548 JOURNAL, BOMB AY NATURAL HIST. SOCIETY, Vol, XNV. 



remains of the collections of the early part of the century, and even 

 lip to and after the commencement of tlie present century the 

 jiosition was not much more satisfactor3^ In the early days collec- 

 tions consisted to a very large extent of spirit specimens, and where 

 this was not so, the specimens were not only badly made up but 

 no details of exact locality and date were recorded. 



In 1911 this Society launched its Mammal Survey of India, 

 which has now unfortunateh" been interrupted ( temporarily let us 

 hope ) by the War, before its work was even half done, but not 

 until some 17,000 specimens had been collected and despatched to 

 the British Museum of Natural History for study. 



Scope of this Summary. 



About a year ago Mr. Thomas suggested to me that the 

 present time and circumstances presented a favourable oppor- 

 tunity to summarise the results from the study of the Survey 

 Collections. On approaching the task it was evident that if limited 

 to a mere list of the forms obtained, both old and new, the Sum- 

 mary, though not without interest, would be of little practical 

 value. Something of the sort will be found in an Appendix at the 

 end of this Summar3^ When the restricted meaning which we 

 have given to the word ' results ' in the Journal, in connection 

 with the survey, was widened to include also the indirect results, 

 the question at once arose, where is the line to be drawn ? The only 

 logical solution appeared to be that the Summary must deal with 

 all changes of the nomenclatiire adopted by Blanford in his Mam- 

 malia which have been shown to be necessary not only in the 

 coiu'se of our study of the Survey material, but also by those of 

 other Mammalogists who have worked at the subject since that 

 work was published. 



Form of the Summary. 



A further and no less important question which had to be 

 solved was the form to be given to the Summary. Blanford's 

 Mammalia, though out of date, is still the recognised handbook 

 of Indian Mammalogy, and it seemed absolutely necessary that 

 the Summary should be kept in close touch with it. Very 

 considerable changes have been adopted in nomenclature 

 during the last 25 years. Groups treated as • (renera ' by Blan- 

 ford are now in many cases accepted as ' Subfamilies,' each 

 including several, often manj^ Genera. The only satisfactory way 

 seemed to me to link the ' Mammalia ' and the ' Summary ' through 

 the ' Species,' and to that end I adopted the following arrange- 

 ments. The larger groups from ' Orders ' down to and including 

 ' Genera ' have been arranged with keys at each stage. It should 

 be I'emembered that all the keys in this Summary have been drawn 



