VI 
PREFACE. 
In the genera Sparus, Labrus, Perea, and Sciaena, which Linneus left 
as requiring reformation, and which have confessedly puzzled Forskal 
as well as other travellers, I flatter myself with an allowance being made 
for me, which, with more diffidence, I wish to be extended to other 
instances of error.-—For the additions under much doubt made to the 
genus Zeus, a kind of reason, such as it is, has been offered in another 
I am fully sensible, that the vulgar names affixed to each species, 
though collected with care, must be liable to error. It is almost inevitable 
where the collector himself ignorant in the language, must trust to the 
ear in seizing the pronunciation of words to which he is incapable of 
affixing a meaning. 
Lists of local names written in the country dialects were procured from 
Ganjam and Ingeram, which differed from each other, while both in most 
instances differed from the current names at Vizagapatam. The number 
of fishes in the respective lists, said to comprehend the whole known at 
each place, amounted in the first to between seventy and eighty, and in 
the second to near one hundred: but there can be little doubt that many 
species, not used by the natives as food, were not inserted. 
The fishes caught at Vizagapatam, or in the vicinage, are most of 
them probably common to other places on the coast. Having occasion 
to make a short visit to Madras, I took the opportunity of showing my 
Drawings to some of the principal fishermen assembled on purpose, who 
readily recognized and named them; a few excepted. Soon after, on a 
fishing party at St. Toma, in the vicinity of Madras, where several large 
nets were dragged, I found some species of Scomber and of Clupea quite 
new to me ; but most of the other Fishes were the same as at Vizagapatam. 
In Bloch’s General History also are several Coromandel Fishes which I 
had not before met with. The present collection may therefore be said 
to contain a large portion, though not the whole, of the fishes found on 
that coast. 
