80 
THE INDIAN MUSEUM: 1814—1914. 
been done in connection with the Museum are clearly shown 
in the papers published in the Records of the Indian Museum, 
and in the last few volumes of the Journal of the Asiatic 
Society of Bengal, not to mention those of the official 
‘‘ Fauna of British India’’ edited and published in England. 
In the centenary volume published by the Asiatic Society 
in 1885^ a complete list is given of all the papers on zoological 
subjects in the Asiatick Researches and the earlier numbers 
of the Society’s Journal and Proceedings. This list gives 
a very fair idea of the manner in which the collections 
that accumulated in the time of Blyth and his predecessors 
and immediate successors were utilized for the purpose of 
research; but subsequent memoirs on material acquired later 
were so frequently published outside India that the full 
extent of the zoological work done in this country was 
never realized either here or in England, and even when, 
under the superintendence of Alcock, the Museum com¬ 
menced the publication of its own monographs/ the re¬ 
search they embodied, although its value was recognized, 
was never attributed to India. 
To strengthen the solidarity of zoological study in the 
country, it was, therefore, decided in 1907 to publish two 
periodicals to be called respectively the ‘‘Records” and the 
“ Memoirs of the Indian Museum,” and to issue in them such 
papers as had hitherto been published in European journals, 
in that of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, or in the form of 
isolated monographs. The Memoirs were to be reserved for 
the more comprehensive papers and for those that needed 
illustrations of a larger size, while the Records were to con¬ 
sist of shorter accounts of the current work of the Museum, 
and also of other zoological research that had a direct bearing 
on India. As three volumes of the Memoirs have already 
appeared and nine of the Records, it is not too early to 
claim that they have been successful, both from a purely 
scientific point of view and also in attaining the special 
object for which they were inaugurated. Their success is 
1 The first was entitled " ‘ Figures and Descriptions of nine species of 
Squillidae from the collection of the Indian Museum/’ published in 1895. 
