602 A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



lithographs. The great English herpetologieal artist of this era was G. H. Ford, 

 who illustrated the numerous papers of Gray and Giinther, including the Reptiles 

 of British India. Of the 216 plates that illustrate Boulenger's catalogues, 78 are by 

 P. Smit, 68 by E. Mintern, 42 by Mintern and Green, 19 by J. Green, 8 by Edward 

 Wilson, and 1 by H. Gronvold. Smit's work illustrated the papers in the Pro- 

 ceedings of the Zoological Society of London between 1884 and 1900, and he 

 produced forty of the fifty magnificent quarto plates in Anderson's Zoology of 

 Egypt, the remaining ten being by H. Gronvold and J. Green. Green's colored 

 lithographs continued to appear in the Proceedings in the first decade of the 

 twentieth century, the last one in 1917. During the second decade of this century, 

 lithographic illustration was superseded by the various photographic processes. 

 The illustrations of the lithographic era had a curiously pleasing quality, in which 

 scale detail was combined with shading, and the loss of this technique is a loss to 

 zoological illustration. The illustrators of that period deserve a more extended 

 essay in appreciation of their services to science. 



The Boulengerian Era in Europe 



The immediate usefulness of Boulenger's catalogues for putting in order the 

 collections accumulated and accumulating in other museums, and the example of 

 his numerous short fauna! lists, fixed the style of herpetologieal publication for 

 two generations in Europe. This Boulengerian era on the Continent continued 

 the heriDCtoIogical exploitation of the colonial empires, notably of the Netherlands 

 Indies by a Dutch school still in the shadow of the great Hermann Schlegel; of 

 the Belgian Congo by Boulenger's successors in Brussels,^ and of the German 

 African colonies by a Berlin group. "^ None of these rose above an unthinking 

 multiplication of morphological species. The synopses of the Amphibia Salientia 

 in Bas Tierreich by Nieden (1923) and Ahl (1931) do not rise above this level. 



Typical of such active national herpetologieal exploitation of colonies is the 

 somewhat later work of Guiseppe Scortecci, in Milan, and later in Genoa, on the 

 expanding Italian colonial empire. His earliest papers (1928) reflect this interest, 

 and one even suspects unrealized colonial ambitions in papers on the reptiles of 

 Yemen. The Italian contemporary of Boulenger was Count Maria Giacinto 

 Peracca (b. 1861, d. 1923), whose ample means enabled him to keep a terrarium 

 on the scale of a large conservatory, in which Galapagos turtles wandered at will. 

 His publishing career and association with the zoological museum of Turin ex- 

 tended from 1886 to 1917. His interests were wide, with a long series of papers 

 on South American herpetology. 



The Boulengerian era in Vienna included the colleagues and successors to 

 Franz Steindachner. Friedrich Siebenrock made notable contribution to the 

 anatomy and systematics of turtles (publishing career, 1892-1924). Otto Wett- 

 stein (son of the eminent botanist) will be most remembered for his detailed 

 account of the anatomy of the tuatara in the Kiikenthal HandhucJi der Zoologie 

 (1931) . On the retirement of Wettstein, the division of herpetology at Vienna was 



4. J. K. de Jong, Nelly de Roolj, P. N. Van Kampen, and L. D. Brongersma. Properly- 

 representative of more modern ecological field observation, Felix Kopstein (-1940) may 

 be named with this group. 



5. G. F. de Witte and Raymond Laurent. 



6. Gustav Tornier, Fritz Nieden, Richard Sternfeld, Ernst Ahl, and Giinther Hecht. 



