British Museum

To Brian Houghton Hodgson

29 Jan 1847

My dear Sir

As we are sending some of the copies of the catalogues I take the opportunity of sending you some letters which have been [waiting?] here. I hope the catalogue will be satisfactory to you, there are some points on which we may differ but such differences elicit truth while easy compliances only perpetuate error. I have just had a visit from Mr. Grace who gave me an account of you. I have looked over his skins he has no Mammalia and only three kinds of Birds not in your collection. Blyth appears to have treated him as he did you as he passed Calcutta. Your skeleton(s) has caused us to go on collecting others and now we have three times as many as they have in the College of Surgeons and nearly as many as they have in Paris except in [?]. We are printing a catalogue of them and your specimens will there appear again as they will in my new catalogue of Mammalia and Birds now in the press. You will see by the catalogue what are the desiderata of Skin and Bones but I shall be very glad to receive good fresh skins of each species and they shall be duly stuffed and [protected?] from London dust [?] soon makes new ones requisite and desirable. I shall send you a list of the Drawings but we have not so many hands here as you have in India and these things take time. I should much like to have the Wild Horse and Ass. What is the Kiang? I shall have a fine work on antelopes for you shortly
Ever yours truly

J.E. Gray

VIZ 27 Sheets of fish, snakes, lizards etc. and 6 sheets of bats also a vol of Meerat Mag and 37 Mss descriptions also a new paper on [Murines?] and another on Birds abstract of [?] paper (to Zool Socy) Gray has for correction List of distribution of skins, Bird and Beast and List of Drawings, recent that is, those given to himself and to Gerrard and those first recd from Zool Socy

Original Drawings lent to Gray to look at returned