xvi HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 



A more serious attempt to anatomize the Salamander, this time 

 without any Triton complications, was made by Perrault c, 1680, 

 but not published until 1734. He dissected two specimens — a male 

 and a female. He noted that the black parts of the skin when viewed 

 under the microscope showed a large number of yellow spots which 

 were almost invisible to the unassisted eye. There was no external 

 auditory opening as in Lizards, but the animal could hear never- 

 theless. The tongue, liver, teeth, gall-bladder, and gut are well 

 described, but the pancreas is assigned a wrong position, and his 

 hepatic duct seems to have been a blood-vessel. Various mistakes 

 and omissions occur in the description of the bladder and urogenital 

 system, and his version of the female genital ducts is simply incom- 

 prehensible. It is perhaps remotely possible that his specimen may 

 have been an hermaphrodite. He asserts that, contrary to accepted 

 belief, the Salamander is sexual and has distinct male and female 

 genital organs, however peculiar they may be. He failed to notice 

 that the young larvae had external gills, and he described the heart 

 as having only a single left auricle. Vallisneri (17 15) apparently 

 regarded Triton and Salamandra as belonging to the same genus. 

 His remarks on the poisonous white secretion of the skin, its peculiar 

 colour, and the supposed reaction of the animal to fire show that he 

 had the true Salamander in mind, but his anatomical work must have 

 been based on Triton. Thus he describes long lungs which extend 

 the length of the abdomen, he denies that there are four testes, he 

 identifies two penes as in snakes and lizards, and in one specimen he 

 found the stomach to be full of frog's eggs, and in another of fish 

 eggs. Maupertuis (1727) redescribes the 'milk' glands of the skin, 

 and from one female he took forty-two, and from another fifty-four, 

 well-developed active larvae, but he says nothing of the external 

 gills or of the caudal fin. Although the work of Du Fay (1729) 

 relates almost entirely to Triton, he deserves mention as being the 

 first author to describe those very obvious larval structures — the 

 external gills. He found also the 'internal' gills, the gill arches and 

 slits, and made an important contribution to the anatomy of meta- 

 morphosis. He was likewise the first to describe the double urogeni- 

 tal papilla of the male Salamander, which he regards as a penis — a 

 structure which, he says, a viviparous animal should possess. He 

 'presumes' that the terrestrial and aquatic Salamanders are vivi- 

 parous and oviparous respectively. He traces the passage of the 

 eggs from the ovary through the ostium into the oviduct and so to the 

 exterior. The 'penis' was subsequently described by Latreille in 

 1800 and by numerous later authors, but others either failed to 



