SCHMIDT: HERPETOLOGY 599 



After completion of the catalogues, Boulenger continued with the descriptions 

 of new species, reports on additions to the collection, and reports on individual 

 collections from all parts of the world. His separately published subsequent 

 works were the finely illustrated Tailless Batrachians of Europe, which reflects 

 his principal contact with living amphibians and reptiles and his early interests 

 in field observation (1896-1897); the compact little summary Les Batraciens et 

 principal ement ceux d'Europe (1910) ; the "Reptilia and Batrachia" in the Ver- 

 tehrate Fauna of the Malay Peninsula (1912); the Snakes of Europe with its 

 admirable introduction on snakes in general (1913) ; and the Monograph of the 

 Lacertidae (1920-1921) . Work on fishes in the British Museum began in 1887, and 

 Boulenger thereafter continued to puljlish in both ichthyology and herpetology, 

 with main interest on herpetology, much as Giinther had worked in both fields, 

 with emphasis of ichthyology. His total list of publications in scientific journals 

 amounted to more than 875, of which 618 were on herpetological and 257 on 

 ichthyological subjects. This is ivitJiout enumeration of his more popular papers 

 in The Field, Cou7itry Life, etc. This large list of publications reflects Boulenger's 

 habit of rapid work, made possible by his having done the catalogue volumes, but 

 this contained the seed of a weakness. His memory was phenomenal, so much so 

 that he so readily recognized species that he had seen before that he was disin- 

 clined to check identifications made' "through the glass"; and so great was his 

 prestige among his colleagues that they also did not usually check his identifi- 

 cations further. "When Clifford Pope and I were making a round of museum visits 

 together in Europe in 1932, we could not help being amused at the dismay of 

 some of our herpetological hosts when we questioned the determinations made by 

 Boulenger on some casual previous visit, and insisted in our unbelieving way on 

 having the jars opened so that we could examine the specimens more critically. 

 Boulenger was not inclined to revise the keys for identification drawn up for the 

 catalogues, and when these led him astray he sometimes described new species 

 instead of making the revisions of his concepts that were indicated. 



For all of Boulenger's mastery of the world fauna, he displayed little under- 

 standing of geographic distribution, and never alternated collecting and field 

 studies with his work on preserved material in the museum. In still another 

 respect his work was superficial — during the sixteen years of the production of 

 the catalogue it was inevitably focused at the species level, and he displayed 

 neither interest in nor understanding of the partition of species into subspecies, 

 which has from the beginning, and of necessity, been based on more accurate 

 knowledge of geographical and ecological relations. By no means an anti-evolu- 

 tionist, the theory of evolution made astonishingly little impact on his thinking. 



The great series of catalogues appeared before the organization of the Inter- 

 national Commission for Zoological Nomenclature. Having already chosen those 

 names that seemed best to him from a welter of early synon>Tny, it is perhaps 

 scarcely surprising that Boulenger sliould have been casually indifferent to the 

 new rules and codes. It is easy to understand also, how annoying this indiffer- 

 ence was to those who, like Leonard Stejneger, took the new attempt to codify 

 and regularize zoological nomenclature so seriously that they could quarrel in 

 print over the omission or addition of an I, or over an elaborately complex 

 method of determining the type species of a genus. 



One of the most important accomplishments of the British Museum group was 



