104 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, 1891. 



above the surface. He is quite incapable of the feat attributed to him by Mr. 

 Boxdenger, which is characteristic of one or frwo species much smaller in size and 

 aquatic in a stricter sense. They live almost entirely in deep water. Moating at 

 the surface with perfect ease, and living chiefly on the insects that fall into 

 the water. Fishing for these with a rod and line is very good sport. A hook 

 i^ not necessary. The bait, consisting of a grasshopper, or any tough insect, 

 may be tied to the line and traded along the surface, past the nose of the frog, 

 who will seize and bolt it at once. He must be whipped out of the water 

 without delay, for the line tickles the lips, and after one or two efforts to wipe 

 it off with his paws, he will disgorge the bait. We must close this notice now, 

 and wish Mr. Boulenger an early call for a second edition, that he may have 

 an opportunity of putting flesh on the dry bones and making his book an inva- 

 luable addition to the to 3 small library of an Indian Naturalist. Of the print 

 and get-up of the book we need say nothing. It is the same as the other of 

 the series.— f Times of India, Dec. 2, 1890. ) 



HUME'S INDIAN OOLOGY. 



Thk history of this valuable re-issue of Hume's " Neshs and Eggs" is told by 

 the author and the editor in the prefaces prefixed to the volume now issued, 

 Mr. Allan Hume, whose unrivalled collection of Indian birds is now safely deposited 

 in the national collection, states that after the first rough draft appeared, he went 

 on laboriously accumulating materials for a re-issue ; these have heen now placed 

 by him in the hands of Mr. Eugene Oates for publication. Unfortunately, how- 

 ever, not the whole of this store of knowledge was available, for on one occasion, 

 durinf Mr. Hume's absence from Simla, a native servant broke into his museum 

 and stole several hundredweights of manuscript which the unappreciative thief 

 sold as waste paper. This MSS., bemoans the author, included the life histories 

 of no less than 700 species of birds, with detailed accounts of their nidification. 

 All the small slips of paper, writes the bereuved author, were left, but the full- 

 sized sheets were abstracted. In this dilemma Mr. Oates came to the aid of the 

 author, not merely arranging the materials as editor, but adding largely to the text 

 from his own stores of knowledge. As the historian of the Birds of India, a work 

 which has recently been the subject of detailed notice in our columns by 

 Mr. Bowdler Sharpe, Mr. Oates was the fittest} person to supervise the publication 

 of the work under notice ; and Mr. Hume states that he knows of no one else to whom 

 he could have entrusted the task. The manuscript has been placed unreservedly in 

 the editor's hands, who has re-arranged the species so as to accord with his own 

 work in the official Fauna of British India. The classification is not on the 

 svstem adopted by Jcrdon and other writers familiar to Indian ornithologists, but as 

 the deposition of the old arrangement was merely a question of time, Mr. Oates 

 rightly regarded the present as a convenient Opportunity, and adopted an arrange- 

 ment better suited to the present state of scientific knowledge. 



