OCCASIONAL PAPERS OF THE CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, NO. 160 
viii 
From the Preface to the first edition of A Manual of the Geology of India . . ., by H.B. Medlicott and W.T. 
Blanford (1879:vii) 
The map (this in reference to the map included in the Manual ), it is feared, will be found defective in 
several other respects . . .But the most serious drawback is in the names of places. Many towns of im¬ 
portance are omitted, owing to the small scale; and other names of interest, for purposes of geological 
description, such as those of fossil-localities, or of villages near important sections, are wanting. Nor is 
this all. The spelling of Oriental names is a well-known cause of perplexity; and the confusion has been 
increased by the unfortunate circumstance that, while one system has been adopted by the Great Trigono¬ 
metrical Survey, and employed in all the maps, including those of the detailed Topographical Surveys, 
issued by the Department, and entirely distinct system (here one can substitute different editors of jour¬ 
nals, AL/SA) has been employed by the Revenue Service, by whom the maps of all the best known parts 
of the country have been prepared. Under the first system, each letter in the Indian language is repre¬ 
sented by a corresponding letter in the Roman alphabet; diacritical marks and accents being employed to 
distinguish such consonants or vowels in the latter as are required to represent two or more sounds, and 
the Italian or German sounds of the vowels being used, instead of the English. Under the second system, 
an attempt is made to represent the original sound by English spelling; double vowels being largely used, 
but no diacritical marks. The imperfection of the latter plan is manifest; because, in the first place, the 
sounds, of the vowels especially, in English, are variable, and incapable, in many cases, of representing 
those of Oriental languages; and, secondly, the representation of the true names by supposed equivalents 
is arbitrary, depending chiefly on the ear, often very imperfectly trained, of the transcriber . . .” 
Preface to Original Publication 
For nearly five decades, we have been compiling a bibliography of the herpetology of Southwest Asia. For 
our purposes, this region encompasses the area between the Red Sea (including the Sinai Peninsula) and the 
Mediterranean Sea (including Cyprus) on the west and the Pakistan-Indian border region (including Jammu and 
Kashmir) on the east, and between the borders of the former Soviet Union on the north and the Gulf of Aden (in¬ 
cluding Socotra and Abd ‘al Kuri) on the south. Thus it includes Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan as the northern 
tier (the Iranian Plateau), Pakistan in the east, the entire Arabian Peninsula in the south, the countries of 
Mesopotamia and the North Arabian Desert, Israel, and the Levant. We have attempted to be comprehensive in 
our coverage of publications wit hin this region. We have also included a miscellany of publications for the her- 
petofaunas of adjacent countries insofar as they bear on taxa also represented within our region. For these areas, 
our coverage is far less complete. 
Although we have tried to see as many of the listed publications as possible, there is still a large portion we 
have cited from sources that we have not verified. To facilitate location of references by interlibrary loan and via 
the Internet, we have given the full names of authors where these are known to us. We have also provided the 
full names of journals wherever possible, although there are still many that we have either not seen or have not 
been able to locate. In the last section, Journals as Cited in References, we provide a complete alphabetical list 
of all journals and the abbreviations we have chosen to use. The latter were chosen, perhaps somewhat arbitrar¬ 
ily, but as much as possible to avoid ambiguity (thus, for instance, we do not use J. for Journal but Jour., Jahrb. 
for Jahrbuch, Jahresh. for Jahresheft, and Zh. and Zhur. for the Russian Zhurnal, which some publications allow 
in the anglicized version as Journal and abbreviate ‘J.’). Furthermore, among the references, users will occa¬ 
sionally notice the presence of a series of ‘x’s, i.e., xxxxx, in place of expected bits of information such as pages, 
volume number, publisher, city where printed, etc. Clearly, at this time we were unable to provide the necessary 
specifics and the ‘x’s are meant to alert the user to unknowns in the citation. 
We have collected references on all aspects of the biology of amphibians and reptiles and have tried to be 
complete, although systematics, distribution, and biogeography are our own particular interests. Owing to our 
areas of research, we have also included works on geology, paleontology, paleoclimatology, and geography that 
bear on biogeography of our region. We include some references on the biogeography of organisms other than 
amphibians and reptiles, as well as publications that refer to other aspects of ecology. Such references are far 
from exhaustive, however. We list a number of titles that deal with analyses of higher taxa that extend far be¬ 
yond our geographic area as well as publications that describe techniques, particularly those useful in systemat¬ 
ics or field herpetology. In short, we include works that have come to our attention that we believe would assist 
researchers conducting herpetological investigations in Southwest Asia. We have been less than diligent in keep- 
