634 Records nf /he Indian Mnseniii. [Voi,. XXII. 



The great difficulty under which we have laboured hitherto 

 has been that the type-specimens of older species were not 

 available and that the figures and descriptions previously pub- 

 lished were inadequate. This difficulty has now been overcome to 

 a great extent, firsth' because the old collection of the Indian 

 Museum, including types of the species described by Day, which 

 was sent to Dr. V. Pietschmann before the beginning of war, has 

 been returned to Calcutta, and secondly because I have been able 

 to visit and obtain specimens from the same localities in which 

 Hamilton Buchanan found his specimens of Cyprinus {Garra) 

 lamta, the genotj^pe of Garra. The collection of the Zoological 

 Survey of India has also been verj- largely augmented by the addi- 

 tion of specimens from many parts of the Indian Empire, and we 

 have in particular received from Mr. Nara3'an Rao and Mr. G. E. 

 Shaw, to whom our best thanks are due, valuable series from 

 Coorg and the Darjiling Himalaj-as respectively. The Bombay 

 Natural History Societj' has also lent us some interesting forms, 

 and practicall)' all the Indian districts whence specimens of the 

 genus have been described are now well represented in our collection. 



My sincere thanks are due to Dr. N. Annandale for placing 

 the valuable material in my hands for investigation and descrip- 

 tion and for allowing me to visit some hill-streams to study these 

 fishes in nature. I am indebted to Dr. S. W. Kemp for going 

 through the manuscript with me and also for some valuable sugges- 

 tions. I have also to express my obligations to Mr. Tate Regan 

 for the courtesy he has shown me in sending at my request a copy 

 of Heckel's original description of the genus Discognathus. 



HISTORY. 



Hamilton Buchanan, in his classical work entitled " An 

 account of the Fishes of the Ganges,^' published in 1822, was the 

 first to describe a species — Cyprinus lamta — with a disc behind the 

 lower jaw, which he '"found in rivulets, with rocky bottoms, in 

 the province of Behar, and in the Rapti River of the Gorakhpur 

 District. " This characteristic form be referred to his ninth divi- 

 sion of Cyprinus which he termed Garra. A decade after this 

 Gray {1832) figured a similar species, Cyprinus gotyla, also with a 

 disc on the lower jaw, from '' ilountain Stream, India " ; while 

 McClelland (1S38, 1839, i^'^42) recorded a number of species with 

 the same character from streams in the Eastern Himalayas. The 

 latter, however, described his specimens under two genera, Goiio- 

 rhynclius and Platycara , and seems to have attached no importance 

 to the character of the disc. Sykes (1841) also paid little atten- 

 tion to this well-marked structure in Chondrostoma mullya from 

 South India and it was left to Heckel to recognise its value as a 

 generic distinction when he referred his Syrian specimens (1843) 

 to the new genus Discognatlius. Heckel refers to Gray's species 

 and also to those described by McClelland, but seems to have been 

 unaware of the existence of Cyprinus lamta and C Itondrostoma 



