Bibliography and Zoological Taxa of Paul Bartsch - Smithsonian ...

NUMBER 143
ing summers he continued and increased his endeavors
along this line, in August 1926 taking
2,400 feet of film.
For three consecutive years, from 1928 to 1930,
Bartsch traveled during the summer months to the
West Indies, visiting Cuba, the southern Bahamas,
the Cayman Islands, and the Lesser Antilles. These
trips, made possible on Walter Rathbone Bacon
Travelling Scholarships, were organized for the purpose
of collecting land snails from the West Indian
islands. On the first of these trips, accompanied
by Ray Greenfield, a Washington Boy Scout, he
spent three months exploring the western part of
Cuba from Pinar del Rio to Camaguey; on part of
this trip he had the companionship of Dr. Carlos
de la Torre, the foremost Cuban malacologist of
his time.
The following year, two and a half months were
spent on board a chartered schooner, the Guillermito,
visiting the Lesser Antillean islands from St.
Thomas to Trinidad, and then westward to Curasao,
Bonaire, Aruba, and the islands off the Venezuelan
coast. In the next year, three months were
devoted to the islands of the southern Bahamas,
the south coast of Oriente Provine, Cuba, the Cayman
Islands, and the Isle of Pines, Cuba. The
first part of this trip was made in the schooner
Island Home out of Miami, and the latter part in
the Cuban fishing boat Jose Enrique; on this expedition
Bartsch was accompanied by two Boy
Scouts and another assistant. Over half a million
mollusks were gathered in the course of these three
expeditions, as well as many other kinds of animals,
especially birds and reptiles; during the last of
these trips, for instance, 925 bird skins were shipped
back.
His next visit to West Indian waters was in 1933
as leader of the Johnson-Smithsonian Deep-Sea Expedition
to the Puerto Rican Deep. This voyage
was made on board the 279-foot luxury yacht of
Eldridge R. Johnson, which had been especially
equipped for oceanographic work. It lasted from
January 21 to March 14 and, in contrast to the
previous three trips, was almost entirely devoted to
the study and collection of marine life. Using the
most advanced sonic sounding equipment available,
more than 900 soundings were made, most of
them in the area of the Puerto Rican Deep and in
the Mona Passage. Dredging operations were also
carried out in these areas as well as off the north
coast of Puerto Rico and north of the Virgin
Islands, and in Samana Bay, Dominican Republic.
Thousands of fish, mollusks, and other marine invertebrates
were collected and, based on this material,
31 papers in various fields of zoology were
published that included the description of many
new species and genera.
In the last twenty years of his active life at the
Smithsonian, Bartsch worked in various areas of
malacology. He began, for instance, in 1927 to
work on the gastropod family Turridae, a large and
complex group. His first paper on this group appeared
in 1934, and from 1941 to 1950 seven papers
on various genera in the family came from his
pen. The imprint of his researches on the turrids
remains to this day in the form of a complete re-
' arrangement with many manuscript names of the
American representatives.
At about the same time he started to monograph
the American species of oysters, but this paper was
never completed.
In 1930 with the receipt of Philippine land snails,
mainly from Pedro de Mesa of Calapan, Mindoro,
his interest in the Philippine terrestrial fauna was
rekindled, and in the ten years from 1930 to 1939
inclusive, he published twelve papers on various
genera of land snails.
Although Bartsch had first started work in 1923
on the taxonomy of the intermediate snail hosts of
the Asiatic Blood Fluke, Schistosoma japonicum,
and published his first paper in 1925 on this subject,
it was not until 1935 that he published a detailed
account of these snails, adding two further
papers on the subject in 1939.
After the United States entered the Second World
War in December 1941 and our troops began invading
the islands of the western Pacific in the
following years, the problem of infection with
schistosomiasis became acute. Bartsch used to tell
how horrified he was on seeing a newspaper photograph
from the war zone in the Philippines showing
our troops bathing in a stream on Leyte and how
the next morning he got in touch with the military
medical authorities and explained to them the
risks involved in this kind of action. From then
on he was actively involved in this problem; his
papers of 1935 and 1939 were reprinted in 1943
and widely disseminated.
In 1936 Bartsch, with the assistance of H. A.
Rehder, took up the task of reworking Dall's manu-