PREFACE 



Inasmuch as Sir W. H. Flower and Mr. Lydekker could not 

 profess to treat the Mammalia exhaustively within the limits 

 of nearly 800 pages, in their Introduction to the Study of 

 Mammals, it is obvious that the present volume, which appears 

 ten years later and is of rather less size, can contain but a selec- 

 tion of the enormous mass of facts at the disposal of the student 

 of this group. Thus the chief question for myself was what to 

 select and what to leave aside. It will be observed that I have 

 reduced the pages of this book to conformity with those of 

 other volumes of the series by treating some groups more briefly 

 than others. It has appeared to me to be desirable to treat fully 

 such groups as the Edentata and the Marsupialia, and permissible 

 to be more brief in dealing with such huge Orders as those of the 

 Eodentia and Chiroptera. Lengthy disquisitions upon such 

 familiar and comparatively uninteresting animals as the Lion and 

 Leopard have been curtailed, and the space thus saved has been 

 devoted to shorter and more numerous accounts of other creatures. 

 As there are nearly six hundred genera of living Mammals known 

 to science, omission as well as compression became an absolute 

 necessity. I have given, I hope, adequate treatment from the 

 standpoint of a necessarily limited treatise to the majority of the 

 more important genera of Mammals both living and extinct ; but 

 the length of this part of the book had to be increased by the dis- 

 coveries, which give me at once an advantage and a disadvantage 

 as compared with the two authors whose names I have quoted, of 

 a considerable number of important new types in the last ten years. 



