SCHMIDT: HERPETOLOGY ^05 



its own school of herpetology.® It is remarkable, however, that Boulenger's influ- 

 ence should have disappeared so abruptly in London with his retirement; when 

 his post became vacant, it was filled by a broadly educated young Cambridge 

 graduate, H. W. Parker (1897-), who brought quite new ideas to his studies on 

 the collection. His revision of the catalogue of the Amphibia Salientia was under- 

 taken on a vastly more detailed and thoughtful basis, and thus has been carried 

 through only the families Microhylidae (Boulenger's Engystomatidae) in A 

 Monograph of the Family Microhylidae (1934), and through most of the Lepto- 

 dactylidae. George E. Nicholls, a young British student at King's College in 

 London, had made a noteworthy contribution to the classification of the Salientia 

 in a little paper on "The Structure of the Vertebral Column in the Anura Phan- 

 eroglossa and Its Importance as a Basis of Classification" ( 1916 ) . The significance 

 of Nicholl's suggestions was more especially elaborated by the late G. K. Noble. 



Miss Joan Proctor (b. 1897, d. 1931), to whom Boulenger refers (I believe 

 with affection) as "mon eleve," would perhaps have been his choice to succeed him 

 at the British Museum. She studied with him and aided in the Division during his 

 last four years at the ]\Iuseum. Her somewhat precarious health prevented her 

 being taken onto the Museum staff, and a place was found for her as the curator 

 of reptiles in the Zoological Gardens of the Zoological Society of London. Her 

 few herpetological papers give little clue to the extraordinary competence she 

 brought to the planning and management of the new reptile house built at the 

 Zoo under her regime. She thus has a secure place in the history of herpetology, 

 in the large subject of the history of the keeping of amphibians and reptiles in 

 zoological gardens, and in her relations with the British Museum group. 



A most effective ''research associate" had meanwhile appeared at the British 

 Museum in Malcolm A. Smith (b. 1875). Dr. Smith had made a large personal 

 collection of amphibians and reptiles, and engaged actively in herpetological 

 studies, while attached to the Court of Siam as Court Physician.^ On his retire- 

 ment he continued these studies and greatly expanded them in the revision of the 

 "Amphibia and Reptilia" for the Fauna of British India. The volumes for turtles 

 and crocodiles (1931), lizards (1935), and snakes (1943) have appeared, in addi- 

 tion to the Monograph of the Sea Snakes (1926), which effectively brings one of 

 the smaller families of snakes up to date from Boulenger's catalogue of 1896. 



Emendations and additions to the Catalogue of Snakes were made by Colonel 

 Frank AVall (b. 1868, d. 1950 of the Indian Medical Service, who had great oppor- 

 tunities to collect and study Indian reptiles. He interested himself especially in 

 snakes and their habits in life, and in the treatment of snake bite. His series of 

 accounts of Indian snakes, with splendid colored plates, "A Popular Treatise on 

 the Common Indian Snakes" (in the Journal of the Bombay Nat. Hist. Soc, 

 1906-1919) was unfortunately never published in book form; he is known espe- 

 cially for his Snakes of Ceylon (1921) and for The Poisonous Terrestrial Snakes 

 of Our British Indian Dominions (4th ed., 1928). It is something of a curiosity, 

 more especially in a herpetological career that was essentially that of an amateur, 



8. The treatment of the North American herpetological fauna is, in fact, one of the 

 weakest features of the Catalogues. 



9. See Malcolm Smith, 1946, A Physician at the Court of Siam. London: Country Life 

 Ltd., 164 pp., illus. 



