82 Report of the President 



EXISTING REPTILES AND AMPHIBIANS* 

 M. C. Dickerson, Curator 



The year has been a relatively fortunate one regarding 

 enrichment of the department's study collections. The new 

 material accessioned numbers 10,084 specimens, 

 Collections about three times the amount received in 1918, 

 and four times that of 1917. Two thousand of 

 the 10,000 specimens have been acquired by purchase and are 

 largely South American, although a few lots are from China. 

 About 1,000, from North America, South America, and the 

 Orient, have come through exchange, in part for exhibition 

 material in the shape of casts from life prepared in the Ameri- 

 can Museum. 



Nearly 1,000 specimens, mostly North American, have been 

 gifts. The department is particularly grateful for this remem- 

 brance by friends of the institution, many of them boys and 

 girls of our high schools. The donors are 52 in number; the 

 specimens for the most part were sent alive and thus in splen- 

 did condition for research or for use in preparation of casts ; 

 in some instances they were of unusual scientific value, like 

 Amphiardis inornatus from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, a small snake 

 known previously only from the type. Among the gifts from 

 other than North American localities are small collections 

 from Australia, Formosa, France and Brazil. 



The largest accessions have been from expeditions. Con- 

 siderably more than 1,000 specimens were collected during the 

 Museum's reptile field work in Mexico, also a like number on 

 the reptile expedition to Porto Rico under the auspices of the 

 New York Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the 

 American Museum. Other valuable lots have come through 

 local work by members of the department, and through cooper- 

 ation with the New York Zoological Society in its work at the 



Under the Department of Herpetology (see also pages 210 to 212). 



