No. 632] SHORTER ARTICLES AND DISCUSSION 285 



Beebe has charmed many readers with essays which show that 

 he is gifted with a delightful diction and a romantic style most 

 convincing and hence to be most carefully used. To criticize 

 these essays unkindly is far too much like picking apart an 

 orchid. Nevertheless they sometimes have the defect of cap- 

 italizing supposed "new discoveries" at a rather high adver- 

 tising value when the history of our earlier knowledge has not 

 been determined from the literature. 



Thomas Penard, in an article of marked gentleness and cour- 

 tesy, 1 has reviewed Beebe 's "Tropical "Wild Life," in such a 

 way that further elaboration is happily unnecessary. Now, how- 

 ever, articles have appeared in Zoological which require more 

 careful examination. They purport to be usable lists, admitted 

 to be necessary, for any study of the higher vertebrates of British 

 Guiana with special reference to the fauna of the Bartica district 

 —the species which Beebe has actually found there being starred 

 with an asterisk. 



Beebe introduces them as follows: 



Finding no resume available of the Amphibia, Reptilia and Mam- 

 malia of this colony, I have gone through the literature at hand and 

 made my own lists. These I offer as a preliminary enumeration of the 



this P.HI ish < ninny. They form a tangible basis for future increments— 

 the many new species and the radical extension of present known dis- 



tain to nchieve. Cheek-lists ,',f wen names such as these are wholly 

 foreign to the future zoological work of the Tropical Station (italics 



investigation, ami it is in this > P irit that \h\< preliminary work has been 

 undertaken. 



I have made no attempt at a thorough search of literature for priority 

 or for confirmation of names or other similar phases of taxonomy, deem- 

 ing this the special province of the literary systematise I have merely 

 sought to utilize the most recently accepted names of herpetologists and 

 mammalogists. 



Now, generally speaking, the "literary systematist" does not 

 confine himself to this somewhat dry but entirely necessary voca- 

 tion, wholly from choice and he is saddened when his more foot- 

 free colleagues cast supercilious glances his way. It therefore 



1 Auk, 36, 1919, pp. 217-225. 



a Vol. 2,Nos. 7 and 8, 1919. 



