Excerpt from A Hand-List of Genera and Species of Birds of the Indian Empire My idea in bringing it out was not to provide a complete or nearly complete, catalogue of the birds of India worked out to the full extent of my own ability. All I hoped to do was to supply workers, both in the field and the museum, with a very rough catalogue shewing what advance had already been made in dis coveries, nomenclature, etc., since Blanford's time. The Avifauna, of which one volume has appeared whilst a second is nearly ready, will take some years more to complete, for it means that every bird's name has to be worked out again, de novo, to see whether it is correct and a vast amount of literature has to be examined and consulted to see what new facts, if any, have been recorded concerning it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.