Excerpt from The Fauna of British India, Vol. 3: Including Ceylon and Burma It were well to remind hasty describers of the truth enun ciated by Agassiz, when he said, The facility with which, in a new country, unknown animals can be described, and notoriety thus readily obtained, is a strong incentive to go on with descriptive work; but it should not be forgotten that the true purpose of systematic work must be to increase our knowledge of the relationship of animals of any special group already known, and serve in some way as a con meeting link in the chain of the various branches of zoology. Working in this spirit, systematic zoology helps us in our attempts to understand the laws of Nature; these must remain unintelligible to him who is busy with naming and classifying materials, reducing his science to an art, merely accumulating facts to be stored in museums, forming, as it were, a library of nature ('american Naturalist, ' Aug. 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.