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VI. Descriptive List of the Rodents of South Africa. By W. L. 

 SCLATEE, M.A., Director of the South African Museum. 



THIS list of the South African Eodents has been drawn up for a book 

 on which I am now engaged, on the South African Mammals, and it 

 seemed worth while publishing it as a preliminary to the greater and 

 more complete work. 



The genera are arranged according to the list recently drawn up by 

 Mr. Thomas (Proc. Zool. Soc., 1896, p. 1012), and I have also made 

 use of the new edition of Trouessart's Catalogue of Mammals, which 

 has enabled me to trace a good many obscure references. 



The synonymy is not complete ; only the more important references 

 are given, and more especially to publications directly bearing on 

 South African forms. 



The descriptions and measurements are as far as possible based on 

 specimens preserved in the South African Museum, and where a 

 species is not represented in the collections, on the original descrip- 

 tion ; the dimensions are in inches and decimals of an inch in 

 all cases. 



No complete list of South African Mammals, much less of Eodents, 

 has appeared since 1832 and 1833, when Smuts published his 

 ' Enumeratio Marnmalium Gapensium,' and Andrew Smith his 

 descriptive catalogue, the latter in the South African Quarterly 

 Journal ; a catalogue of this sort, therefore, cannot fail to be useful 

 to naturalists in South Africa, whatever its shortcomings. 



For these I must ask the pardon of my fellow-workers ; but few 

 realise the difficulties of working at a distance of 6,000 miles from 

 Europe, with imperfect libraries and not a very abundant material. 



All I can do is to hope that this list may be the foundation for a 

 great deal of future work on this subject, which has been so strangely 

 neglected for so many years. 



