Translation of Bleeker, 1858

[Silurus]

The “Ichthyologiae Archipelagi Indici Prodromus. Volumen I. Siluri.” by Pieter Bleeker (1858) has been translated completely from Dutch and Latin to English.

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[Silurus]

My copy arrived today, and seeing that this is possibly the first book entirely devoted to catfishes, perhaps a review for the site would be in order?

A direct translation from the rather archaic Dutch used in the original version yields some rather strange and evocative common names, e.g. Encheloclaris tapeinopterus has the common name of “low-finned treegill fish” and Laides hexanema the “six-barbelled maypole”.

[Jools]

My copy arrived today, and seeing that this is possibly the first book entirely devoted to catfishes, perhaps a review for the site would be in order?

I think that's a great idea...

Jools

[Silurus]

The pdf version can be dowloaded here.

[TP]

I have really enjoyed looking through this, the pictures and drawings are magnificent. Out of interest I notice that the pictures can be copied as images from the PDF but where would that stand copy write wise. The paper is very old originally but the translation is new. Hypothetically if they were to be used in the Cat-elog would that be allowed?

[MatsP]

Why not ask - there is an e-mail contact for Naturalis here:
http://www.zoologischemededelingen.nl/c ... =about.tpl

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Mats

[Silurus]

The images are actually from Volume II of Bleeker's Atlas Ichthyologique des Indes Orientales Néêrlandaises. At their original size, most are much too large to be scanned as a single image on a flatbed scanner.

Jools has a couple of original plates framed. Mine are just lying around somewhere.

[TP]

In the PDF, if the image is selected and then a right click done and the image "saved as" they end up as a 1mb bitmap, that I guess could be converted to make the size smaller. They really come out quite nicely!. If they could be used I would not have a problem with taking them all out and converting them!.

[Jools]

Hypothetically if they were to be used in the Cat-elog would that be allowed?

Yes, this is on my never shrinking to-do list, I mean to say that adding these (and a tonne of others) is something I'd like to do, but ONLY if exact reference is given to the original work. To do this I'd need to improve a few things on the database to store that additional information and also I would like to delegate that work out to volunteers. To do that I'd need an image submission process akin to that in the data submission process. Another reasonably sized task.

Jools