408 MR. G. A. BOULEN'GER ON ORIENTAL [-^Pl'- 28, 



showed them to be opisthoccelous. It is therefore clear that the 

 character, however- important it may appear at first, is worthless 

 even as a specific charactei' in these Batrachians. I had to a 

 certain extent foreseen this result in 1882*, when I refused to 

 divide these frogs into larger groups according to the mode of 

 articulation of the vei'tebra?, as had been done by Cope t and 

 Lataste +, remarking that : " In this case, this character does not 

 seem to me to be of such importance as was believed by some 

 authors. It has been noticed that, in some individuals of various 

 species, the intervertebral spheres do not become firmly attached 

 to either centrixm at maturity, and one adult specimen of 

 Xenophrys monticola in the British Museum exhibits a very 

 anomalous mode of articulation, the fourth vertebra being 

 biconcave, the fifth biconvex, the others proccelian." Curiously, 

 I was soon after censui-ed by R. Blanchard § for not having 

 divided the Tailless Batrachians into two primary groups : the 

 Opisthoccelous and the Proco?lous. 



Still I per.sisted in using the character of the opisthoco?lous 

 vertebrae for separating 3Iegalophrys from Leptohrachiiivi , with 

 which I had been obliged to unite Giinther's Xenophinjs when it 

 was shown that the presence or absence of vomerine teeth could 

 not be \ised as a generic character in this group IJ. JSTow an 

 unexpected discovery shows the last genus to be still more closely 

 related to the first. 



Some time ago, whilst collecting in Darjeeling, Dr. Annandale 

 found some curious tadpoles agreeing so closely with those of 

 Megalophrys montana, first described from Java by Prof. Max 

 Weber and since found in the Malay Peninsula. However, 

 owing to the fact that M. montana has never been recorded 

 from the Himalayas, whilst Xenophrys monticola (now called 

 Jlegalophrys parra) is common there, doubts arose in his mind 

 as to the correctness of the identification, and he sent me a large 

 series of specimens, adidt and young, of the latter sjDecies, 

 together with several specimens of the problematic larva, one of 

 which has the limbs fully developed. A study of this material 

 has convinced me that the so-called Xenophrys monticola has 

 the same sort of tadpole as Megaloplirys montana, so closely 

 resembling it that I can only distinguish it by the whitish 

 colour of the belly, which in the Malay species is dark brown. 

 I have therefore no hesitation in abandoning the genera 

 Xenophrys and Zeptobrachium and xmiting them with the first- 

 described Megahphrys. And as the species are in want of 

 i-evision, I have seized this opportunity for submitting them all to 

 a renewed study, the results of which appear in this paper. 



Before proceeding with the descriptions of the species, I wish 

 to reply to two criticisms of Beddard's in the above-quoted paper. 



* Cat. Batr. Ecaud. p. 432. t J- Acad. Pliilad. (2) vi. 1866, p. 67. 



t Actes Soc. Linn. Bord. xxx. 1879, p. 330. 



§ Bull. Soc. Zool. France, 1885, p. 58J..— Reply by Boulenger, op. cit. 1886, 

 p. 320. II Ann. Mus. Geneva, (2; vii. 1889, p. 750. 



