XX 



birds touched in the volume are or were, 

 sometime or other, inmates of my aviaries ; 

 and I have said about them nothing which 

 did not come within my personal obser- 

 va.tion, or was not verified as correct. 



In including the birds in this volume, I 

 have in view the limits of Bengal as they 

 stand at present. When the first edition 

 of Fauna (Birds) of British India appeared, 

 Bengal was a much bigger province than 

 it is now. It then included Bihar, Orissa 

 and Chota Nagpur within its boundaries 

 but those three divisions were sliced oft' 

 into a separate province in 1912. A map 

 of Bengal has been included in the volume, 

 showing the present and past limits to 

 enable the reader to understand the dis- 

 tribution of the birds treated of in the book. 

 There is, however, a host of cage-favourites 

 belonging to provinces other than Bengal, 

 They do not as a rule come within my 

 purview except in one or two cases in 

 which the bird is not unfrequently seen in 

 the fringe-areas of Bengal. The omission 



