IV PREFACE. 



My descriptions of species will be found to vary 

 greatly in length and as regards the amount of detail 

 given; but this is intentional, as my object is not to 

 give an exhaustive description of any species, but 

 merely such a description, and so much detail of its 

 structure, as will enable the student to specifically 

 determine it, my object being the production of a useful 

 working student's handbook, ratlier than a more preten- 

 tious Zoological monograph, which must be the work of 

 some future decade ; at the same time I am so conscious of 

 its many shortcomings, that nothing but my urgent sense 

 of the want of some such work emboldens me to come 

 forward with what I cannot but think will be an accept- 

 able contribution to brother naturalists in India, interest- 

 ed in this branch of natural science, or the class of 

 men as they have been contemptuously described, who 

 are "desirous of acquainting themselves with animals." 

 (Zoological Record, 1868, p. 5.) 



As for my critics, 1 fully admit, what they will no 

 doubt put with great force, in a variety of shapes, that ' the 

 book would have been better written, if the author had 

 taken more pains,' but as one specimen of the difficulties 

 a compiler has to encounter in India, I may mention that 

 there is no complete copy in Calcutta of the Madras 

 Quarterly and Monthly Journal of Medical Science, in 

 which Beddome's original descriptions of South Indian 

 Keptiles appeared, and it was only as these pages were 

 going through the Press, that I managed to get some of the 

 numbers I required. Some critics, no doubt, with that 

 mixture of pertness, flavoured with Boeotian ignorance of 

 Indian surroundings and drawbacks, and that inapprecia- 



