Zsivny Viktor (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 30. (Budapest 1936)

Fejérváry, G. J.: Notes on a very little-known lizard: Lacerta princeps Blanf., with description of the male specimen preserved in the Vienna Natural History Museum

axillar region and the flanks, down to the limit of the ventral plates, being, contrarily to what obtains in the mentioned forms of L. viridis, totally absent on head and neck. Returning now, after such comparative analytical considerations, to the livery of L. princeps, it proves to enter into the type obtaining in the ocellata group, closely paralleling, in this respect, subsp. pater LAT. The ocelli form a short double range, the lower of the two ranges formally lying within the course that has been followed by the totally vanished subocular stripe. I do not believe, however, that the lower row of ocelli may be looked upon as heterogenous, in origin, from the upper one. On the contrary, both the size and disposition of the elements under discussion seem to suggest that they actually belong to the area of the temporal band, their origin being either directly retraceable to a lower row of mesh interstices, having occurred, of yore, in the vitta temporalis, and having undergone, later on, in the form of ocelli, a secondary enlargement and, with it, a ventrad expansion, or „drift", of the original inter-reticular elements encroaching now upon the range of the disappeared subocular stripe, or simply consisting in practically new elements due to the splitting up of the upper series of ocelli, by means of a successive increase of their blue and black pigment, thus representing, on the whole, evolutionarily new, i. e. accessory or additional, components of livery. — So far as may be stated from the examination of the single male specimen known of L. princeps, as well as on the scarce account of the two females, described by BLANFORD and BOULENGER, no fixation of juvenile, or archaic, characters, is to be stated in the male, and but faint traces of such might be presumed to obtain, in some instance, in the female (see p. 12. of the present paper). If such condition should prove, on the strength of a larger material, to prevail in L. princeps, this species would parallel, in this respect, rather L. viridis (and the „muralis-like" Lizards) than L. ocellata, for in subsp. pater I have severally observed the maintenance of juvenile, or archaic, livery characters in the male, whilst the female gets, in her ontogenetical development, sooner rid of the early markings than the male. Thus the female of pater more easily exhibits a total and real uniformity of its advanced livery than the male, and the same fact obtains in those of the females of L. viridis, which finally quite lose their juvenile share of coloration. For the male of L. viridis, which, in his livery, shows, on the whole, much less inclination toward the late persistence of juvenile characteristics, often acquires