INTRODUCTION. 
The genius of the French produced, during the first three decades of this century, 
that magnificent work entitled ' Description de l'Egypte, ou Recueil des observations et 
des recherches qui ont ete faites en Egypte pendant l'expedition de l'armee Francaise.' 
This great achievement dealt with the country in nearly all its aspects, each department 
of research having been intrusted to a savant well qualified to expound it. In those 
days, however, zoologists were not alive to the importance of recording the exact 
localities in which the species they described were found ; and the French naturalists 
were no exception in this respect, so far as the Reptiles and Batrachians were concerned, 
as all the information put on record regarding their distribution is that they came 
from ' Egypt.' 
The present work contains some additional facts bearing on the Reptiles and 
Batrachians of Egypt and their distribution, and thus supplements, at the close of the 
century, during the occupation of Egypt by the British, the information brought 
together by the French at the beginning of the century, when they were, for the time 
being, masters of the Valley of the Nile. 
In drawing up this account of the Reptiles and Batrachians of Egypt it would have 
been an easy matter to have arbitrarily drawn a line from east to west at the First 
Cataract, and to have excluded all species found to the south of it, and thus to have 
confined this description to the area corresponding to the Egypt of the ancients. But 
Egypt of the past is no longer the Egypt of the end of the nineteenth century, which 
has now its frontier in the Nile Valley as far south as Wadi Haifa, and its frontier of 
the Red Sea littoral, at Tokar. 
Moreover, as the physical characters of the region on the east bank of the Nile 
lying to the south of the arbitrary line are practically identical with those existing to 
the north of it, and as the same is also true of the corresponding areas on the west 
side of the river, there is every reason why the consideration of the zoological features 
of these areas should be extended to the political frontier ; and had there been any 
c 
