598 A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



d. 1900). With a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh, Anderson 

 went to Calcutta in 1864. His arrival was fortunately timed, for the collections 

 of the Asiatic Society of Bengal were then being turned over to the government 

 of India. A new museum building was to be erected, and John Anderson was 

 named Curator in 1865 and Superintendent a few years later. He retired in 1886, 

 to live in London, and spent his winters in Egypt. While in India, Anderson 

 took part in the two Yunnan expeditions, whose zoological results appeared in 

 1878-1879 in two quarto volinnes, herpetologically important for their descrip- 

 tion of the remarkable turtle fauna of southeastern Asia. 



John Anderson's career and interests fall sharply into an Indian and an 

 Egyptian period. After his retirement he devoted hilmself (and no small part of 

 his fortune) to the preparation and publication of the Zoology of Egypt. The 

 quarto volume on amphibians and reptiles in this work (1898) is not only mag- 

 nificent in format and illustration, but is one of the most competent and soundly 

 useful of faunal works in the history of herpetology. 



George Albert Boulenger, born at Brussels in 1858, exhibited a passion for 

 natural history at an early age, and specifically for the study of amphibians and 

 reptiles. During his student days at the University of Brussels he engaged in the 

 identification of the materials in the Museum of Natural History (the Belgian 

 National Museum) and came under the influence of M. Fernand Lataste, whom 

 he addressed throughout his career with affectionate regard. His first paper, pub- 

 lished at the age of nineteen, a revision of the iguanid genus Laemanctus with the 

 description of a new species from the collections of the Brussels Museum, is 

 already in such competent and scholarly form that it might have appeared forty 

 years later, when he was the acknowledged dean of European herpetologists. He 

 was made assistant at the museum in 1880, but very soon resigned, on the invi- 

 tation of Dr. Giinther to come to the British Museum to undertake a new edition 

 of the catalogues of amphibians and reptiles, quite as Giinther himself had been 

 invited by Gray twenty-two years earlier. It is easy to see that it was the favor- 

 able impression made by the twenty papers published as the result of his work 

 at Brussels that caused the young Boulenger to be invited to the most distin- 

 guished herpetological position in the world. 



At the British Aluseum Boulenger immediately plunged into the work of 

 revision of the classification of the amphibians, applying to the frogs and toads 

 the system suggested by Cope in 1865, and literally bringing order out of chaos 

 in this group. The volumes for Batrachia Gradientia (the salamanders) and 

 Batrachia Salientia (the frogs and toads) appeared in 1882. Next came the three 

 volumes for the Lizards, 1885-1887; the volume for Chelonians, Rhynchocephal- 

 ians, and Crocodiles in 1889, and the three volumes for the Snakes in 1893-1896. 

 Important contributions to the family classification were made throughout, and 

 from the first, descriptions of the species not in the British Museum collections 

 were included, so that these nine volumes constituted a summary of the world 

 fauna for the classes Amphibia and Reptilia to the year 1896. Though his clas- 

 sification of the amphibians has required complete revision, his arrangement of 

 the families of reptiles is essentially that current in 1950. Concurrently with the 

 great series of catalogues, Boulenger published no less than 279 herpetological 

 papers in scientific journals in the sixteen years from 1881 to 1896, in addition 

 to a volume on the amphibians and reptiles of British India. 



