PREFACH. 
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ieee following work has been drawn up for the Forest 
: Department of the Government of India. 
It is designed to meet a want which has been felt in the 
Imperial Forest School, Dehra Dun, for a short elementary 
manual to cover the zoological teaching of that institution. 
Slight as it is, the difficulties which have had to be en- 
countered in ifs preparation will be readily appreciated by 
those who have attempted to find their way through the 
fragmentary literature upon which dependence has still to 
be placed in studying many of the groups of Indian animals. 
The Vertebrata of India, it is true, have been systematically 
described ; indeed the series of volumes which are being pre- 
pared under the able editorship of Mr. W. T. Blanford will 
leave, when completed, little to be desired in this section. 
Unfortunately the Vertebrata form numerically but a small 
group when compared with the myriad hosts of insects and 
other lowly creatures which make up the bulk of the animal 
species occurring in India. In this larger field students have 
been few and far between, and although much excellent 
work of a more or less isolated nature has been done, the 
subject is so vast and the observations generally have been 
so little systematized that, except in a few stray orders and 
families, they have hitherto been almost entirely unavailable 
for teaching purposes. None of the general text-books of 
the day again deal in sufficient detail with the particular 
animals with which the Indian Forest Officer is concerned, to 
be anything like complete guides in themselves, though they 
are invaluable for purposes of reference. In putting to- 
gether his notes therefore, the writer has had to cull inform- 
ation from very numérous and widely different sources. Tle 
has also been hampered to some extent by the necessity of 
not overstepping the bounds of what can be gone through 
