Descriptive catalogue of the reptiles of British India / by William Theobald.

  • William Theobald
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Descriptive catalogue of the reptiles of British India / by William Theobald. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    My descriptions of species will be found to vary greatly in length and as regards the amount of detail given; but this is intentional, as my object is not to give an exhaustive description of any species, but merely such a description, and so much detail of its structure, as will enable the student to specifically determine it, my object being the production of a useful working student’s handbook, rather than a more preten- tious Zoological monograph, which must be the work of some future decade; at the same time I am so conscious of its many shortcomings, that nothing but my urgent sense of the want of some such work emboldens me to come forward with what I cannot but think will be an accept- able contribution to brother naturalists in India, interest- ed in this branch of natural science, or the class of men as they have been contemptuously described, who are “desirous of acquainting themselves with animals.” (Zoological liecord, 1868, p. 5.) As for my critics, 1 fully admit, what they will no doubt put with great force, in a variety of shapes, that ‘the book would have been better written, if the author had taken more pains,’ but as one specimen of the difficulties a compiler has to encounter in India, I may mention that there is no complete coj)y in Calcutta of the Madras Quarterly and Monthly Journal of Medical Science, in which Beddome’s original descriptions of South Indian Reptiles appeared, and it was only as these pages were going through the Press, that I managed to get some of the numbers I re([uired. Some critics, no doubt, with that mixture of pertness, flavoured with Boeotian ignorance of Indian surroundings and drawbacks, and that inapprecia-
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