12 Department of Zoology. 



1856-1861. price was fixed so near the cost of production that scarcely 

 any return of the expenditure could be expected from their 

 sale. They were of small extent, and, at first, uniformly 

 printed of 12 size. Several years elapsed before, for some of 

 them, a larger size and illustrations could be used. When 

 the number of persons engaged upon the catalogues increased, 

 and was no longer limited to the staff, considerable latitude 

 was allowed to the authors as regards plan and arrange- 

 ment of the subject-matter, and it was a pity that the plan 

 adopted by Dr. Gray for the first catalogue prepared by himself 

 in 1843 and entitled a "List of the specimens of Mammalia 

 in the British Museum," was not more strictly and uniformly 

 carried out in succeeding publications. In this List a full 

 enumeration of the specimens in the Museum was given, and 

 it thus retains its value by offering direct evidence regarding 

 the history of many important individual specimens. 



Thus these publications differed from one another in several 

 respects : 



1. Some were merely lists of names, with the addition of a more 

 or less complete reference to the previous literature, while in 

 others each species was accompanied by a diagnosis or short 

 description. 



2. Either those species only were admitted into the catalogue 

 which were actually represented in the Museum, without 

 reference to, or with but scanty information on, desiderata ; or 

 the catalogue embraced all the species known and rose to the 

 standard of a monograph. 



3. Either a list of all the individual specimens in the 

 Museum was appended to each species with a short statement 

 where or from whom each specimen was obtained ; or the species 

 in the Museum were merely marked with the letters B. M. 



4. The majority were general catalogues, but others dealt 

 only with the contents of a private collection or the proceeds of 

 an expedition, which had become the property of the Trustees ; 

 and finally many were purely faunistic. The British Fauna 

 especially received Dr. Gray's attention, some 17 parts of a 

 "List of British Animals" being published between 184855. 

 This series was never completed, and descriptive catalogues 

 of a higher scientific value, containing much original work, 

 took its place, notably F. Smith's Catalogues of British 

 Hymenoptera and G. Johnston's Catalogue of British Non- 

 parasitical Worms. But this series also soon languished, and 

 received later only one more addition, during Dr. Gray's 



