Abstract
DR. ADOLF BERNHARD MEYER, who, as most of the readers of NATURE will be aware, has lately returned from a very successful expedition to New Guinea, has published in the “Monatsberichte” of the Berlin Academy a short account of his herpetological discoveries, which present several points of interest. Previous investigators of the natural history of this wonderful land have paid more attention to its birds than to its reptiles and amphibians—a circumstance perhaps scarcely to be wondered at in the land of paradise-birds and so many other anomalous forms. Dr. Meyer, however, while he has by no means neglected the class of birds, as shown by his recent communications upon that branch of zoology to the Academy of Vienna, has likewise paid much attention to the representatives of the inferior orders of reptiles and batrachians which he met with in New Guinea and the adjacent islands. Although this branch of the Papuan fauna is well known to be comparatively poor, Dr. Meyer's labours have been by no means without result. Of sixty-three different forms belonging to these orders of which he collected specimens, thirty-four have turned out to be new to science; and of the remaining twenty-nine, the greater part were previously not known to occur in this locality.
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The Herpetology of New Guinea * . Nature 10, 191 (1874). https://doi.org/10.1038/010191a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/010191a0