By Arthur de Carle Sowerby, ¥.n.G.8., ¥.2.5.
Though under the above title the present writer is bringing out a book, which at the moment is in the press, a short preliminary account of the natural history of the wonderful region of which Manchuria forms the centre may not be out of place. It does not appear to be generally known that Manchuria is not merely a land of fertile plains and hills, but contains wide stretches of magnificent forests. Indeed, to me the very name Manchuria is associated with forests, though I have frequently heard people say that they did not know there were any such things in the country. This appears to be due to the fact 80 many authors of books about the land of the Manchus have confined their travels and remarks to the province of Fengtien, or Shengking, as it was formerly called, and the narrow strip of Heilungkiang that is traversed by the easternmost section of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Even if they have. travelled down tha Sungari River, or up the Amur, they do not seem to have realized that, back of the flat lands that form the river-beds, almost the whole of the country is, or was till quite recently, covered with dense growths of pine, birch, or oak. It is quite safe to say that, even today, after a great deal of timber has been cut down and exported from the country, the greater part of Kirin province and very large sections of Heilungkiang, as well as of the Ussuri Valley in the Primorsk, or Maritime Province, and that wide stretch of territory known as the Pre-Amur, or, simply, the Amur, are heavily forested, if not with pine and spruce, with deciduous trees of considerable size...
Though the name Manchuria is restricted to-day to the three provinees, Fengtien, Kirin and Hei-sungkiang, I prefer to use it in its older and wider sense, when it included the Amur and Primorsk, which formed part of the country, conquered by the founder of the Manchu, dynasty and was subse quently annexed by the Russians, The Amur and Primorsk have been fairly well explored by naturalists working for the Imperial Academy of Science at Petrograd, but the rest of the Mamchyrian region, and more especially the forested areas, remained more or less unknown till within the last decade, when the attention ¢f a few field naturalists, myself among the number, has been directed toward this profitable field of investigation. During the years 1913-14-15, I carried out a series of biological expeditions into the forested parts of Kirin amd the lower Sungari Valley, which, taken with the work of others, results in a very complete knowledge of certain branches of the zoology of: the region having been acquired.
may be said that the vertebrates, even the marine vertebrates, of the Manchurian region are very well known, as also are such classes of invertebrates as the molluscs—land, fresh-water, and marine; the insects—more especially the butterflies, moths and beetles; and the crustaceans. In many branches of the lower forms of animal life, however, there still remains a lat of work to be done. Botunicaily, the whole region is very well known, and a very complete work has been published in the Russian language upon the flora of Manchuria. So rich is the natural history of this extensive area that one finds considerable difficulty in speaking of it in terms, of moderation. The- whole country, from the borders of China Proper to the northern rim of the Amur basin, and even beyond, into Eastern Siberia itself, is full of interest to the naturalist, who need never spend
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.