IBRARY ^ 
Introduction 
v 
The eyes of the world are fixed upon the western shores of 
the Pacific Ocean where millions of men have been locked in a 
struggle to free, or dominate, those lands and the peoples who 
inhabit them. Many people whose sons write home from a 
Pacific A. P.O., to whom Burma, China, Formosa, Japan, and 
Siberia were scarcely more than names on a map, wish to know 
the kinds of territories and climates, the manner of peoples, the 
various sorts of animal and plant life that may be encountered 
in eastern Asia. In a book 1 recently published, my colleagues 
and I told about the animals to be found on the islands from 
Australia to the Kurile and Aleutian Islands. The present vol- 
ume has been prepared in order to offer the same service in 
considerably fuller detail for the mammals of the mainland of 
eastern Asia. Books and articles relating to the mammals of 
limited portions of the Asiatic margin of the Pacific exist, but 
are usually either out of print, too technical, written in a foreign 
language, or for some reason are not usable by the public. The 
geographical scope of the present work covers some 6000 miles 
of the Pacific coast of Asia, from northeastern Siberia through 
Manchuria, China, Burma and Indo-China, to the Malay Penin- 
sula. The mammals of Sakhalin, Japan, and Formosa are in- 
cluded. 
In preparing this work, museum specimens of the various 
mammals described have been examined whenever practicable. 
But of necessity, much of the information has been taken from 
the literature. I have not hesitated to borrow from all sources 
in order to gather the habit notes, often pitifully meager, on 
the various genera and species. Although it is not possible to 
1 Carter, T. D., Hill, J. E., and Tate, G. H. H., Mammals of the Pacific 
World. Macmillan Co., 1945. 
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