HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION xvii 



observe it or doubted its erectile nature, and Duvernoy even denied 

 its existence. 



The celebrated Monro secundus, in his inaugural dissertation 

 (1755), gives us an admirable description of the male genitalia of 

 'Salamandra'. He mentions a connexion between the genital system 

 and the heart by which the semen is supposed to reach the blood- 

 stream. This may be either Muller's duct, which is always present 

 in the male, or the post-cardinal vein. Monro's paper is the most 

 careful account of the male genitalia and renal organs with their 

 ducts, the cloacal glands (which he notes are not developed in the 

 female), lung and fat body of a Urodele so far published, but the 

 subject was undoubtedly Triton and not Salamander. In the short 

 and little known paper by Zinn published in 1757 there are many 

 brief anatomical notes covering almost all the organs of the body 

 except the nervous system, of which the most important is his dis- 

 covery of the operculum which fits into the fenestra vestibuli 

 (ovalis) of the ear. He also saw the otolith, and noted the absence of 

 auditory ossicles and an external ear duct. In 1758 Roesel, who died 

 in the following year, was working on an HistoriaNaturalisSalaman- 

 drarum^ which was never completed or published. J. Hermann, in 

 1789, reported that he had seen the plates, which compared favour- 

 ably with Roesel's beautiful illustrations of the Anura published in 

 1758. No descriptions of these plates have been found. Kleeman 

 says that Roesel hoped to publish a work on the Lizards and Sala- 

 manders of his native country in the same style as that on the Frogs, 

 but that he died before he was able to complete it. 



The genus Salamandra was instituted and defined by Laurenti in 

 1768, and he was the first to name and figure S. atra from the Alps — 

 a species first described by Gesner. The name Salamandra occurs in 

 Aristotle, and has been used by many pre-Linnean systematists. It 

 was applied indifferently to any tailed European Amphibian, or even 

 treated as an abstraction without any objective equivalent. Laurenti 

 draws attention to the fact that the Amphibia, being without a 

 diaphragm and ribs, cannot breathe like a mammal, but that by 

 alternate movements of the throat they can empty and fill the lungs 

 with air. He was thus familiar with the idea of the buccal force- 

 pump, but was not aware that this had already been described by 

 Swammerdam in 1 667, and also that there was an admirable analysis 

 of buccal respiration in the posthumous works of Malpighi pub- 

 lished in 1697. Malpighi indeed was the first to show that when the 

 lower jaw of the frog was severed the lungs could no longer be 

 inflated. 



4038 u 



