TREFACE TO THE PRESENT EDITION. 



li\' THE Editor of the ZooLociic.vi. and Botanical roniioNs. 



The Chief Commissioner of British Burma having determined to 

 bring out a new edition of Dr. Mason's work, phiced the manuscripts 

 of the Zoological and Botanical portions in my hands for the purpose 

 of arranging a thoroughly revised Edition. The MSS. in question 

 consisted of various emendations of the printed text, and a very 

 heterogeneous mass of scraps and cuttings, accumulated by my late 

 friend before his dcatli, but which were certainly not all of them 

 intended for publication, but rather as materials for the preparation 

 of an edition he never lived to bring out. Under these circumstances 

 I accepted the office, with the understanding that the work was to 

 be completely rewritten by myself, as that I saw was the only way 

 it was possible properly to amalgamate such a mass of material, and 

 hence the different arrangement of the present edition from that adopted 

 in the previous ones. Indeed, I had no choice in the matter ; for 

 several branches of the subject had since been so fully investigated, 

 that the task before the compiler of any new edition of Dr. Mason's 

 work was not so much to incorporate the new materials with the 

 old, as to combine the old materials with the actually larger and fuller 

 accessions to our knowledge of subsequent date ; and as Dr. Mason 

 himself did not so much claim to be an original observer in the 

 various branches of natural history, as the historian of the labours 

 of other workers in its several departments, I felt that the task 

 I proposed fo myself was merely the task that Dr. Mason would 

 himself have undertaken had he been spared thereto, though of 

 course the charm of the popular style of Dr. Mason's writing would 

 be lost, in the execution of the work by another pen. 



