Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTORY. IT is only too often that one, not a specialist in some line of scientific work asks bread of those who have devoted themselves more especially to that department of science and receives but a stone. There are at present many general and local works on the subject of the animals and plants about us, but few are adapted to the non-specialist and fewer still to the layman. To read the majority of these works it is necessary to become conversant, often to quite a degree, with the nomenclature and technicalities used. This, to say the least, is burdensome to a general reader and often results in annulling any interest he may have had in the subject. The present paper is an attempt to put in a form comprehensible to general readers an account of the reptiles and batrachians of the State. If the paper is too technical to be used by any intelligent person it fails of its purpose. It is, however, impossible to discuss a subject such as this without the use of any uncommon terms ; the very fact that the two groups under consideration are themselves generally unfamiliar is a confirmation of this statement. But the attempt has been made in the present paper to reduce such terms to a minimum and to fully explain those that must be used. chapter{Section 4 HISTORICAL. Two lists of the Batrachia and Reptilia of Ohio have been thus far published. The first was issued in 1838, by Dr. Jared Potter Kirtland ('38), then at the Medical College of Ohio, in Cincinnati. The list embraced a part of the Report of theZoologjr of Ohio, arranged by Kirtland and published in the First Annual Report of the Geological Survey of the State of Ohio. The list embraces twenty-seven (27) Reptiles and twenty-one (21) Batra- chians, and brief notes on distribution are added for many of t...