PREFACE. 



It was the intention of ray late friend and immediate predecessor James 

 Wood-Mason, to write a Descriptive Catalogue of the collection of Crustacea 

 in the Indian Museum. 



To this end he had collected a very comprehensive Crustacean literature, and 

 liad set in motion a scheme for extracting in a handy form, the references con- 

 tained therein. 



He had also roughly sorted the whole collection into its component great- 

 groups, and had made a large number of identifications. 



In short he had, before his sad and premature death, collected the material, 

 and laid the foundations, of a work that, had he lived, would have been some- 

 thing more than a monograph of the Indian Crustacea. 



The only group, however, the arrangement of which he had systematically 

 undertaken for the proposed Catalogue, was the Stomapoda. 



In this Order he had not only named, and finally arranged in their cabinet, 

 the species of the four genera Leptosquilla, Lyaiosquilla, Chloridella, and Squilla^ 

 but he had also had prepared four elaborate plates of certain species, both new 

 and already known. 



These plates were seen through the press by myseK in 1893, and would then, 

 with the sanction of the Trustees, have been published, but that I knew of the 

 existence of certain rough manuscript notes which referred to them, and which, 

 I hoped, might be found to contain an account of the collection of Stomapoda 

 sufficiently complete to furnish, with these plates, a small instalment of the 

 Catalogue of Crustacea — an instalment with which my friend's name might have 

 been definitely associated. 



But after careful and repeatedly renewed examination of the manuscripts — 

 which consist entirely of rough laboratory notes, scored and corrected and con- 

 tracted as such notes must always needs be — I find myself quite unable to 

 present them, at present, in anything like the form that their author would have 

 designed them to take in his i)roposed Catalogue. 



I have, therefore, though with great reluctance, abandoned the attempt to 

 edit them as part of the Catalogue ; but in order to avoid further delay in the 

 issue of the four plates, I have recommended their immediate publication along 

 with the author's descriptions, so far as I have been able to collect them, of the 

 species figured. 



Indian Museum, A. ALCOCK, Surgeon-Captain, 



Calcutta, 1st June, 1895. Supermtendent. 



