8 
Wilfred had quite a droll sense of humor. On field trips 
he would sometimes predict the presence of a specific 
species under a specific log, and find the species after a 
bit of ripping with his mattock. Some of his companions 
wondered whether he salted the site beforehand. During his 
graduate school days (see below), he would hand a fellow 
student a pickled Crotalis durissus or whatever from 
British Guiana (Guyana) and say "Look what I found in Polk 
County!" He fooled quite a few members of the younger 
generation with the ERA-WTN Collection. During his 
anthropological studies, Neill learned how to quickly 
fashion fluted points by the same method the native peoples 
used, by hitting one rock against another (Neill, 1952). 
One time a member of the Anthropology Department at the 
Florida State Museum had to perform a "patina test" on some 
Neill finds, to prove their antiquity was not quite what 
the discoverer professed! 
Allen and Neill had a falling out in 1962 during the 
Belize period, resulting in Neill's permanently leaving 
Silver Springs and moving to New Port Richey, where he 
cared for his retired parents. Neill's financial status 
has been rather poor ever since. He worked in a gas 
station, but still managed to publish five papers in 1963. 
In January of 1964 at the urging of Walter Auffenberg, the 
new Curator of Herpetology at the Florida State Museum, 
Wilfred, then 43 years old, moved to Gainesville to work in 
the Seagle Building in downtown Gainesville, identifying 
and cataloguing amphibians and reptiles. He soon decided 
to enter graduate school at the University of Florida, 
enrolling in the spring term to start work on his doctorate 
in zoology. 1964 was to be another productive year, with 
nine papers published, including the still standard work, 
"Taxonomy, Natural History, and Zoogeography of the Rainbow 
Snake, Farancia ervtrocrramma (Palisot de Beauvois)." 
One day in the fall of 1964, after working in the 
Ichthyology Collection with Dr. Carter Gilbert, Wilfred 
abruptly disappeared and returned to New Port Richey. By 
the end of 1964, he had written or coauthored 228 articles 
and papers and had a long-standing regional reputation. 
Forced to take the standard class schedule of a beginning 
graduate student, Neill simply could not tolerate the major 
demotion in status. The zoology department waived the 
requirement for a research project for the Ph.D., but 
demanded Wilfred take the usual classes. In addition, 
Neill chose Pierce Brodkorb, with whom he had copublished a 
paper back in 1956, as his major professor. Neill and 
