wo of the bales were opened
for my inspection. The first contained about five hundred Lady Amherst
pheasant skins, falling to pieces and lacking heads and legs. The second
held over four hundred silver pheasants, in almost perfect condition.
The chief collector had put the absolutely prohibitive fine of 200
pounds on them, and was waiting for the expiration of the legal number
of days before burning the entire lot. They must have represented years
of work in decimating the pheasant fauna of western China.

Far up in the wilderness of northern Burma, and over the Yunnan border,
we often came upon some of the most ingenious examples of native
trapping, a system which we found repeated in the Malay States, Borneo,
China and other parts of the Far East. A low bamboo fence is built
directly across a steep valley or series of valleys, about half way from
the summit to the lower end, and about every fifteen feet a narrow
opening is left, over which a heavy log is suspended. Any creature
attempting to make its way through, treads upon several small sticks and
by so doing springs the trap and the dead-fall claims a victim. When a
country is systematically strung with traps such as these, sooner or
later all but a pitiful remnant of the smaller mammals, birds and
reptiles are certain to be wiped out. Morning after morning I have
visited such a runway and found dead along its path, what must have been
all the walking, running or crawling creatures which the night before
had sought the water at the bottom; pheasants, cobras, mouse-deer,
rodents, civets, and members of many other groups. In some countries
nooses instead of dead-falls guard the openings, but the result is
equally deadly.

I have described this method of trapping because of its future
importance in the destruction of wild life in the Far East. The Chinaman
in all his many millions is undergoing a remarkably swift and radical
evolution both of character and dress. In many ways, if only from the
viewpoint of the patient, thrifty store-keeper he is a most powerful
factor in the East, and is becoming more so. In many cases he imitates
the white nations by cutting off his queue and altering his dress. In
some mysterious correlated way his diet seems simultaneously affected,
and while for untold generations rice and fish has satisfied all his
gastronomic desires, a new craving, that for meat, has come to him. The
result is apparent in many parts of the East. The Chinaman i