Complete and unabridged, with 46 full-page plates by Thomas Daniell, Robert Melville Grindlay and Robert Mabon. A museum superintendent's inventory of what the villages of Madras watched for: the lizard on the wall, the crow on the roof-beam, the day no journey should begin. Thurston spent twenty-five years running the Madras Museum and collecting the material household by household, and recorded the omens without explaining them away. Forty-six plates by painters including Thomas Daniell and Marianne North carry the temples, streets, and holy men of the Madras country alongside Thurston's record of its omens.