ILLUSTRATIONS (10). THE PLATEAUX OF INDIA. 55 



the south of Siberia, would no doubt have sought support 

 from some ancient and venerable authority. The poem of 

 the Mahabharata appears, in the geographical fragment Bhisch- 

 makanda, to describe " Meru" not so much as a mountain as 

 an enormous swelling of the land, which supplies with water 

 the sources of the Ganges, those of the Bhadrasoma (Irtysch), 

 and those of the forked Oxus. These physico-geographical 

 views were intermingled in Europe with ideas of other kinds, 

 and with mythical reveries on the origin of mankind. The lofty 

 regions from which the waters were supposed to have first 

 retreated (for geologists in general were long averse to the 

 theories of elevation) must also have received the first germs 

 of civilization. Hebraic systems of geology, based on ideas 

 of a deluge, and supported by local traditions, favoured these 

 assumptions. The intimate connexion between time and 

 space, between the beginning of social order and the plastic 

 condition of the surface of the earth, lent a peculiar import- 

 ance and an almost moral interest to the Plateau of Tartary, 

 which was supposed to be characterized by uninterrupted 

 continuity. Acquisitions of positive knowledge, — the late 

 matured fruit of scientific travels and direct measurements, — 

 with a fundamental study of the languages and literature of 

 Asia, and more especially of China, have gradually demon- 

 strated the inaccuracy and exaggeration of those wild hypo- 

 theses. The mountain plains (dpoTredia) of Central Asia are 

 no longer regarded as the cradle of human civilization, and 

 the primitive seat of all arts and sciences. The ancient nation 

 of Badly' s Atlantis, which d'Alernbert has happily described 

 as " having taught us everything but its own name and 

 existence," has vanished. The inhabitants of the Oceanic 

 Atlantis were already treated, in the time of Posidonius, as 

 having a merely apocryphal existence.'' 1 



A plateau of considerable but very unequal elevation runs 

 with little interruption, in a S.S.W.-N.N.E. direction, from 

 Eastern Thibet towards the mountain node of Kentei, south 

 of Lake Baikal, and is known by the names of Gobi, Seha-mo, 

 (sand desert,) Scha-ho, (sand river,) and Hanhai. This swell- 

 ing of the ground, which is probably more ancient than the 

 elevation of the mountain-chains by which it is intersected, is 

 situated, as we have already remarked, between 81° and 118° 

 * Strabo, lib. ii. p. 102; and lib. xiii. p. 598, Casaub. 



