Cuba 89 



had rediscovered Phyllobates lifiibatus. This particular frog 

 had been lost sight of for sixty years. Cope in 1862 de- 

 scribed it as originating in Cuba. But Stejneger and I sus- 

 pected that it was wrongly labeled and that its home was 

 Central American, not Cuban. Now we were proved 

 wrong. We got a good series, and it was well that we did, 

 as the type specimens in the U. S. National Museum from 

 which the species had been originally described were dried 

 up and worthless. 



We collected other things — I remember a new fresh- 

 water crab — but the finding of this lovely little frog, the 

 smallest frog which I know of in the world, was certainly 

 the high light of this particular journey to Cuba. Later I 

 found that they were quite abundant in the rocky area 

 which we keep as a wild plant preserve in the Botanic Gar- 

 dens and there countless students have had a chance to 

 collect and observe this charming little creature, whose life 

 history was finally worked out by Dr. Dunn. 



Years earlier Stejneger and I in our conversations con- 

 cerning the Cuban fauna doubted the locaUty of another 

 creature taken there years before by Don Juan Gundlach, 

 a German naturalist long resident in Cuba. Our doubts 

 concerned the little lizard of a very archaic family whose 

 representatives are rare denizens of scattered localities be- 

 tween the southwestern United States and Panama. We 

 should have known better, as a matter of fact, for old Don 

 Juan Gundlach did not make mistakes in the localities of 

 the species which he described. He said this came from 

 Cape Cruz, the extreme southern tip of the island. To verify 

 this Don Carlos de la Torre and I set out on a survey trip, 



