MOLLUSCA OF INDIA. 227 



series, in the volume assigned to the Mollusca. He wrote a great 

 number of excellent papers teeming with original and suggestive 

 ideas, which only one with his knowledge of the physical and 

 geological characters of the country could have conceived, beginning 

 with the " Contributions to Indian Malacology, I.-XII.," 1861- 

 1880, the first two in association with his brother. I cannot do 

 better than quote from what Col. A. W. Alcock, Superintendent 

 of the Calcutta Museum, says of him in the ' Records of the 

 Geological Survey of India,' vol. xxxii. pt. 4 : — 



"^ To those interested in the finer problems of zoology the most 

 taking parts of Blau ford's work are his essays on the geographical 

 distribution of Indian animals. This subject, indeed, was at the 

 back of all his systematic papers, and was separately treated by him, 

 in a tentative way, as early as 1870. But in lS76"he published, in 

 the ' Annals and Magazine of Natural History,' a critical and con- 

 structive paper, in which the elements of the Indian vertebrate 

 fauna are segregated from a physiographical standpoint, their 

 relations to the Ethiopian fauna are emphasized, and the argument 

 that certain common elements suggest a vanished land-connection 

 between South Africa and the Indian Peninsula is clearly stated. 



" Twenty-five years later the material accumulated in the com- 

 pilation of the ' Fauna of British India ' was used by him for an 

 exhaustive examination of this subject, and in 1901 he crowned 

 his zoological work with an elaborate essay, entitled ' The Distri- 

 bution of Vertebrate Animals in India, Ceylon, and Burma,' which 

 was published in the 'Philosophical Transactions of the Royal 

 Society.' 



" In this fine monograph the entire land and freshwater vertebrate 

 fauna of the region is critically analyzed by genera, and is split, by 

 considerations of habitat, into definite geographical units ; these, 

 again, are recombined into subregions, the relations of which to 

 each other, to neighbouring zoological regions, and to past geological 

 land-connections and former geological climates being minutely and 

 most efi"ectively discussed. 



" It was characteristic of Blanford, in connection with this subject 

 upon which his profound knowledge of cognate branches of natural 

 science entitled him to speak with authority, that his views were 

 expressed with singular moderation. Though he was among the 

 first to realize that modern zoological regions which ignore past 

 geological changes on the large scale must be artificial, and, conversely, 

 that instances of what are commonly regarded as anomalies of 

 distribution may possibly afford evidence of those very changes, he 

 allowed his opinions to mature before giving utterance to them." 



Some of the results of the work contained in the previous Parts, 

 together with papers contributed to the Malacological Society's 

 'Proceedings' since 1899, were partly referred to in my Presidential 

 Address to that Society, and also by my friend and fellow- 

 worker for many years, Dr. W. T. Blanford; and, as I show 

 further on, it was not a little satisfaction to find he accepted 

 some of my views regarding distribution — a subject on which 



TART X. x: 



