Original descriptions

[Rusty]

I have a few (read: > a dozen) descriptions by Boulenger, Sykes, and other old timers typed up. These were published 100 years or more ago, meaning their copyrights are long gone. So, would the original descriptions of a select few fish be interesting in the CLog? If they are of interest, I have access to plenty of them...

Rusty

[Silurus]

Did think about this once, but given that many of these old descriptions are not very well-done by today's standards, even scientists find it difficult to extract useful information from them, let alone the average aquarist.
The space and bandwidth can be better employed for other purposes.

[Jools]

If they have nice illustrations or map information then I think we could use images.

Jools

[Dinyar]

Did think about this once, but given that many of these old descriptions are not very well-done by today's standards, even scientists find it difficult to extract useful information from them, let alone the average aquarist.
The space and bandwidth can be better employed for other purposes.

Not to sound contentious, but I actually prefer reading mid-19th century descriptions to early 21st century ones. The former are written in clear, if sometimes quaint, English, whereas the latter usually read like gobbledygook. It's actually fun to read people like Hamilton-Buchanan, which is more than I can say for any contemporary descriptions. I wonder if scientific accuracy must always be at the expense of writing readable English?

Dinyar

[Silurus]

Sure, it makes for good reading and all, but since the point of making original descriptions easily available to non-scientists is for them to check the identities of their fish, the utility of the (often inadequate) descriptions is very low.
If you read something like Hamilton or Cuvier & Valenciennes, the description of any given species of say, Mystus, can be used to describe almost any bagrid.

[Jools]

I would still like to use images or maps...

Jools