ii Reyort on the Zoological Survey of India 



Indian Museum have been those connected with publications and 

 with field-work. 



At a much earlier date occasional monographs on sections of 

 the Indian fauna were written by members of the staff and others 

 and published by the Trustees, but these memoirs, though they main- 

 tained a high standard of excellence, failed, mainly owing to their 

 sporadic appearance, to be accepted by the scientific world at large • 

 as the results of genuine Indian research. In the Records and the 

 Memoirs of the Indian Museum, the issue of both of which began in 

 1907, we have now an organ universally recognized as emanating from 

 India. Apart from all Imperial or departmental feeling, I do not 

 think that any unprejudiced person acquainted with the state of 

 scientific research in this country would deny that these journals 

 have had a stimulating effect on Indian zoology. Their issue has 

 not only resulted in the publication of Indian work in India, but has 

 induced zoological research by proving that it could be done in the 

 country, in spite of lack of scientific atmosphere and other chimaeras 

 formerly supposed to stand in its way. The research has been 

 carried out not only in Calcutta, but in Lahore and Madras, in 

 Bangalore, Agra and Allahabad. Twelve volumes of the Records 

 and six of the Memoirs have now been published ; they have con- 

 tained 241 papers written in India, and 24 written by Indians. 



No small share in the success of these publications is due to the 

 artists now attached to the Zoological Survey, Babu S. C. Mondul, 

 Babu A. C. Chowdhary and Babu D. N. Bagchi. Their work is 

 in a sense well known to all students of the Oriental fauna, but of 

 its very nature is apt to escape notice and to be credited rather 

 to the authors of the papers than to its executants. 



When I became Superintendent of the Indian Museum in 1906, 

 touring, owing to the accumulation of work at headquarters and 

 the numerical insufficiency of the staff, had become an obsolete 

 practice. My first attempts to revive it were met by the question, 

 Do officers of the British Museum go on tour ? But, though I was 

 the only permanent gazetted officer at the time, I was allowed to 

 tour, at first almost surreptitiously and then openly. A notice of 

 the inauguration of the Zoological Survey in " Nature " has, in my 

 opinion justly, laid stress on its importance in relation to faunistic 

 exploration. What we are now doing in this direction will be indi- 

 cated in my account of the year's progress. 



Minor lines in which progress has been made are the systematic 

 exchange of specimens with museums throughout the world ; the 

 extension of the informal system by means of which we were able 

 to obtain the assistance of specialists in different countries ; the 

 growth of the library ; the fitting up of new laboratories, and 

 the organization of popular lectures. Last but perhaps not least 

 important of the ways in which we have advanced is the re- 

 alization, forced upon us by the present- war, of our own strength 

 in zoological research and of the fact that we are able to go forward, 

 slowly but none the less surely, with little assistance from abroad, 



