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

and ocellata forms only, with the difference that within the frame of individual variation many specimens of the latter forms are, in himatological respect, still falling back to their immediate ancestors. Having thus closed the discussion of the external characteristics that enter the field of eidonomical and himatological inquiry, there remains a word to be said on those cranial features which are accessible to examination without dissection. The pterygoid is toothed, according to BLANFORD who refers to the presence of „Palatal teeth" which term, of course, is not quite exact. The type of the skull is decidedly pyramiclocephalous, as in all Massive Lizards. DE MÉHELY points at the presence of a large membraneous fontanel, to be established by palpation, on the supraciliary lamina of the Sarchun specimen. Very correctly he adds, however, that the presence of this fontanel is merely due to the juvenile condition of the individual. Prof, DE MÉHELY has demonstrated the existence of such fontanel in numerous Lacertids that are bearing it throughout their life. In others he found it only in the young, the lamina superciliaris being fully ossified in the adult. In some cases, however, the fontanel may ossify in old males pertaining to the first group, whilst, on the other hand, it may persist in some females and adult males belonging to the second group. The species belonging to the first group were gathered by him, as „Archaeolacertae"

, into a separate systematical unit that still is regarded by him as a genetical entity different from the species with a more ossified cranial type, which were classed by him into another systematical complex which he provided with the name „Neolacertae"

. Also this group is considered by DE MÉHELY as constituting a natural, i. e. genetical, unit. The membraneous type of skull is looked upon by DE MÉHELY as representing a more ancestral, i. e. more primitive, grade on the phylogenetical scale, whilst the ossified Lacertian cranium is pretented, by him, to be expressive of a higher development. In the latter instance the presence of a fontanel in early ontogenetical stages should simply mean the biogenetical recapitulation of a condition having obtained in a more remote period of Lacertian euthygenesis (i. e. linear development). In this place I do not wish to enter into a more detailed discussion of such fundamentally erroneous way of interpreting facts that are, in se, i. e. so far as their existence be concerned, correctly established — which should be stated to the benefit of the descriptive part of the work DE MÉHELY has carried on along the line we are, at present, interested in, and in disfavour of the evolutionary theories, Annales Musei Nationalis Hungarici XXX. 2