EAST AFRICAN KEPTILES AND AMPHIBIANS IN 

 THE UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



By Arthur Loveridge 

 OJ the Museura of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Mass. 



INTRODUCTION 



Of papers dealing with the East African herpetological material 

 in the National Collection only five have appeared. Three of these 

 were by Dr. L. Stejneger^ and references to them are given under each 

 species to which he referred; tw^o others by myself^ appeared in 1928 

 and are not cited, nor is the material mentioned in these referred to 

 again except in the complete List of Species (p. 8), where it so happen? 

 that the species is nob mentioned in the body of this paper. 



The geographical limits covered by this report differ slightly from 

 those in Hollister's work, as no material from Somaliland is recorded 

 and only one specimen from Abyssinia (now called Ethiopia) and two 

 from the Sudan. The report is chiefly confined to specimens from 

 Uganda, Kenya Colony, and Tanganyika Territory. In Hollister's 

 work these last two regions appeared under their old names of British 

 East Africa and German East Africa. In the present paper the ab- 

 breviations L. E. for Lado Enclave or West Nile Province of Uganda, 

 U. for Uganda, K. C. for Kenya Colony, T. T. for Tanganyika Ter- 

 ritory, have been used to avoid much useless repetition. Less than 

 a dozen specimens from more or less adjacent territories have been 

 included, namely, from Abyssinia, Belgian Congo, Mozambique, 

 Rhodesia, and the Transvaal; in no instance, hov»xver, v/ere they 

 species not already Ivnown from East Africa as defined above. 



Historically the earliest material from this region to reach the 

 United States National Museum was Dr. W. L. Abbott's collections 

 of 1888-89 and Mr. Astor Chanler's of 1892; both have been referred 

 to in detail by Stejneger. The vast bulk of the collection, comprising 

 some 2,000 specimens, was secured in 1909-10 by the Smithsonian 

 African expedition under the direction of the late Col. Theodore 

 Roosevelt. During 1911-12, when with the Frick and Paul J. Rainey 



' stejneger, 1891, Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus., vol. 14, pp. 353-4, fig.; pp. 405-6; 1893, vol. 16, pp. 711-74.1. 

 • Loveridge, 1928, Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus., vol. 72, art, 24, pp. 1-2; vol. 73, art. 17, pp. 1-69. 



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