FLORA OF TIBET OR HIGH ASIA. 157 
This chain is parallel to Arka Tag, and constitutes, as I after- 
wards found, a continuation of the Koko Shili. Its highest peak 
was named after King Oscar. Between these two gigantic chains, 
which run from east to west, stretches a rolling plateau which is 
divided into a whole series of basins without outlet.... In the 
iniddle of each basin is a lake of clear but bitter water from the 
streams of the surrounding mountains. In travelling east we 
discovered twenty-three such lakes, of whose existence not even 
the Chinese had any idea. The largest was three days long. 
These lakes were dead and desolate as well as the surrounding 
country. Birds were very scarce, except one species of guil. 
“The only animals that were capable of putting any life into 
these regions were the yaks and khulans, which were there in 
incredible numbers. Yak-dung afforded us the very best of fuel, 
and every evening we could warm ourselves by fine, large fires. 
“Thus we wandered day after day across the plateaux of 
Tibet for two months without seeing a single living being. 
We found trace of man only twice during this time: at the last 
halting-place north of Arka Tag, where a charred pile of coals 
atter a cap fire showed that we were crossing Littledale’s route; 
and between our seventeenth and eighteenth halting-places, 
where, in the soft sand, we still found traces of Bonvalot and the 
Prince of Orleans’s camels, these tracks having remained un- 
disturbed for eight years. Meanwhile our caravan dwindled down 
in an alarming manner ; at last the men had to go atoot, and we 
thought it was time to try to find inhabited country.” 
Dr. Sven Hedin presented his Tibetan botanical collection to 
Kew on the condition that we furnished a list of the plants 
to be embodied in his account of the scientific results of his 
travels in Petermann’s ‘ Geographische Mittheilungen.’ This has 
already appeared, but we shall be excused for including it in the 
following enumeration in order to make it accessible to a wider 
circle of botanists. It should be explained that this collection, 
consisting of less than sixty species, was made on his journey, 
1896, across the Arka Tag mountains into Tibet and through 
the Tsaidam country, mainly between the meridians of eighty-five 
and uinety-four and the thirty-fifth and thirty-seventh parallels. 
Some of the plants were collected on the north side of the Kuen 
Luen range, in Chinese Turkestan. But we have not been able 
to localize all the plants with exactitude, because some of them 
are merely dated, whilst others only bear the number of the 
