Preface. VIT 



as army surgeon 3rd class of the Dutch East Indian army. On 

 10 March, 1842 Bleeker arrived in Batavia and remained there 

 till 10 September, i860, when he returned to Holland. 



All this time, the 18 best years of his life, he spent 

 exclusively at Batavia with just two exceptions. That is to 

 say he spent two years as a physician at Samarang, Sourabaya 

 and Ambarawa (Java) and he accompanied Mr. Duymaer van 

 Twist, then governor-general of Dutch luist India, in 1856 

 on a voyage to Celebes and the Moluccos. 



Soon after his arrival in Java, Bleeker began to investigate 

 the fauna of his surroundings, doing which he encountered 

 several unknown species of fishes, which drove him to study 

 this group of animals. He encountered many difficulties in this 

 entirely new field of study, not the least of which was at 

 first the lack of really good literary resources, but his un- 

 daunted perseverance and great power of work triumphed 

 and no later than 1844 he could communicate his first notes 

 on the study of the material he had in the meanwhile col- 

 lected. Then already he first planned to publish an atlas of 

 the Indian fishes and so the question was how to collect 

 the necessary material. In this he succeeded beyond measure 

 during the 18 years he spent in India. For rarely, if ever, did 

 one man procure such extensive fish collections. As he was 

 but rarely out of Batavia, and as all his journeys were prin- 

 cipally in Java, it was only possible t^ collect study material 

 from the other parts of the Archipelago by the assistance of army 

 surgeons and officials of the civil service who were quartered 

 in different islands and who regularly sent him collections. 

 As a rule he published the result of his investigations as soon 

 as possible, usually giving lists with descriptions of the new 

 species. Between the years 1852 and 1873 for instance he 

 published 26 papers on the fish fauna of Amboina, from 1852 

 to 1864 24 lists of fishes of Sumatra and between 1844 and 

 1865 44 papers on fishes of Java. Though this way of pu- 

 blishing caused endless repetitions, yet it gave him an oppor- 

 tunity to revise the descriptions of species formerly described 



