SCHMIDT: HERPETOLOGY 609 



and errors, Cope was the most stimulating figure in North American zoology in 

 the last half of the nineteenth century. 



Leonhard Stejneger (b. 1851, d. 1943) is the next great figure in American 

 herpetology, contrasting as sharply with Cope as with Boulenger. He would have 

 been mainly a contemporary of Cope's, had it not been that he came late to 

 herpetology, at the age of thirty-eight, with a distinguished ornithological career 

 behind him, and that Cope died at fifty-seven, whereas Stejneger lived to be 

 ninety-one. The two herpetological careers overlapped for eight years, not 

 without resounding clashes. 



Leonhard Hess Stejneger was born in Bergen, Norway. He was educated in the 

 schools at Bergen, by private tutor, and at the University of Kristiana. He first 

 studied medicine, in order to take the courses in zoology and botany; when he 

 found the prospect of a medical career not to his liking, he planned to go into 

 the family business and he entered the school of law and graduated in 1875 as 

 cand. jur. When the business failed, he determined to make a profession of zool- 

 ogy, instead of a hobby; and as there were few opportunities for positions in this 

 field in Europe (let alone Norway), and on the advice of friends, he emigrated to 

 the United States. This was in 1881; he went directly to the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion, and seems at once to have been given temporary employment in the National 

 Museum by Baird. His first eight years of work were in the field of ornithology, 

 to which he contributed a notable series of reports and the excellent volume for 

 birds in the Riverside Natural History. This period also included his field work, 

 financed through the United States Signal Service, on the Commander Islands, 

 and this left an indelible stamp on his interests, as may be seen from his ambitious 

 and sound plan for the exploration of eastern Asia (1902), his effective contri- 

 butions to the herpetology of China and Japan, his participation in the work of 

 the Fur Seal Commission, and his life of Steller. 



In 1889, on the resignation of H. C. Yarrow from the curatorship of herpetol- 

 ogy at the National Museum, Stejneger was persuaded to take charge of this 

 Division, and turned his attention thereafter almost exclusively to the systematics 

 of amphibians and reptiles. He took an active part in the early field work of the 

 United States Biological Survey in the western United States, made small collec- 

 tions in Japan in 1896 and 1897, and took part in a collecting expedition in Puerto 

 Rico in 1900. Thereafter he devoted himself more and more to the description of 

 the collections flowing into the National Museum from miscellaneous sources. He 

 was made Head Curator of Biology in 1911. The Division of Herpetology is now 

 in charge of Dr. Doris M. Cochran (1898-), who came as Aid in 1919. 



Next to the IlerpetoJogy of Japan (1907), Stejneger's largest herpetological 

 works were The Poisonous Snakes of North America (1895), The Herpetology of 

 Porto Rico (1904), and a paper summarizing the Chinese collections in the 

 National Museum. His smaller papers were devoted to the fauna of the United 

 States, Mexico and Central America, the Philippines, and the West Indies, with 

 a few from Africa and South America for good measure. His descriptions of new 

 species are models of formal taxonomic work. 



When Cope produced his volume on the crocodilians, lizards, and snakes of 

 North America, the turtles had been reserved for a separate monographic report 

 by the comparative anatomist Georg Baur (b. 1860, d. 1898). Baur came to the 

 United States in 1884, and by the decade of 1890 had become the leading student 



