Digital Rare Book:
The Game Birds of India, Burmah, and Ceylon (Illustrated)
By Allan Octavian Hume and Charles Henry Tilson Marshall
Published by A.O.Hume and Marshall, Calcutta - 1879
In Three Volumes

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Volume 3 -

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Volume 3 -

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PREFACE

IN presenting to our Subscribers this First Volume of "The Game Birds of India," we feel keenly how much we shall need their indulgent consideration.

The plates, the most important portion of the work, and to secure the proper preparation of which Captain Marshall devoted nearly an entire year's leisure at home, are by no means all that we could have desired.

In the first place having 150,000 plates to produce within a limited period, we were compelled to have recourse to chromo-lithography. Great as may seem the delay that has occurred in the appearance of this work, this would have been increased by some years had we adhered to our original design of giving hand-coloured plates. Chromo-lithographs, though more uniform in their tints, {every copy of any plate being infallibly exactly like every other copy, while handcoloured plates always vary a good deal in tone) are yet always more harsh and staring, and admit of less elaboration of delicate details. Some, at any rate, of our plates are really beautiful for chromos, but the best chromo is not equal to a really good handcoloured plate. But it would have taken five years to get 150,000 plates really well coloured by hand, and as for those coloured by hand by indifferent workmen, they are often worse than chromos. Here therefore, we were helpless.

In the second place, we have had great disappointments in artists. Some have proved careless, some have subordinated accuracy of delineation to pictorial effect, and though we have, at some loss, rejected many, we have yet been compelled to retain some plates which are far from satisfactory to us. Too often, again, though exact details of the colours of soft parts were furnished to the artists, these have been wrongly represented, in some cases glaringly so. Throughout, both as regards the names of species (often misspelt), and the colours of the soft parts, the text and not the plates must be relied on.

Yet in this matter of the plates, indifferent as the results may seem, Captain Marshall took an infinity of pains, and but for his labours this work could never have appeared.

The text, for which Mr. Hume is mainly responsible, is likewise by no means what he would have wished to make it. A work like this requires leisure ; time to consult all that has ever been written by others. in regard to each species ; time to weld all this together with personal and unpublished experiences into a harmonious whole ; time to re-write, revise and polish. As it is, amidst the pressure of other work of all kinds, Mr. Hume has only been able to jot down roughly his own experiences, supplementing these by such notes of others, published and unpublished, as he chanced to have available.

The printing, too, had necessarily to be done in India, and though extremely good for this country, cannot compare in finish and general appearance with similar work turned out at home, where sheets, as printed, can be passed between hot rollers, giving a gloss and finish to the pages impossible to be attained in any other manner.

But the Authors' case is simply this : the work is one much wanted and long called for ; no one else appeared willing to incur the trouble and great expense involved in its preparation. Indifferent as it is, whether from an artistic or literary point of view, it will yet, it is believed, enable sportsmen to identify every game bird they may shoot, and ascertain something of its distribution in India and elsewhere, of the places in which it may be sought, and of its habits, food, and nidification so far as these are yet known, and after all, imperfect as it may be, it is the best that, circumstanced as they have been, the Authors could possibly produce.

Simla, 1st July 1879.

ALLAN HUME.