Excerpt from Fur Facts The question is often asked is trapping cruel, and the answer from anyone who knows wildlife is unhesitatingly it is not. Agnes Laut, who is probably one of the best informed women on wild animal life in the country, has pointed out that there is less cruelty in trap ping than there is in the slaughter house. Anyone need only go into the wilds to at once realize that natural wild life is more cruel by far than the most careless and thoughtless hunter. To begin with there is hardly such a thing as natural death in the wilds. The weak fall victims to the strong. The weasel hunts the rabbit and kills indiscriminately; the fox hunts the weasel and so on through the en tire list; and if fur bearing animals did not multiply with such ter rific rapidity they would soon exterminate one another. To give an idea of the rapidity with which wild animals multiply, a number of years ago a settler in Australia, whose home had been in England, decided to have a pair of rabbits sent over to Australia as pets for his children. Previous to this time there were no rabbits in Australia and the rabbit was not a native of the soil. The pair of rabbits which this English immigrant had sent over from the old country was the beginning of the Australian Rabbit. In due time the rabbits had a litter of young. Some of the young were given to neighbor as pets for their children. Finally some of them left the barn yard and took up their home in the wilds. This was the beginning of the wild rabbit in Australia. There was no other wild life to destroy them with the result that they multiplied so rapidly that in a compara tively short number of years they overran the country. It became necessary for the Australian Government to build hundreds of miles of rabbit-proof fences to protect farms and ranches from their de predations. Their number ran into the millions and no headway seemed to be made against them. The pest, however, turned out to be a profit for the reason that their fur is valuable, the hair being used in the making of felt, most of our felt hats being made from Australian rabbit skins. The finer grades of skins are used for furriers' purposes for making low-priced furs. And are known in the trade as dyed coney. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In this path-breaking book, Tong Lam examines the emergence of the "culture of fact" in modern China, showing how elites and intellectuals sought to transform the dynastic empire into a nation-state, thereby ensuring its survival. Lam argues that an epistemological break away from traditional modes of understanding the observable world began around the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing the Neo-Confucian school of evidentiary research and the modern departure from it, Lam shows how, through the rise of the social survey, "the fact" became a basic conceptual medium and source of truth. In focusing on China’s social survey movement, A Passion for Facts analyzes how information generated by a range of research practices—census, sociological investigation, and ethnography—was mobilized by competing political factions to imagine, manage, and remake the nation.