Clashing views on how to recognise species in the 1950s. The case of the Treefrogs

By the middle of the 20th century the museum-based classical zoologists were being looked down on. Their traditional pursuit of describing, naming and cataloguing species that were believed to be newly discovered, or of revising classifications and taxonomy of whole groups of animals, was—and indeed in Britain still is—most definitely out of fashion. The classical museum zoologists, with some notable exceptions, had become wedded to the notion that only morphological characters could and should