PREFACE.
In the annual prefatory contribution to 'The Zoologist,' we are apt to notice any new feature in the volume. On this occasion attention is attracted by the number of communications received from the more remote parts of the British dominions. Canada, West, Central, and South Africa, India, Ceylon, Burma, Australia, and Tasmania have alike furnished zoological records. We hope that our pages may be still more informative of the great fauna to be found by colonists and travellers in a region over which the sun never sets, that exhibits the extremes of temperature, and comprises great districts still awaiting the visit of a naturalist.
Our contributors have ably maintained the position of 'The Zoologist' as the journal for animal bionomics, and in this work the ornithologists are again far in front. Ornithology and entomology are the studies which now impel most field-work, and for actual observations the followers of the first science appear to almost excel those of the second, a conclusion hitherto scarcely suspected—at least by the writer.
There are many invertebrates which are practically ignored in our pages. Our "Notes and Queries" afford a good index to the animals which are most observed by our readers and contributors; but we still hope, as is our annual custom, that these neglected orders may receive more attention. We do not ask contributors to neglect or go beyond their own subject, but they would confer a service to zoology by enlisting any students and observers of invertebrates—especially marine—with whom they
