PREFACE. 



N presenting to our Subscribers this First 

 Volume of " The Game Birds of India," we 

 feel keenly how much we shall need their 

 indulgent consideration. 



The plates, the most important portion of 

 the work, and to secure the proper preparation 

 of which Captain Marshall devoted nearly an entire 

 year's leisure at home, are by no means all that we could 

 have desired. 



In the first place having 150,000 plates to produce 

 within a limited period, we were compelled to have 

 recourse to chromo-lithography. Great as may seem 

 the delay that has occurred in the appearance of this 

 work, this would have been increased by some years 

 had we adhered to our original design of giving hand- 

 coloured plates. Chromo-lithographs, though more uniform 

 in their tints, {every copy of any plate being infallibly 

 exactly like every other copy, while hand-coloured plates 

 always vary a good deal in tone) are yet always more 

 harsh and staring, and admit of less elaboration of deli- 

 cate details. Some, at any rate, of our plates are really 

 beautiful for chromos, but the best chromo is not equal 

 to a really good hand-coloured plate. But it would have 

 taken five years to get 150,000 plates really well coloured 

 by hand, and as for those coloured by hand by indifferent 

 workmen, they are often worse than chromos. Here 

 therefore, we were helpless. 



In the second place, we have had great disappoint- 

 ments in artists. Some have proved careless, some 

 have subordinated accuracy of delineation to picto- 

 rial effect, and though we have, at some loss, rejected many, 

 we have yet been compelled to retain some plates which 

 are far from satisfactory to us. Too often, again, though 

 exact details of the colours of soft parts were furnished to 

 the artists, these have been wrongly represented, in some 

 cases glaringly so. Throughout, both as regards the 



