tree recognisable by means of words. A picture would often do it in an instant, but there are no pictures of the birds of India, at least none worth mentioning. I hope that the simple drawings which head these chapters will prove usetul so far as they go.
Again, what are the Birds of Bombay? Imagine one undertaking to describe the human inhabitants of Bombay. I am told that the Czar of Russia has eight hundred subjects in our island. I suppose that the Ameer of Afghanistan has many more, to say nothing of the Khan of Khelat and the Akhund of Swat. The heathen Chinee is not scarce, and I have seen the Jap, there are certainly Persians and Turks and Egyptians and Negroes and Burmans and Malays and Jews of several varieties and Armenians; and every nation in Europe is represented. In short, what country is there of which one can say with any confidence that there is not one native of it in Bombay? Franz Joseph Land perhaps. And the case is pretty much the same with the feathered population. Bombay has of course its own peculiar resident avifauna; but it lies between the Indian continent on the one hand and the ocean on the other, and receives contributions from both. A storm at any time may toss the Frigate Bird or the Booby on our shores, and a misguided Hornbill may make its appearance on Malabar Hill. Then there is a host of birds of passage which regularly visit us every cold season, or drop in on us en passant, as quails drop on board of a P. and O. steamer on its way through the Mediterranean. And last, but by no means least as an element of perplexity, there are at all times escaped captives from the cages in the
