NOTES ON SCELOPORUS VARIABILIS AND ITS GEOGRAPHICAL 

 DISTRIBUTION IN THE UNITED STATES. 



BV 



Leonhard Stejneoer, 



Curator, Department of RtplUcH and Jiatrachiana. 



HallowelTs iSccloporus mannorafus has had a very carious fate in our 

 herpetolofjical literature. Tlie name occurs a few times iu later nomi- 

 nal lists, but so little is known of it, and so little has been said of it that 

 Boulenger, in the second volume of the Catalogue of Lizards in the Brit- 

 ish Museum, was compelled to simply refer to it iu a foot-note(p. 21G). 



Two specimens of Fence-Lizards brought home by Dr. S. \V. Wood- 

 house from San xintonio, Bexar County, Texas, were described iu 1852 

 by Hallowell as iSceloporus mannorafus and S. (lelicatissimiis (Proc. Piiila. 

 Acad., VI, p. 178), and fuller details, as well as two wretched plates illus- 

 t rat inj; the two supposed species, were given in Cai)ta in Si tgreaves' Report 

 of an lv\]>edili()ndown the Zufii and Colorado IJiveis (pp. 101), 110). The 

 allegeil ditVerences of these consisted chielly in tlie somewhat dillerent 

 number and arrangement of the cephalic scales. It must have been 

 plain, however, to anybody Aimiliar with the great variability of these 

 scales in this group of lizards that the two species were only individual 

 variations of the same thing, and in Professor Baird's report upon the 

 reptiles collected during the survey of the United States and Mexican 

 boundary the two forms were correctly united, the name mar»iora(its 

 being retained as the first one described by Ilallowell (p. 0). In this 

 report two additional localities for the species were recordeil, both in 

 southwestern Texas. 



We next find rlu^ name «S'. marmorafus in Coi)e's Check-list of North 

 American Batrachia and Reptilia (1875), but with an entirely different 

 habitat, as, on page 48, it is referred to the " Sonoran region, Utah," 

 and on page 02 it is enumerated as one of the "species confined to the 

 Sonoran region." This exclusion of S. marmorattis from the original 

 habitat is still more accentuated five years later, as it is not at all men- 

 tioned ill Professor Coj)e's memoir "On the Zoological Position of 

 Texas.'' This misplacement seems not to have been caused by the ac- 

 cession of new material, but is probably due to a htpsns of some kind, 

 for, as will be shown further on, this form seems really to be coTifined 

 to southwestern Texas so far as its occurrence within the United States 



48r> 



Proceedings National Musenni, Vol. XIV— Xo. 873. 



