PREFATORY NOTE. 
Though within the Northern Tropic, Hongkong, Macao and the adjacent country exhibit 
little of the luxuriance of vegetation usually associated with a tropical climate. This, however, is 
owing to the district being burdened with a poor and dense population, who destroy the vegetation 
and gather up the mould-forming materials for fuel. The climate for the greater part of the year is 
hot and damp; the landscape chiefly rain-swept, sun-burned hills, intersected by valleys mostly 
cultivated as wet rice-fields, but with patches of sweet potato and other vegetables, whilst dirty, 
crowded villages lie in every direction at the foot of the hills. Most of these are very barren, some 
boulder-strewn and scantily covered with coarse grasses and stunted undergrowth, others scattered 
over with the small fir common on the hills of S. China. Here and there, chiefly at the back of the 
villages or on isolated hills specially devoted to the ever-present horseshoe graves, are small clumps 
of trees and bushes continually lopped and hacked by the villagers, except the few, generally banyans, 
preserved as “joss” trees, the trunks bedaubed with red papers and the usual dirty and tawdry 
paraphernalia arranged on a delapidated altar beneath their shade. A few of the Buddhist monasteries, 
however, are sheltered by really fine forest trees. 
Birds and insects are almost the only wild fauna which are conspicuous in the countryside, 
but the birds numerous enough to make much show are few in species, three kinds of Pycnonotidoz 
or Bulbuls being most in evidence, and their plumage is very soberly coloured. The butterflies, 
however, are both numerous and brilliant and strike even an indifferent observer. Throughout the 
year, in places where a little vegetation manages to exist, great numbers of lovely butterflies are to 
be seen, especially the dark but resplendent JSuplceince , characteristic of the East, whilst many species 
of Papilio and other gorgeous and striking genera fly hither and thither at a speed which quite 
eclipses their English relatives. 
Wallace, in his “Geographical Distribution of Animals” includes S. China in the “Oriental 
Region” as the “Indo-Chinese Sub-region,” and his arrangement is here followed when reference is 
made to the range of families and genera. 
Hongkong is some seventy miles within the tropic of Cancer, the line passing a few miles 
north of Swatow and nearly equally dividing Formosa, in the opposite direction almost touching 
Wuchow. The island itself is about eight miles by four, with an area of some twenty-nine square 
miles, nearly all hills, separated from Kowloon on the mainland by a strait about half-a-mile broad 
at its narrowest points. Though there are few large trees, and small firs outnumber other species, 
yet it is well wooded and looked after by an Afforestation Dept., whilst the natives are not allowed 
