No. 9. — Novitates cubanae By Thomas Barbour and Benjamin Shreve INTRODUCTION The senior author is at this point inclined to be a bit reminiscent. It was, he believes, Doctor C. T. Ramsden who first stoutly protested at the arrangement of the species of Eleutherodactylus which the senior author preferred for use in the Herpetology of Cuba, published in the Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1919, and it is a tribute to his innate courtesy that he finally acquiesced to an arrangement in which he was strongly disinclined to believe. The views which the senior held during the early years of his work on West Indian Amphibia were perhaps unconsciously prejudiced by the work of predecessors and by a sort of innate feeling that there could not, by any probability, be so many members of a single genus on islands of the size of the Greater Antilles. How extraordinarily in-correct his belief was, is shown by the enormous number of forms which have been and are still being discovered. Some, probably not very many, will fall as synonyms, others, probably a great many, will ultimately be recognized as geographic races rather than as "full species" when much more collecting and much more field observing has been done. Many more hills and mountains remain to be intensively searched, particularly in Cuba and San Domingo; and in Cuba there are large areas of the central portion of the Island between the eastern border of the Province of Santa Clara and the mountains of Oriente, which may be expected to provide the information necessary to indicate the relationship and to produce intergrades between forms now known in the eastern and western parts of the Island. Whether there are hills high enough to shelter forms relating to those found in the higher parts of the mountains of Santa Clara and of Oriente may perhaps be doubt-ful, but a good many of the lowland species will probably best be designated by trinominals after more collections come in from this little known region. As in the case of the Bahamas, so also in Cuba, it is an unhappy fact that intensive collecting has been so long delayed. The changes which man has wrought over vast areas once high forest and now cattle pastures or cane fields make it uncertain whether we shall ever know as much as might have been learned had intensive collecting been carried
BioStor
