2 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL. MUSEUM vol. 69 



to a great extent was delegated did not know anything about rep- 

 tiles, their names, the literature involved, or the geography of the 

 countries inhabited by them. He was also very often mistaken in 

 his deciphering the old numbers, either carelessly written originally 

 or blurred with age, so that this retagging of the collection resulted 

 in an orgy of errors, some of which I have been able to discover, 

 though the majority will probably remain incorrigible. At the con- 

 clusion of this retagging there remained hundreds of specimens, 

 with or without data, which were recatalogued under new numbers, 

 the old numbers being "obliterated." 



Quite a few specimens of the collections brought home by the 

 Rogers North Pacific Exploration Expedition suffered a similar fate. 

 In my " Herpetology of Japan " (Bull. U. S. Nat. Mus., No. 68, 1907) 

 I had occasion to call attention to some of them (for instance on 

 pages 23, 96, 124, 148, 157, 175, 191, 196, 205, 239, 260, 328, 334, 340, 

 367, 412, 475), and others have been discovered since (thus the co- 

 types of Lygosaurus pellopleurus Hallowell,^ missing in 1907, have 

 been found and reentered as Nos. 42110 and 42114). 



One of the most perplexing mysteries of this kind has been the 

 Megaloys maculatus Hallowell,- alleged to have been collected in 

 Tahiti by Mr. Adams. The description of the somewhat defective 

 specimen was too insufficient to identify it with any known species, 

 and as no land snake has been found in Tahiti by any other collector, 

 the status of this species and the genus founded upon it has re- 

 mained unsolved. Matters were made still worse when Cope, in 1895, 

 in dissecting the specimen from Hongkong, Cat. No. 7339, U.S.N.M., 

 which Hallowell had doubtfully referred to Homalopsis huccatus, 

 erroneously assumed that he had before him Hallowell's Megalops 

 maculatus. Cope redefined it as a separate genus and gave it the 

 name Anoplo phallus maculatus., because Megalops was preoccupied. 

 As I have shown elsewhere,^ the specimen thus erroneously identified 

 by two eminent herpetologists is that of a very common East Indian 

 snake, Lycodon subcinctus. The true type not having turned up yet, 

 I had to conclude, less than a year ago : " What Hallowell's Megalops 

 maculatus from Tahiti really represents is still a mystery."^ 



In glancing over a shelf of old unidentified material a few days 

 ago, my eye caught the word " Tahiti " on the faded paper label 

 of a snake. It was at once confronted with Hallowell's original 

 description of Megalops maculatiis., with which it Avas found to 

 agree in every detail. Here, then, was the type. Cat. No. 7367, 



1 Proceedings Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, 1860, p. 496. 



=> Idem, p. 488. 



sproc. U. S. Nat. Mus., vol. 66, art. 25, 1925, pp. 90-91. 



