Dave on birds

[Klaus Karttunen]

When you read the cover and preface of Dave, it turns out that the man
was 99 years old when he finished it and had worked on it many many
years. The book is thus sort of life's work. He was both a Sanskrit
scholar and an enthuasiastic ornithologist. A major problem was that he
wanted ancient Indians to be ornithologists, too, and tried to find
exact names for as many species as possible. Thus there are cases where
he takes two Sanskrit names which I suppose to be synonymous and
explains them as the names of two related species. Here we must be
careful, but the book is very useful, indeed. By the way, zoological
information about Indian birds can be find in the books of Salim Ali
Regards
Klaus
--
Klaus Karttunen, Ph.D.
Docent of Indology and Classical Ethnography
Institute of Asian and African Studies
PL 59 (Unioninkatu 38 B), 00014 University of Helsinki, FINLAND
phone 358-0-19122188, fax 358-0-19122094