Introduction 



The herpetology of tropical America has been a continuing subject 

 of research by the staff of the Division of Reptiles and Amphibians of 

 the United States National Museum for over half a century. The 

 opportunity to visit Brazil came to me in 1935 through an invitation 

 from the late Dr. Adolpho Lutz, who, duriug my five months' stay, 

 showed me examples of many species of frogs and made numerous 

 comments upon them. 



Together, Dr. Lutz and I visited most of his type locahties in the 

 Districto Federal and made excursions to Nova Friburgo and Petr6- 

 polis. With his collector Joaquim Venancio, I visited Bello Horizonte, 

 Lassance, Pirapora, and Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais; and the city of 

 S5o Paulo, the biological reserve of Alto da Serra, and Santos in Sao 

 Paulo. To my own collections of over 1,500 specimens, mostly frogs, 

 for the United States National Museum, Dr. Lutz generously added a 

 donation of over 1,100 specimens from his own collections, including 

 cotypes or topo types of most of the species named by him. 



I obtained fresh specimens of all the species described by Girard in 

 1853 from material collected in Rio de Janeiro by the U. S. Exploring 

 Expedition on its round-the-world voyage begun in 1837. These I 

 have compared mth such of Girard's types as are still extant in the 

 National Museum and have figured them in the following pages. In 

 the several European museums having Brazilian collections I have 

 photographed many historic type specimens, and have measured and 

 compared them, giving particular attention to characters often 

 neglected in the early diagnoses. 



Other material for comparison was borrowed from various institu- 

 tions, to all of which I am deeply grateful. Chief among these are 

 the Musee Royale d'Histoire Naturelle de Belgique, the British 

 Museum (Natural History), the Natur-Museum Senckenberg, the 

 Departamento de Zoologia, Secretaria da Agricultura, Sao Paulo, the 

 Museum of Zoology of the University of ^lichigan, the Chicago 

 Natural History Museum, and the Museum of Comparative Zoology. 



To Dr. Adolpho Lutz for the invitation that took me to Brazil and 

 for his kind gift of study material and field notes, as well as to Dr. 

 Leonhard Stejneger for his helpful advice at the beginning of these 

 studies, I am most grateful. I regret that neither hved to see the 

 completion of this paper. To Bertha Lutz, Karl P. Schmidt, Lorenz 



