602 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1902. 



Habitat. — In 1881 Dr. Gundlach wrote that this species had not been 

 observed by him in Porto Rico, but had been sent by Dr. Stahl, who 

 had found it in a house at the capital, San Juan, adding- that "it seems 

 to be rare.'* Dr. Stahl does not give this species in his Fauna of the 

 following- year (1882), but on page 71 he mentions that Don Tomas 

 Blanco, a pharmacist in Porto Rico, had met with "another species of 

 the gecko family," which he himself had observed later on in Agua- 

 dilla and other places. It is probably the present species to which he 

 refers. It was not collected by Mr. Baker, nor by any of the Fish 

 Commission naturalists. Dr. Richmond aud I were equally unsuc- 

 cessful. However, the species was reported as having been sent from 

 Porto Rico by Latimer as early as 1868, and Boettger mentions two 

 specimens in the Museum Senckenbergianum donated in 1879 by 

 Mr. Carl Knoblauch; Garman also mentions specimens from Porto 

 Rico in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Cambridge, Massa- 

 chusetts, and, finally, I have recently examined a specimen in the 

 museum in Hamburg collected by Mr. Herman Engel, in San Juan. 

 H. mabouia is a species of extremely wide distribution. Besides 

 having been found in various other West Indian islands, it occurs in 

 many places in South America, South Africa, and Madagascar. It 

 has probably been carried to man} r distant places in ships, and its 

 occurrence in Porto Rico is undoubtedly due to a similar agency. 



Genus SPH^ERODACTYLUS" Wagler. 



1830. Sphscrodactylus W agler, Nat. Syst. Amph., p. 143 (type & sputator). 



1830. Spheriodactylus Guerin, Icon. Regne Anim., pi. xiv, fig. 6 (emend.). 



1831. Sphccriodactylus Gray, in Griffith's Anim. Kingd. Synops., p. 52 (emend.). 

 1833. Sphscriodactylus v. n. Hoeven, Handb. Dierk., II, ii p. 344 (emend.). 



The two species of Sphserodactylus found in Porto Rico and its 

 dependencies may be easih T distinguished by the size of the scales, as 

 follows: 



a 1 . Number of scale rows around the middle of the body about 34-38, 



S. grandisquamis, p. 602. 

 a 2 . Number of scale rows around the middle of the body about 46-48, 



S. monensis, p. 607. 



SPH/ERODACTYLUS GRANDISQUAMIS, l> new species. 



1863. Sphseriodactylus macrolepis Reinhardt and Luetken, Vid. Meddel. Nat. 

 Foren. (Copenhagen) 1862, pp. 174, 279; authors' separate, pp. 22, 127 

 (part, not of Guenther; island of Vieques). — Peters, Mon. Ber. Berlin 

 Akad. Wiss., 1876, p. 705 (Porto Rico). — Gundlach, Anal. Soc. Espan. 

 Hist. Nat., X, 1881, p. 308 (Porto Rico) .—Stahl, Fauna Puerto-Rico, 

 1882, pp. 70, 159 (Porto Rico). — SpJiaerodactylus m. Gaeman, Bull. Essex 

 Inst, XIX, 1887, p. 21 (part: Porto Rico). 



a6(paifja, ball; Sa/cruAo?, digit. h With large scales. 



