PREFACE. 



The following Catalogue of the collections of the Asiatic Society in 

 the class of Birds, is the hest which 1 have been able to prepare under 

 the disadvantages of a deficiency of books of reference and isola- 

 tion from other students of Ornithology ; compensated, however, in 

 some measure by the obliging assistance of different friends in Europe, 

 with whom I have been necessitated to correspond, and among whom 

 I have particularly to tender acknowledgment to H. E. Strickland, 

 Esq., A. M., the accomplished author of the treatise on the Dodo and 

 its affines and of sundry other productions familiar to most students of 

 zoology, for a variety of identifications and synonymes, many of which 

 are now for the first time made publicly known. 



I have also derived much aid from the British Museum catalogues 

 of Mr. G. R. Gray, relative to the groups treated of in those catalogues,* 

 and from the few numbers which I have seen of the ' Illustrated Genera 

 of Birds' by that gentleman and Mr. D. \V. Mitchell ; but it will be 

 observed that I have not implicitly accepted the names and collations 

 of synonymes adopted in those useful works. 



The magnificent volumes on the Birds of Australia, by Mr. Gould, 

 have likewise been of considerable service, not only as regards the 

 species peculiar to Australia, but many (especially of the aquatic 

 tribes), which are common to that country and S. E. Asia ; and I have 

 in several instances been enabled to refer Mr. Gould's supposed new 

 species to previously described Asiatic types, as more particularly cer- 

 tain of his Herons and of his Terns. 



Almost at the last moment, and when the Index to the present 

 Catalogue was nearly printed, I had the good fortune to receive from 

 Europe a series of the Revue Zoologique par la Societe Cuvierienne, a 

 work in which I have detected many new synonymes of Indian birds, 



* The Nepalese species are generally given in the Messrs. Grays' Catalogue of 

 Mammalia and Birds presented by B. H. Hodgson, Esq., to the national collection. 



