NEW BOOKS ON INDIAN ZOOLOGY. L83 



and colleagues, arises the enormous increase in number of species 

 now before us. 



It will be remarked that in North-western India the increase is 

 chiefly in migratory Palsearctic birds. On the Malayan side, per 

 contra, it is, necessarily, in tropical forms. It is to be regretted that 

 this work is by no means calculated to take the place of Jerdon's. 

 Mr. Blanford's ( or perhaps the Secretary of State's ) compressing 

 apparatus has been at work ; and the present volume is very little 

 more than a Museum Catalogue of dried skins. That Mr. Oates and 

 Mr. Blanford can do better than this we know ( many of us by 

 personal intercourse ) , and the waste of the opportunity now offered 

 is the more to be regretted. 



The classification is no doubt very scientific ; but the catalogues of 

 the British Museum are good enough for ours, and Mr. Bowdler 

 Sharpe, of the same, is rather " down " on our author for confusing 

 a "key" with a "classification," and wants to know where the 

 editor was when this was done ? Mr. Sharpe, indeed, mingles 

 blessings with his objurgations, and thinks that the present period 

 of Indian Ornithology will be known as the " Oatesian Era," 

 wherein Mr. Sharpe is very widely astray. The period when one 

 man could name an era in Indian Ornithology is over. 



Messrs. Blanford and Oates have indeed given us half a stone 

 where we asked for bread. But they have not, in the language of 

 the turf, given us " a stone and a beating." While they have been 

 pottering over their list of the skins in the British Museum, the 

 Bombay Education Society has brought out Mr. James Murray's 

 Avifauna of British India. 



It is first in the field to replace Jerdon's admirable, but now 

 obsolete work. In the important matter of illustration, it is far 

 superior to what we have, as yet, of Mr. Oates's book. Like that, 

 it is too much of a mere catalogue ; but the fault is much less in the 

 Indian work, and, upon the whole, the present writer considers it 

 much the fitter book of the two for district use. 



It may, perhaps, be added that whereas the volumes, as yet 

 apparent, of the Secretary of State's Fauna have been published under 

 great patronage, the Avifauna of India has been carried through in 

 spite of poverty and what might almost be called persecution ; and 



