P E E FACE .
The zoological collections made during the Surveying-voyage of
H.M.S. ‘ Alert ’ in the years 1878-82, under the command of
Capt. Sir G. Nares and his successor Capt. J. Maclear, were
presented by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to the
Trustees of the British Museum.
A narrative of the voyage has been given by Staff-Surgeon
E. W. Coppinger, in his work ‘ Cruise of the ‘ Alert ’ ’ (London,
1883, 8vo).
The principal parts of the Survey, and consequently the
Collections, fall into three distinct sections, v iz .:—1, th at of
the Southern extremity of the American continent; 2, th at of
the coasts of North-eastern Australia and Torres S tra its ; and
3, th at of the groups of Oceanic Islands in the Western Indian
Ocean, situated between the Seychelles and Madagascar.
The first of these collections has already been reported upon in
Proc. Zool. Soc. 1881; but the two others surpass it so much
in extent and importance as to he quite beyond the scope of a
periodical publication, and therefore the Trustees considered it
best th a t a full account of them should he prepared in the form
of a separate work. With the exception of the ‘Challenger’
Expedition, none of the recent voyages has contributed so much
to our knowledge of the Littoral Invertebrate Fauna of the Indo-
Pacific Ocean as th a t of the ‘ Alert.’ Irrespective of a number of
specimens set aside as duplicates, not less than 3700, referable
to 1300 species, were incorporated in the National Collection ; and