572 Catalogue of Nipalese Birds. [No. 7. 



Catalogue of Nipalese Birds, collected between 1824 and 1844. — By 

 B. H. Hodgson, JEsq. 



To the Secretary of the Bengal Asiatic Society. 



Sik, — "When I went to England in 1844 I presented my immense 

 Zoological Collections (10,000 specimens, osteological and ordi- 

 nary) to the National Museum. I was immediately asked, how 

 many of the species had been named and described, one or both, in 

 print ? I answered that all the new Mammals had been so, by 

 myself, in the Bengal Asiatic Journal, or in the India Eeview, and 

 that a vast number of the new genera and species of Birds had been 

 described in a paper sent from Nepal just before I left it. But that 

 paper, it was replied to me, had not appeared, and I was requested 

 to recast it, as well as I could, from rough notes, not having retained 

 a copy of the MS. I did so, and the paper was printed. But it 

 did not include the whole of my ornithological stores, and it seemed 

 expedient to put at once in print, my own complete Catalogue of 

 Birds. Accordingly I placed that catalogue in the hands of Mr 

 Gray for publication, and it soon after appeared in London,* sub- 

 stantially my own, but with its groups disposed according to the 

 system followed in the National Museum Catalogue. The altera- 

 tions I think were not always for the better, my own distribution 

 having been founded on a careful examination of the entire organs 

 of species in a fresh state — a vast advantage, though one, no doubt, 

 qualified by my non-access to Library and Museum. In due time 

 another complete Catalogue of all my collections appeared under 

 the auspices of the Trustees of the National Museum, and therein 

 the Curators of Zoology in that institution made such rectifications 

 of my printed and MS. catalogues as seemed proper to them. No 

 doubt, there was upon the whole much improvement upon my 

 unaided work performed in the jungles. But, for the reason I have 

 already assigned, the new determinations of species and allocations 

 of types according to their affinities, were not always sound, and 

 students of Himalayan Zoology have, accordingly, found it expedient 



* In Gray's Zoological MisceH#uy for Juue, 1844. 



