PREFACE. 



In the annual prefatory contribution to ' The Zoologist, 

 we are apt to notice any new feature in the volume. On this 

 occasion attention is attracted by the number of communications 

 received from the more remote parts of the British dominions. 

 Canada, West, Central, and South Africa, India, Ceylon, Burma, 

 Australia, and Tasmania have alike furnished zoological records. 

 We hope that our pages may be still more informative of the 

 great fauna to be found by colonists and travellers in a region 

 over which the sun never sets, that exhibits the extremes of 

 temperature, and comprises great districts still awaiting the visit 

 of a naturalist. 



Our contributors have ably maintained the position of ' The 

 Zoologist ' as the journal for animal bionomics, and in this 

 work the ornithologists are again far in front. Ornithology and 

 entomology are the studies which now impel most field-work, and 

 for actual observations the followers of the first science appear 

 to almost excel those of the second, a conclusion hitherto scarcely 

 suspected — at least by the writer. 



There are many invertebrates which are practically ignored 

 in our pages. Our " Notes and Queries " afford a good index to 

 the animals which are most observed by our readers and con- 

 tributors ; but we still hope, as is our annual custom, that these 

 neglected orders may receive more attention. We do not ask 

 contributors to neglect or go beyond their own subject, but they 

 would confer a service to zoology by enlisting any students and 

 observers of invertebrates— especially marine — with whom they 



