59.81(72.2) 



Article XL— THE AMPHIBIANS AND REPTILES OF LOWER 

 CALIFORNIA AND THE NEIGHBORING ISLANDS 



By Karl Patterson Schmidt 



Plates XLVII to LVII 



CONTENTS 



Page 



Introduction 607 



List of New Forms Proposed in the Present Paper 610 



List of New Forms in the Albatross Collection of 1911 610 



Geographic Analysis of the Herpetological Fauna 611 



Speculations on the Origin of the Fauna 626 



Keys to the Genera 629 



Distributional List of the Species 632 



Bibliography 703 



INTRODUCTION 



A general account of the "Albatross Expedition" of 1911 has been 

 given by Dr. C. H. Townsend in the first paper of the Scientific Results 

 (1916, Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist., XXXV, pp. 399-476, 45 figs., 1 map). 

 That paper contains the itinerary of the expedition, many valuable 

 notes on habitat conditions, and especially photographs illustrating the 

 topography and vegetation at the localities where collections of am- 

 phibians and reptiles were made. The additional photographs showing 

 habitat conditions in the present paper have been kindly furnished by Dr. 

 Townsend. 



As has already been stated in other papers, the expedition was made 

 possible largely through the generous support of Mr. Arthur Curtiss 

 James, Trustee of The American Museum of Natural History, to whom 

 the Museum is consequently indebted for the splendid Lower Calif ornian 

 collections discussed below. 



The collections made by the Albatross Expedition in 1911 contain 

 four hundred and forty-eight specimens of reptiles and seven amphibians, 

 representing two species of amphibians and sixty-one species of reptiles. 

 In a previous paper, Dickerson (1919, Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist., XLI, 

 pp. 461-477) has described a new genus and twenty-three new species 

 from the Albatross collection, of which sixteen are recognized in the 

 present paper. To these must be added three forms described below, 

 making a total of nineteen forms new to science contained in the collec- 

 tion. Perhaps the most important part of the collection is the material 



607 



