120 
Smith, Preston, Smith, and Irey 
through copies made by others, were not preserved. In their time, all 
were widely known, widely admired, and usually poorly imitated. His 
Indian paintings, copied notably by DeBry, were for centuries the 
primary basis for European concepts of native Americans. 
The first generally available reproduction of the entire collection of 
75 paintings appeared in color, copied from tinted photostats, not the 
originals, in a single volume by Lorant (1946). An elaborate, handsome 
analysis and reproduction followed 18 years later in a two-volume work 
published by, and drawing exhaustively upon the resources of, the 
British Museum (Hulton and Quinn 1964). Hulton (1965, 1984) also 
reproduced the White paintings and drawings, and Cumming, Skelton, 
and Quinn (1972), in a beautifully illustrated book on North American 
explorations, reproduced four of the five reptile paintings by White, two 
in color. 
All the works cited above included most or all of at least the 
American drawings, including the reptiles. However, none of the reptile 
paintings had been reproduced for general public access prior to 1946, 
and none of the three works in which they subsequently appeared had 
been prominently noted by herpetologists. In order to bring White’s 
contributions more generally to the attention of herpetologists, we here 
reproduce in monochrome all five reptile paintings, with the coopera- 
tion of the Trustees of the British Museum, where all of White’s known 
extant replicas are located. 
Although White’s reptile paintings have never been given much 
attention by herpetologists, they were first discovered as early seven- 
teenth-century copies (by a near descendant of White’s) in a portfolio 
acquired in 1709 or shortly thereafter by Sir Hans Sloane, and now in 
the British Museum. Sloane had numerous copies made of these copies, 
and in turn, Catesby in 1731-1743 copied seven of Sloane ’s copies of 
White’s paintings in his “Natural History,” among them the “iguana.” 
Lorant (personal communication) sought the assistance of the authori- 
ties in the British Museum (Natural History) in identifying the reptile 
paintings, and for the Hulton-Quinn volumes Doris M. Cochran of the 
U.S. National Museum of Natural History and J. C. Battersby of the 
British Museum (Natural History) furnished expert comments on identifica- 
tions, expanding on the identifications detailed in Quinn (1955). Howard 
H. Peckham, Helen T. Gaige, and Carl Hubbs prepared a locally 
distributed pamphlet for a meeting in Ann Arbor, Mich., of the 
American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists in 1946, bearing 
a reproduction of White’s sea turtle painting as its frontispiece, for a 
display of rare books in the Clements Library of the University of 
Michigan. We are not aware of any other herpetological attention, 
