212 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HIST. SOUIETY, Vsl. XXVIII. 
the latter were chiefly remarkable for the species the authors and no 
one else ever met with and some of them were, to say the least, highly 
improbable. : 
The working up of the notes of various observers has been no simple 
task ; many notes were made in the trenches, or at least under active 
service conditions where baggage was reduced to a mimimum, and were 
therefore not presented in a manner which lent themselves to easy 
abstraction. Furthermore, as was to be expected, many observers 
saw species which were quite new to them and mistakes in their identi- 
fication were inevitable. Fortunately the collections contained speci- 
mens of the great majority of the birds which are known to occur in 
our area and so in many cases I have been able to correct wrong identi- 
fications ;in other cases however, unless it is extremely probable or 
known that the species recorded does occur, in the absence of specimens 
I have omitted them or referred to them in the text. Names of places 
in the text mean the districts round those places. 
In the letter-press it will be noted here and there that I have drawn 
attention to various points which require further elucidation, and it 
is to be hoped that any one who has the chance will make special 
efforts to throw light on the questions raised ; I shall be at all times 
most willing to give any help or information to, or identify specimens 
for any one who cares to communicate with me, and I propose from 
time to time, as new facts accumulate, to add addenda and corrigenda. 
to the Mesopotamian avifauna in the Journal. 
Of each species I have given the English and Latin names and below 
these, as a trinomial, the names of the race or races of that species 
which I am satisfied occur in Mesopotamia ; I have also added, as I 
think it may be of use, the original references and type localities to. 
all, except to those species of which some, but at present underter- 
mined, race occurs. In some cases (e.g., some Waders and Ducks, etc.) 
for economy of space only the binomial name is given ; either I have 
considered that no good races occur, or else are so remote from Meso- 
potamia that any but the typical race 1s unlikely to occur. 
As regards the much vexed question of nomenclature it is now fairly 
widely agreed to start from the tenth edition of Linnzeus, an ill advised 
procedure which for the time being has put nomenclature into a chaotic 
state ; even the names of our British species, on which perhaps more- 
study and discussion has taken place than on those of any other area, 
are not yet finally and indisputably decided on, while in some faunal 
areas hardly any revision has as yet been attempted. 
Therefore it is needless to say that there isno up-to-date list (will 
any list ever be correct according to the present rules of nomenclature: 
for more than six months after publication ? !) which for our area we: 
can follow. The hunting up of the latest published opinions, scattered 
throughout the ornithological literature of the world, on what various. 
names should now be, entails more time than is at my disposal and if 
