368 



A SELECTION OF LECTOTYPES OF INDIAN MAM- 

 MALS, FROM THE CO-TYPES DESCRIBED 

 BY HODGSON, GRAY, ELLIOT AND OTHERS. 



By Oldfield Thomas. 



Nothing has so much contributed to the difficulty in working out 

 Indian Mammals, and the confusion that has reigned in their arrange- 

 ment, as the vagueness with which the identification of the typical 

 specimens of the early Indian describers has been dealt with, and 

 there could certainly be no greater lesson as to the vital advantage of 

 an original selection of tjrpes than a study of the histoiy of Indian 

 Mammalogy for the last 80 years, with the confusion and innumer- 

 able errors which non-selection has given rise to. 



Such an original selection was not of course practised by, or known 

 to early writers, and even Blanford, so well balanced and sensible in 

 other things, was at first inclined to be against selection, and it was 

 only as he graduall}^ absorbed the lesson referred to, that he was 

 induced towards the end of his life to select types of the species he 

 described. 



The primary difficulty in the case of Indian Mammals was an out- 

 come of the wonderful work done in Nepal by Brian H. Hodgson, 

 who described and figured in various journals both in India and 

 England the many mammals which he discovered. Writing in 

 Nepal, away from books, collections and Museums, he not unnatur- 

 ally made many mistakes, and indeed it has been sarcastically said 

 that " every animal in India has two names, one its proper name, 

 and the other which Hodgson gave it," but in spite of all, he was 

 the real pioneer of Indian Mammalogy, and the maker and donor of 

 the finest collection ever made in that country until the inception of 

 the Bombay Natural History Society's Mammal Survey. 



Now Hodgson described mammals in the country as he got to 

 know them, stich knowledge coming from living specimens he saw 

 or kept alive, and the collection that he gradually built up. No 

 particular individual was ever selected as a type, and as more and 

 more later specimens were added to the collection, great difficult}" 

 was found in obtaining any exact definite idea of the animals to 

 which his name should technically be attached. 



Owing moreover to the fact that he sent other specimens to Cal- 

 cutta, to the Museums of the Zoological Society and the East India 

 Company and further collections to the British Museum, and that 

 most of these gravitated into the National Museum in course of time, 

 the series representing his species is often very large, and it has often 

 been with great difficulty that specimens which could be called 

 typical have been identifiable. 



Gradually however in recent years, with the help of Messre. 

 Wroughton and Lj^dekker, the supplementary and later specimens 



