for the year 1916-17. xi 



of the north-eastern states of the Malay Peninsula. An account of 

 the weighing apparatus will be published by the Asiatic Society of 

 Bengal. 



The value of the collection of fishing and weighing apparatus is 

 greatly increased by the excellent photographs of it in use taken by 

 Dr. Gravely in the course of our tour. He also secured other photo- 

 graphs of ethnographical interest, including a series illustrating the 

 funeral cars of the daughter of a Shan chief, one of the operation of 

 tatooing a boy's legs in an Intha monastery, and several illustrating 

 the peculiar method of rowing adopted by the fishermen of the lake, 

 who use their legs as well as their arms in the process. 



At the personal request of Sir Harcourt Butler, Lieutenant- 

 Governor of Burma, I submitted to him a note on the fisheries of 

 the Inle Lake, written of course mainly from a biological point 

 of view but also discussing the dangers to which an under- 

 staffed local fishery department is liable in India, with historical 

 instances. This note has since been published by the Government 

 of Burma. 



Li order that the interesting flora of the lake and its floating 

 islands might be studied, Dr. H. G. Carter, Officiating Director of 

 the Botanical Survey of Lidia, was kind enough to arrange that a 

 collector from his department should accompany us. The specimens 

 he obtained are not only of botanical interest but greatly facilitate 

 the study of the general biology of the lake. I am a believer 

 in the co-operation in field-work of different biological departments, 

 but the financial sections of the Civil Service Regulations throw 

 great difficulty in the way of any such co-operation, in so far as 

 they insist upon a rigid separation between the finances of the 

 different Imperial Surveys. In the present instance difficulties of 

 the kind were overcome by a special grant. 



Our tours have not blinded us to the fact that much faunistic 



work still remains to be done in the innnediate neighbourhood of 



Calcutta. We have probably not yet by any 



cutta.'''''^'*'*' "'"' ^*'° "^®^'^^ exhausted the fauna of the Museum 

 compound, but I will refer here only to two 

 week-ends spent by Mr. Kemp and myself at the Royal Botanic 

 Gardens at Sibpore. In a worm-eaten post on the shore of the 

 River Hughli we found the first specimens of a new and interesting 

 genus of crabs ; we obtained other new and interesting crustacea 

 from the river itself ; and, perhaps strangest of all, we found on 

 bricks at the edge specimens of a fresh-water polyzoon that one of 

 us had just described from an out-of-the-way part of the Siamese 

 Malay States. Considering the fact that the Hughli has been ex- 

 plored by naturalists for the last fifty years and that my two imme- 

 diate predecessors made a special study of its crustacea, nothing 

 could better ilkistrate our present ignorance of even the better- 

 studied elements in the fauna of even well-explored parts of 

 India. 



