Download or read book Catalogue of the Marsupialia and Monotremata written by Oldfield Thomas and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-21 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Catalogue of the Marsupialia and Monotremata: Collection of the British Museum (Natural History) This volume, the greater part of which is devoted to the Marsupialia, has been prepared by Mr. O. Thomas, one of the Assistants in this Department, on the plan of the new series of the Zoological Catalogues of the British Museum; it contains descriptions of every species known, with references to all the descriptions and figures previously published, and gives a complete detailed list of the specimens in the Museum Collection. The large series of specimens examined by the author has enabled him to pay special attention to the various degrees of relation which obtain between forms previously described under uniformly binomial terms; in judging of these relationships he has relied on craniological as well as external characters. Beside the Marsupials the Monotremes have been embodied in this volume, this division of Mammals being numerically too small to form a volume by itself. Since the year 1843, when 'The List of Mammalia in the Collection of the British Museum' was prepared by my predecessor, no general account of the Marsupials in that collection has been published, whilst nearly all the other Orders of the Class were made the subjects of continuous study and revision. This seeming neglect was chiefly duo to the appearance of two works, viz. Waterhouse's standard work on these Mammals in 1846, which then, in the course of the following twelve years, was supplemented by Gould's excellent illustrations in his 'Mammals of Australia.' Both these works had a direct relation to the collection of the British Museum, and for many years seemed to fully satisfy the needs of the zoologist. 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.
