®. 
136 MR. G. A. BOULENGER ON THE 
L. v. Ménery.—Materialien zu einer Systematik und Phylogenie der Muralis-ahnlichen 
Lacerten. Op. cit. vii. 1909, p. 409. 
G. A. Boutencer.—Remarks on Prof. L. v. Méhely’s recent Contribution to the Knowledge of 
the Lizards allied to Lacerta muralis. Ann. & Mag. N. H. (8) v. 1910, p. 247. 
L. v. Minety.—Weitere Beitriige zur Kenntniss der Archeo- und Neolacerten. 
Hung. viii. 1910, p. 217. 
See also remarks by E. G. Denavr, Bull. Soc. Zool. France, xxxvi. 1911, p. 8. 
Ann, Mus. 
Prof. Méhely does not need my praise, but I should like to say that, however 
much I differ from him in the taxonomic appreciation of characters, in the conception 
of species and their probable derivation, as well as in matters of nomenclature, I 
have the greatest admiration for the originality and energy displayed in his painstaking 
investigations and for the accuracy of his illustrations. I can only regret that I am 
unable to accept the conclusions reached by him in his praiseworthy attempt to settle a 
difficult problem. 
It is my object, by a mere statement of facts, accompanied as far as possible by 
photographic representations of the specimens, to re-act against the tendency to 
exaggerate the importance of trivial or inconstant characters such as are adduced 
to justify the splitting up of Lacerta muralis into a score or more of so-called species. 
Although I have examined a great number of skulls, which have been prepared and 
studied by Mr. E. Degen, I do not propose dealing with them here, as I feel convinced 
they do not afford any help out of the difficulties. As I said on a previous occasion 
(1907), skulls of Lizards cannot be extracted as is done in the case of mammals; pre- 
paring the skull means the partial destruction of the specimen, and in a discussion of 
this kind, dealing mainly with individual variations, annectant examples cannot always 
be sacrificed. We are not much the wiser when the skulis have been prepared, as the 
characters pointed out by Prof. Méhely are, for the most part, correlative of the 
degree of elongation or depression of the head, which can be appreciated without 
injuring the specimens. Alluding te the author’s two extreme skulls (L. fiwmana and 
LL. bedriage) figured in his paper of 1907 and reproduced here (text-fig. 1 A & C), I added 
that I could easily lay out a series that would to such an extent bridge over the 
differences as to show of how little practical value they are for the definition of 
species. ‘This demonstration has been furnished by Prof. Méhely himself, who, in 
his paper of 1909, gives occipital views of two skulls of L. bedriage which contradict 
his previous statement that a pyramidocephalous skull (text-fig. 1A) is distin- 
guished by a ‘“ Processus ascendens des Supraoccipitale hoch und kraftig” from 
a platycephalous in which it is “ schwach und niedrig.” 
Text-fig. 1 B, published in 1909, entirely destroys the impression conveyed by the two 
extreme types (text-fig. 1 A & C) represented in 1907 with the object of showing one of 
the principal differences between a pyramidocephalous skull and a platycephalous. 
In this contribution, as in the preceding one, I have, as a rule, abstained from theories 

