In the early 1960s, the name Robert Mertens (1894-1975) was well-known to anybody in Britain keen on reptiles because the translation of his book, The World of Amphibians and Reptiles*, hit the bookshops and libraries in 1960. The publication of books on reptiles and amphibians was a pretty unusual event and it joined the other popular survey by Schmidt † and Inger. Living Reptiles of the World, published in 1957 but taking a very different approach.
These books though were expensive. Mertens sold for £3-3s-0d. The equivalent price today is £63 if calculated on the increase in retail prices, £136 if calculated on the increase in pay. I had Schmidt and Inger (the same price) but had to make do with Mertens renewed countless times from the local library. As a result I did not have a copy until I bought one for a few pence several years ago.
Mertens, although a museum man through and through, kept a large collection of animals at work and at home. His survey included what was known of behaviour, ecology and physiology rather than just a review of the kinds of living animals and their taxonomy.
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| Robert Mertens from Contributions to the History of Herpetology |
Gradually, I found other work that Mertens had done, for example, on the European lizards and his checklist of European reptiles. I also heard of how he died (see later). However, only when I read the biography in Contributions to the History of Herpetology, did I become fully aware of his work.
In brief, Mertens was born in Russia to German parents—his father was a fur trader. Because of the social unrest that eventually exploded as the Russian Revolution he went to a German university, Leipzig to study medicine and biology. He served a short time in the German army and then joined the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt in 1919 where he stayed for the until his retirement in 1960. From 1947, he was Director of the Museum. From 1930 he was also a professor at the University of Frankfurt.
During the Second World War, he spread the collection around Germany and operated a scheme to receive specimens collected by keen soldiers by using the army’s field post system. Imagine the scene on either side of the front line in North Africa as German herpetologists studied and collected the fauna while British and Commonwealth herpetologists, like John Cloudsley-Thompson (1921-2013) of the 7th Armoured Division (Desert Rats), beavered away on the other.
On the Mitchell Plateau in the Kimberley of Western Australia, Mertens is commemorated geographically as well as zoologically. This is because he travelled, collected and explored extensively in tropical regions including northern Australia and the Indonesian islands. In May, as we walked to Mitchell Falls we passed Little Mertens Falls, waded across the top of Big Mertens Falls and some us saw (I just got the end of the tail) Mertens’s Water Monitor (Varanus mertensi). The newly-described monitor was named in Mertens’s honour by Ludwig Glauert in 1951 (more on Glauert of the Western Australian Museum, Sheffield born and a Sheffield graduate in another post). The naming was highly appropriate—Mertens was the world expert on varanid lizards.
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| Arrow shows the location of Mertens Falls |
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| Little Mertens Falls |
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| From the cave behind Little Mertens Falls |
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| Big Mertens Falls |
Merten's Water Monitor above Little Mertens Falls
Beyond finding that the two sets of water falls on the Mitchell Plateau were named for him, I have been able to find nothing on when this was done nor by whom it was done. Those who walk or are flown by helicopter over his falls to the Mitchell Falls have no idea who Mertens was or of his role as one of the leading herpetologists of the 20th Century.
There is very little information on Robert Mertens in English and I do not know when he travelled in the northern part of Western Australia. From a list of some of his publications, I would assume the 1920s or 30s. What is known is his sad end. He had kept for a long time a rear-fanged vine or twig snake. When I read about this at the time it was Kirtland’s Vine Snake (Thelotornis kirtlandii) and that identification still appears in some publications including Manson's Tropical Diseases. More recently it is shown as T. capensis from further south in Africa. Whatever the species, it bit him on 5 August 1975. Mertens was 90. No antivenin had been made for this species and eighteen painful days later he died. Throughout that period he kept a diary and ended it with the famous line, ‘a singularly appropriate end for a herpetologist’.
†Karl Patterson Schmidt (1890-1957) of the Field Museum in Chicago, and with similar wide interests to Mertens, died as a result from the bite of another African rear-fanged snake, the Boomslang, Dispholidus typus, in 1957. A single fang of a small specimen caught him and after declining any treatment recorded its effects on him. He died the next day.
*The book first appeared as La Vie des Amphibiens et Reptiles in 1959 with the English, Italian and Spanish editions following. There seems to have been no publication in German. One of the reasons why it was so good is that it was translated into English by Hampton Wildman Parker (1897-1968), retired Keeper of Zoology at the Natural History Museum in London and before that, head of herpetology.
Anon. Mertens, Robert (1894-1975). 2014. In, Contributions to the History of Herpetology, Volume 1, revised and expanded. Edited by Kraig Adler, pp 98-99. (Contributions to Herpetology 30, Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles).
Glauert L 1951. A New Varanus from East Kimberley, Varanus mertensi sp.n. Western Australian Naturalist 3 (1, July 20, 1951), 14-16.
Mertens R. 1960. The World of Amphibians and Reptiles. London: Harrap.
Schmidt KP, Inger RF. 1957. Living Reptiles of the World. London: Hamish Hamilton.
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