PREFACE.
—.-o«l®!s»e—
N presenting to our Subscribers this First
Volume of " T H E 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 handcoloured
plates. Chromo-lithographs, though more uniform
in their tints, (every copy of any plate being infallibly
exactly like every other copy, while hand-coloured 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 hand-coloured 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