Page:The Fauna of British India, including Ceylon and Burma (Mammalia).djvu/28

iv described by the Editor. The greater part of the second half-volume on Mammalia is written, and much progress has been made with all other parts of the work, so that there is every prospect of the whole being issued in the course of the next few years.

The limits adopted for the fauna are those of the dependencies of India, with the addition of Ceylon, which, although British, is not under the Indian Government. Within the limits thus defined are comprised all India proper and the Himalayas, the Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, all the Kashmir territories, with Gilgit, Ladák, &c., Nepal, Sikhim, Bhutan, and other Cis-Himalayan States, Assam, the countries between Assam and Burma, such as the Khási and Naga hills and Manipur, the whole of Burma, with Karennee and, of course, Tenasserim and the Mergui Archipelago, and, lastly, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Afghanistan, Kashgaria, Tibet, Yunnan, Siam, and the Malay Peninsula south of Tenasserim are excluded. A few States, such as Nepal and Bhutan, at present not accessible to Europeans, are comprised, because it would be difficult to leave them out; scarcely an animal occurs in either not found also in British territories or in protected States, such as Sikhim.

The whole of India and its dependencies, with the exception of the higher Himalayas and Trans-Himalayan tracts, is included in the Oriental Region, one of the six great zoological regions into which the terrestrial surface of the globe was divided by Sclater, whose views have been adopted by Wallace and others. Several Ethiopian and Palæarctic genera are intermixed with forms characteristic of the Oriental Region in North-western India, and some of these forms range throughout the Peninsula, but not further to the eastward.

The division of the area into zoological subregions is somewhat difficult, the affinities of the different subdivisions being compli-