GUIDE-BOOKS, CATALOGUES AND LECTURES. 133 
Bengali by the Trustees. The whole has been edited by Dr. 
B. L. Chaudhuri of the Zoological and Anthropological Sec¬ 
tion^ but the component parts were prepared under the direct 
supervision of the heads of the different sections. Great care 
was taken in making the language as simple as possible, and 
although several of the authors were anxious to use abstruse 
Sanskrit words as equivalents of English technical terms, it 
was decided to substitute for them the nearest vernacular 
equivalents, giving the English term in brackets when neces¬ 
sary, for in modern Bengali terms of the kind have been 
adopted freely: it is often possible to follow the discussions 
of Bengali students in the geological galleries without know¬ 
ing a word of Bengali. The general guide-book, which is 
sold for two annas (twopence), is necessarily of a superficial 
nature, and it is greatly to be hoped that more elaborate ones 
for the different galleries will be prepared, whether in English 
or in some Indian vernacular, at an early date. 
To produce catalogues of its collections is a particu¬ 
larly important part of the duties of a museum that claims 
to be a centre of investigation but is isolated geographically 
from the community of scientific and historical research. 
Nor has the Indian Museum been remiss in this respect. 
Museum catalogues are of many species, as they are of 
many degrees of utility; it is often difficult, as in the case 
of Dr. Anderson’s account of the archaeological collections, 
to draw a hard and fast line between them and guide¬ 
books ; but they may as a rule be separated into three main 
divisions :— 
Hand-lists, 
catalogues missones, 
descriptive catalogues. 
In zoology the late Mr. G. Nevill’s Hand List of the 
Mollusca in the Indian Museum,” the completion of which was 
unfortunately prevented by the author’s death, is an excel¬ 
lent example of the first division, while the '‘Catalogue of 
Mammalia in the Indian Museum” by the late Dr. John 
Anderson and Mr. W. L Sclater belongs rather to the cate¬ 
gory of catalogues raisonnes. It is, however, by full descrip- 
