604 A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



West Indies and Centra] America, with a monumental review of the lizard family 

 Varanidae (1942) and a general account of insular reptiles as notable contribu- 

 tions, in addition to the reports on his own expeditions. He falls sharply out of 

 the Boulengerian school in Die Amphihien und Reptilien Europas (1928, 2nd ed. 

 1940), a check list drawn up on the plan of the check list for North America of 

 Stejneger and Barbour, produced in collaboration with Lorenz Miiller. 



The Zoologische Sammlung des Bayerischen Staates, the repository of the 

 Spix and Martins Brazilian collections, an independent center of herpetological 

 studies, renewed active herpetological work with the appointment of Lorenz 

 Miiller (b. 1868) as curator of reptiles (about 1906). Miiller was immensely 

 stimulated by a zoological expedition to the region of the Lower Amazon in 1909; 

 his background as a competent zoological artist, curiously enough, does not appear 

 in his own publications. In 1932 he was joined by Walter Hellmich, who had 

 returned from Chile with large collections and brought to herpetological studies 

 the background of a training at the Zoological Institute of the University, thus 

 again marking the end of the era of Boulengerian dominance in Europe. 



Another German center of herpetological studies was created at Magdeburg 

 by Willy WollterstorfP (b. 1864, d. 1943), to whom lifelong deafness seems to 

 have been a stimulus rather than a handicap. After early paleontological papers 

 he began to devote himself more and more to the salamanders, which are so richly 

 represented in Europe, and which lend themselves so well to observation of 

 habits in captivity. Wollterstorif is succeeded in these interests by students and 

 colleagues in Wolf Herre (Kiel) and Giinther Freytag (Berlin). 



The continuing interest in the insular lizards of the Mediterranean Islands, 

 at first mainly a matter of nomenclatorial rivalry, has been shared by most of 

 the herpetologists of the European continent. Even as early as the 'seventies, 

 Theodore Eimer (b. 1843, d. 1898) called attention to the problems of environ- 

 mental effect and of the origin of species and subspecies. Papers by Wettstein, 

 Miiller, Mertens, and Eisentraut are written from the more modern viewpoint 

 of an interest in speciation. The somewhat parallel insular phenomena in the 

 West Indies and in the Gulf of California have long attracted American herpe- 

 tologists. It seems proper to record the failure of one ambitious plan of attack 

 on this problem in the West Indies. In conversations on West Indian herpe- 

 tology between myself and G. K. Noble, which began in 1916 (and resulted in Dr. 

 Noble's expedition to Hispaniola in 1922), we agreed that only direct comparison 

 of living lizards, in good series, would be adequate to establish the degrees of 

 differentiation from island to island; that preserved collections from different 

 dates and scattered localities would not serve; and that only a special expedition 

 in a suitably small vessel would answer our needs. When Gilbert C. Klingel ap- 

 peared as volunteer aid in the Department of TIerpetology, the matter was laid 

 before him; and the result was the perfectly planned and completely disastrous 

 voyage of the yawl Basilisk in 1930, the story of which is recorded by Klingel 

 in Inagua (1940). The Basilisk was fearfully storm-beaten and piled up as a 

 total loss on the reefs of Inagua Island in the Bahamas at the very beginning of 

 her maiden voyage. 



BouTenger so dominated his Continental colleagues that his influence among 

 them persisted long after his retirement. Neither Boulenger nor his catalogues 

 ever gained any corresponding respect in North America, which has produced 



