Hamilton, F., <An Account of the Fishes of the Ganges>

[Dinyar]

Hamilton, F. [Buchanan]  1822, An account of the fishes found in the river Ganges and its branches, Edinburgh & London.

I found this classic work on Indian ichthyology online at:
http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/doc ... ib_id=3060
Catfish start at page 144.

Francis Hamilton was a young doctor who spent 21 years from 1794 to 1815 in Bengal with the East India Company. Shortly after he arrived, he was dispatched by the Company to undertake a comprehensive survey of the history, culture, languages, flora and fauna of Bengal, a task on which he labored for the next 15 years. His output of books, reports, and unpublished papers summarizing his findings was prodigious, covering everything from anthropology to linguistics to ichthyology. Unlike racist cretins such as H.M. Stanley in Africa, Hamilton appears to have had considerable empathy for the people, places and things he studied. One among many indications of this is that he used existing common names in local languages for the scientific names he gave to the new fish species he described.

Although not an ichthyologist by training, Hamilton's <An Account of the Fishes of the Ganges> described several hundred species, 163 of which are recognized as valid today (according to Eschmeyer). About a quarter to a third are catfish. Unlike modern species descriptions, Hamilton's are quite readable. I enjoyed this online scan of the original, and the diehards among you may enjoy browsing it too. (The OCR version is too corrupt to be readable. The JPEG scans seem to load faster than the GIFs.)

Dinyar

[Silurus]

Too bad only the text is available (there was a separate volume of plates), as the illustration of the fishes were remarkably accurate for its time and given the conditions that Hamilton had to work under.
The whole work (plates included) is available as a reprint by an Indian publisher (on the usual poor quality Indian paper) for about $70.