136 ME. G. A. BOULENGEE ON THE 



L. V. Mkhely. — Materialien zu einer Systematik uud Phylogenie der Muralis-ahnlichen 



Lacerteu. Op. cit. vii. 1909, p. 409. 

 G. A. BouLENGER. — Remarks on Prof. L. v. Mehely's recent Contribution to the Knowledge of 



the Lizards allied to Lacerta muralis. Ann. & Mag. N. H. (8) v. 1910, p. 247. 

 L. V. Mehely. — Weitere Beitrage zur Kenntniss der Archseo- und Neolacerten. Ann. Mus. 



Hung. viii. 1910, p. .217. 

 See also remarks by E. G. Dehaut, Bull. Soc. Zool. France, xxxvi. 1911, p. 8. 



Prof. Mehely does not need my praise, but I should like to say that, however 

 much I differ from him in the taxonomic appreciation of characters, in the conception 

 of species and their probable derivation, as well as in matters of nomenclature, I 

 have the greatest admiration for the originality and energy displayed in his painstaking 

 investigations and for the accuracy of his illustrations. I can only regret that I am 

 unable to accept the conclusions reached by him in his praiseworthy attempt to settle a 

 difficult problem. 



It is my object, by a mere statement of facts, accompanied as far as possible by 

 photographic representations of the specimens, to re-act against the tendency to 

 exaggerate the importance of trivial or inconstant characters such as are adduced 

 to justify the splitting up of Lacerta muralis into a score or more of so-called species. 



Although I have examined a great number of skulls, which have been prepared and 

 studied by Mr. E. Degen, I do not propose dealing with them here, as I feel convinced 

 they do not afford any help out of the difficulties. As I said on a previous occasion 

 (1907), skulls of Lizards cannot be extracted as is done in the case of mammals; pre- 

 paring the skull means the partial destruction of the specimen, and in a discussion of 

 this kind, dealing mainly with individua,l variations, annectant examples cannot always 

 be sacrificed. We are not much the wiser when the skulls have been prepared, as the 

 characters pointed out by Prof. Mehely are, for the most part, correlative of the 

 degree of elongation or depression of the head, which can be appreciated without 

 injuring the specimens. Alluding to the author's two extreme skulls {L.fiumana and 

 L. hedriagw) figured in his paper of 1907 and reproduced here (text-fig. 1 A <& C), I added 

 that I could easily lay out a series that would to such an extent bridge over the 

 difterences as to show of how little practical value they are for the definition of 

 species. This demonstration has been furnished by Prof. Mehely himself, who, in 

 his paper of 1909, gives occipital views of two skulls of i. hedriagce which contradict 

 his previous statement that a pyramidocephalous skull (text-fig. 1 A) is distin- 

 guished by a " Processus ascendens des Supraoccipitale hoch und kriiftig " from 

 a platycephalous in which it is " schwach und niedrig." 



Text-fig. 1 B, published in 1909, entirely destroys the impression conveyed by the two 

 extreme types (text-fig. 1 A & C) represented in 1907 with the object of showing one of 

 the principal differences between a pyramidocephalous skull and a platycephalous. 

 In this contribution, as in the preceding one, I have, as a rule, abstained from theories 



