Linck-Sammlung und Schlangenabbildungen v. J.J. Scheuchzer

On the Linck collection and specimens of snakes figured by Johann Jakob Scheuchzer – the oldest fluid-preserved herpetological collection in the world?: One of the great private natural history cabinets of
the century was that of the Linck family of Leipzig pharmacists. Parts of the collection have survived to
the present and form the core of the Naturalienkabinett Waldenburg in Saxony, Germany. The collection
was particularly rich in reptiles and was documented by Johann Jakob Scheuchzer in his Physica Sacra
(1731 – 1735), which figured 67 specimens of snakes and amphisbaenians based on a set of unpublished
illustrations, the Icones Serpentum et Viperarum, prepared under the direction of Johann Heinrich
Linck the Elder. We review the original herpetological content of the Linck collection as documented by
Johann Heinrich Linck the Younger in his Index Musae Linckiani (1783 – 1787) and provide both a summary
of earlier identifications (to 1858) of the species depicted in the Icones and Physica Sacra and new identifications based on our research. Some of these snakes served as holotypes or syntypes of species
described by Linnaeus and Blasius Merrem and, thus, are of taxonomic significance. As many as 11 of these illustrated specimens (although none of them types), and an unknown number of others, are still extant in Waldenburg. At a minimum, these specimens were present in the Linck collection in 1729, but they may be as much as half a century older, as the reptile collection was already large and wellknown by the debut of the century. Even at the minimum age possible, the surviving Linck snakes figured by Scheuchzer are among the oldest documented fluid-preserved herpetological specimens in the world.