be thought of as domi- 

 nating the field for a long generation. It is characteristic that the legion of his 

 heirs should be so numerous, so much equals, and on the whole so cooperative. The 

 remaining history of herpetology in North America is a history of the establish- 

 ment of active herpetological work at a whole series of nationwide centers, some- 

 times with whole groups of active graduate students pursuing "problems." 



10. George Gaylord Simpson, 1940, "Types in Modern Taxonomy," Amer. Journ. Sci., 

 238:417. 



11. lUd. 



