36 Mr. J. McClelland on Indian Cyprinidae. 



there appears to be no copy of his work in Calcutta, nor 

 have I been able to meet with it in India ; but his collection 

 appears to have embraced few Cyprinida, and scarcely any of 

 those afterwards found in Bengal by Dr. Buchanan*. The 

 fishes of Ceylon, as well as those of the Bay of Bengal, have 

 recently excited the attention of naturalists f? while those of 

 the Sunderbuns and the vicinity of Calcutta have long been 

 objects of interest to collectors for the museums of France and 

 the other parts of the continent where alone ichthyology seems 

 to have been cultivated as a philosophical branch of zoology. 



2. Dr. Buchanan appears to be the only author who has 

 devoted his attention to the freshwater fishes of Bengal, and 

 his success seems to have left little for others to do in the way 

 of discovering new species. His i Gangetic Fishes/ published 

 in Edinburgh in 1822, contains descriptions of no fewer than 

 eighty Cyprins, of which number he has only given figures 

 of twenty-one. And unfortunately, Cuvier appears to have 

 adopted such only as were figured in that work, leaving the 

 rest as doubtful materials, which, from their extent, and the 

 deficiency of the details connected with them, perhaps deterred 

 him from the task of entering into, or finishing, his account 

 of the Carps, in the hope of receiving further particulars re- 

 garding them from India. 



3. It was partly with a view, of supplying this deficiency 

 that I devoted the time we spent on rivers, during our journey J 

 to Assam in the winter of 1835-6, to the examination and 

 figuring of species. The obscurity of Buchanan's specific 

 descriptions, which with few exceptions are chiefly composed 

 of characters of generic value, rendered the task of identifying 

 his unfigured Cyprins most difficult and uncertain. Never- 

 theless it appeared to me to be a desideratum that must be 

 accomplished sooner or later by some one, and at length, after 

 perseverance for the better part of three years, occasionally 

 giving it up in despair, I succeeded in identifying most of the 

 species unfigured by Buchanan, as well as in having made two 

 series of finished drawings of them, one set for England and 

 one for India. After all this, and after the present paper had 

 been ready for publication in April last, my notice was, for 



* Afterwards Dr. Buchanan Hamilton. As most of his publications have 

 appeared under the name of Buchanan, authors should follow the example 

 of Cuvier in the ' ilegne Animal ' and < Histoire Naturelle des Poissons ' in 

 referring to the author of the ' Gangetic Fishes' by the name by which he 

 is best and will be universally known, in proportion as his vast works on 

 Indian statistics and natural history transpire. 



t Mr. Bennett and my friend Dr. Cantor. 



\ I allude to the deputation of Dr. Wallich, Mr. Griffith, and myself to 

 Upper Assam. 



