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

a livery called „piquée" in French, and consisting- in a subequal alternation of fine black spots, or rather dots, and bright green or yellowish ones on the dorsal surface. This coloration has nothing whatever to do, phylogenetically. with the livery of the young, being himatologically throughout different from it. In some instances the black dots may take, and considerably, the overhand in the performance of the general coloration of such specimens. In females such kind of dottedness, or sprinkledness, that does not consist in the preservation of early livery-characters, being, on the contrary, due to a new and different grouping of the pigments concerned, is comparatively rare, whilst the tendency toward the production of a uniformly bright green livery is more marked in the female than in the male. The livery referred to as „piquée" phylogenetically constitutes a parallel to the reiterated uniformity of the coloration, which means that these two stages mark the same degree of advancement on the evolutional scale. In the „typical" !.. ocellata the pattern has come to a special form of development which is very much like a modification of the piquée type, but differs from it partly in the formation of dark brown or black circlets, the ocelli — those on the back being „blind" in comparison to those on the flanks, for in the latter place they are blue-centred, whilst on the back their centres exhibit the ground colour —, and partly in the important developmental fact that in the piquée livery of L. viridis the early elements of the juvenile coloration are, as such, i. e. himatologically, practically absent, whereas in L. ocellata presence of the black design in the adult is due to more than to a mere physiological, or biochemical, continuity in the individual existence of the dark pigments, for the pigment masses to which the dark pattern is due, prove, topographically and dispositionally, to be directly retraceable to juvenile livery elements: by which fact the strictly himatological — i. e. both substantial and formal — continuity in the development of certain components of coloration is maintained. Adopting such grounds of visulization, the full stage of the piquet é-1 ike livery obtaining in L. ocellata DAUD. S. str. and in some of the specimens of subsp. pater (and its var. tangitana) — I mean those in which the uniformity in coloration has not been brought about — is not equivalent, neither phylogenetically nor ontogenetically, to the true piqueté stage of the livery in L. viridis. For in subsp. pater the piqueté1 i k e stage — which shall be called, in this special instance, the „ocellate" — respresents a lower degree on the scale of himatological