402 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SKETCH OF NICHOLAS PREJEVALSKI. 



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1IIE Russian explorer, Prejevalski, had returned, at the "beginning 

 of 1886, from his fourth journey of scientific investigation and 

 military reconnaissance in Central Asia. His activity and its fruitful- 

 ness in the extension of knowledge are truly wonderful. 



Nicholas Prejevalski is now in his forty-seventh year, having 

 been born on the 31st of March, 1839. He was the son of an old Polish 

 landholder in the province of Smolensk. Having attended the gym- 

 nasium of his native province for a time, he entered the Military 

 Academy in St. Petersburg, and devoted himself to the natural sci- 

 ences. He was engaged in the Polish campaign, and afterward resided 

 at Warsaw, as teacher of history and geography, till 18G7 ; then, at 

 his own request, he was transferred to Irkutsk, in Eastern Siberia, 

 whence he undertook journeys to the Amoor and Ussari. This remote 

 region exercised such a power of fascination over the young man that 

 the starting-point of his whole career may he dated from his residence 

 there. It gave the first response to his natural taste for traveling in 

 strange lands, and we therefore find it perfectly in course that he 

 should have started in 1870 upon a longer journey through China. 

 The expedition was undertaken under a commission from the Geo- 

 graphical Society of St. Petersburg, in company with Lieutenant 

 Michael Pylzow and two Cossacks, and lasted three years. In its 

 course it traversed Mongolia, Shan-Su, the hasin of the Kuku-Nor, and 

 Northern Thibet, for a distance of more than seven thousand miles. 

 The literary fruit of this expedition was a book of " Travels in Mon- 

 golia in the Tangut Country, and the Solitudes of Northern Thibet, 

 1870-'73," which was published in London in 1876, translated by E. 

 Delmar Morgan, and furnished with an introduction and notes by 

 Colonel Henry Yule. 



The journey was directed to the regions lying outside of the great 

 Chinese wall, a country concerning which our data, derived chiefly 

 from the accounts of Marco Polo in the thirteenth century and of a 

 few missionaries, were so defective and inaccurate, that the whole 

 table-land of Eastern Asia, extending from the Siberian mountains in 

 the north to the Himalaya in the south, and from the Pamir Plain 

 to China, was as little known to us as Central Africa or the interior 

 of New Holland. This region, then a terra incognita, exceeding the 

 whole of Eastern Europe in extent, situated, to borrow the words of 

 the explorer, in the middle of the greatest continent, at an absolute 

 height with which no other region on the globe could compare, here 

 intersected by giant mountains, there spread out into illimitable des- 

 ert plains, presented in every aspect features of scientific interest. 

 But, he added, strongly as these regions attract us by the mysteries 

 which they conceal, they equally deter us by the threat of all possible 



