1904.] Nelson Annandale — The Lizards of the A n.lamcms. 17 



standpoint, to determine a species from a mere examination of specimens. 

 Uncloubtedly he is riglit. Without a study of bionomics it would be 

 impossible to group together the seasonal forms of certain butterflies he 

 instances, or to draw the line between closely related local races of 

 many animals. But in a museum — and too often the naturalist exists 

 for the museum, not the museum for the naturalist — any system of 

 arrangement is impossible, unless names are given to specimens. 

 Anyone who would have the courage, the skill, and the patience 

 (and would live long enough), to classify the whole animal kingdom 

 according to some system of numbers and letters, which could be re- 

 corded as in a library catalogue, would confer an enormous boon on 

 scientific zoology. The tendency at present among systematists is to 

 search for differences rather than relationships, and very little is being 

 done in tropical countries to find out what these differences mean. No 

 investigations are being made, so far as I know, to discover whether the 

 members of the fauna of any given island or group of islands of limited 

 extent are undergoing modification in any one direction. That this is 

 probably the case even in Northern Europe is shown in a recent paper 

 by Eagle Clarke (8), who points out that in the Faroes animals as dis- 

 tinct from one another as the wren, the starling and the house mouse 

 {Mus. musculus) have all developed in the direction of increase of bulk 

 and coarseness of the feet. The work of Darwin and of Wallace on 

 island life is of course classical, and as such liable to be ignored. 

 When they wrote and laboured on the subject the extraordinary elabora- 

 tion of modern zoology had scarcely begun, and it was less easy to lose 

 sight of philosophical principles. We now know a considerable part of 

 what is to be known about the " species " of the larger Indian verte- 

 brates, nsing the term " species " in the loose way to which the museum 

 zoologist is condemned ; we do not know, even in a few cases, why 

 one animal survives^ under any given change of environment while 

 another, apparently just as fitted for survival and quite as variable 

 perishes. It is not likely that we shall soon gain any such knowledge, 

 at any rate in the tropics ; for such problems can only be studied in 

 the field. Collectors have rarely time to observe, and all that can be done 

 in a Museum is to classify and anatomize dead and imperfectly pre- 

 served material. 



The object of this digression from the subject strictly in hand has 

 been to illustrate the position of the Andaman Gonatodes as a distinct 

 form, and at the same time to point out that even where a fauna has 



1 For example, why is it that certain species of the Indian tank mollnsca 

 snccamb almost at once if kept in an aqaariam witlioat ventilation, wliile others 

 from the same tank live for a considerable period under such conditions ? 



J. II. 3 



