SCHMIDT: HERPETOLOGY 597 



in London. In retrospect, the major turning point is discernible in the appoint- 

 ment of George Albert Boulenger to the curatorship of reptiles at the British 

 Museum in 1880. 



Studies on the amphibians and reptiles preserved in the British Museum had 

 been greatly promoted by the voluminous but uncritical work of John Edward 

 Gray (b. 1800, d. 1875), who began the tradition of published catalogues of the 

 museum collections. Gray's publishing career (1825-1874) marks the rise in 

 importance of two journals that became the principal media for the description 

 of new forms — the Annals and Magazine of Natural History and the Proceedings 

 of the Zoological Society of London. 



Much of the most notable contribution made by Gray to herpetology was the 

 choice of Albert Giinther^ (b. 1830, d. 1914) as his assistant in the divisions of 

 ichthyology and herpetology, and, as it turned out, his successor as Keeper of 

 Zoology. The young German (born at Esslingen, Wiirttemberg), after taking 

 holy orders in 1851 in the Lutheran Church, was diverted into a zoological career 

 by the lectures of Professor von Rapp at the University of Tiibingen. He took his 

 degree as M.D. at that university in 1857, having meanwhile studied with the 

 great anatomist Johannes Miiller at Berlin and with Franz Hermann Troschel at 

 Bonn, served at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, and written a book on 

 medical zoology (published in 1858). In 1857 he accepted an assistantship offered 

 by Gray at the British Museum, in which he was to catalogue the fishes, amphib- 

 ians, and reptiles. By 1859 the great Catalogue of Fishes was under way, and the 

 catalogues of Batrachia Salienta and of Colubrine Snakes were both published 

 in 1858. His largest herpetological work was the folio Reptiles of British India 

 (1864) , published by the Ray Society. 



Giinther's most notable herpetological discovery was that the New Zealand 

 tuatara is not a lizard but a living representative of an otherwise extinct order 

 of reptiles, the Rhynchocephalia (1867). His contributions to ichthyology so 

 much overshadow his herpetological work, that we tend to underestimate him as 

 a herpetologist ; but his greatest contribution to herpetology was, in his turn, his 

 choice of successor, which fell to a young Belgian, George Albert Boulenger 

 (b. 1858, d. 1937). 



Before turning to the work of Boulenger and the Boulengerian era, it is 

 necessary to note the work of the Biologia Centrali- Americana, and of John 

 Anderson, the origins of which fall in the time of Giinther. The herpetological 

 share in the Biologia Centrali- Americana was important to the growth of the 

 British Museum collections and affords an example, on a grand scale, of the 

 effective aid of amateurs to museum work. The history of the Biologia is an 

 extraordinarily pleasant story of a friendship between two Cambridge University 

 students in the eighteen-fifties. Osbert Salvin and Frederick Ducane Godman 

 were drawn together by a common interest in natural history, and their com- 

 panionship led from wild-fowling in the Cambridge fens to the biological explora- 

 tion of a quarter of a continent, resulting in the magnificent monument of the 

 63 quarto volumes of the Biologia. The volume on amphibians and reptiles (1885- 

 1902), illustrated with 76 lithographic plates by the fine artists of the era, was 

 prepared by Albert Giinther. 



Another notable herpetological career was that of John Anderson (b. 1833, 



3. His full name, Albert Charles Lewis Gotthilf Giinther, was usually so shortened. 



