ZOOLOGK^AL RESULTS OF A TOT^R FN TUV. FAR EAST. 
INTRODUCTION. 
(With Three Maps in the Text.) 
By N. Annandale, D.Sc, F.A.S.B. {Zoological Survey of India). 
I have to thank the Council of the Asiatic vSociety of Bengal for undertaking the 
publication of the results of my recent tour in the Far East and for devoting to them a 
special volume. The main object of this tour was to obtain material for comparison 
with the fauna of Indian freshwater lakes and lagoons of brackish water. I visited 
three countries for the purpose (Japan, the Kiangsu Province of China and that part 
of Siam which lies in the Malay Peninsula) and in each investigated and collected 
the animals of one large lake. Supplementary collections were also obtained at other 
localities. 
In Japan I stayed nine weeks (21st September to 26th November, 1915), spending 
most of my time in the immediate neighbourhood of Lake Biwa in the central part 
of the Main Island. In China my observations were carried out in the Tai-Hu (Great 
Lake) of the Kiangsu Province, in the vicinity of Shanghai in the same province and 
on the island of Hong Kong. To no one locality in that country was I able to de- 
vote more than a few days ; at the Tai-Hu I stayed five. In the Malay Peninsula, 
apart from a few specimens collected on the islands of Singapore and Penang and at the 
mouth of the Prai River on the mainland immediately opposite the latter, my attention 
was directed mainly to the Tale Sap or Inland Sea of Singgora, which lies in the Siam- 
ese Province of Sunkla. I also made .small collections at the mouth of the Patani 
River, which opens into the Gulf of Siam .some distance south of the mouth of the 
Tale Sap, and in the caves of Jalor in the same province. At the Tale Sap I spent 
about a month (January and February, 1916). 
I do not propose at present to give a lengthy description of the various localities ; 
full geographical details are reserved for a series of faunistic papers, which cannot be 
completed until the collections have been worked out from a systematic point of 
view. It may be as well, however, to give now a general account of the three great 
lakes I visited, as the conditions of life are very different not only in each lake but 
also, in the case of those in Japan and Siam, in different parts of the same lake. 
Lake Biwa. (Fig. i, p. 2). 
Lake Biwa (Biwa-ko in Japanese) is a inland lake .situated among the mountains 
of the old province of Omi at an altitude of about 300 ft. above sea-level. It is 
the largest lake in Japan, having a total length of about 36 miles and a maximum 
