332 Attempt to delermine the mean height of Continents. 



Europe four times more considerable than the system of the 

 Alps. This result of calculations is the more satisfactory 

 as it appears to be deduced without reference to any pre- 

 vious hypothesis. 



We have recently acquired many new ideas respecting the 

 configuration of Asia. The effect of the elevated colossal 

 masses of the southern portion is found to be weakened, since 

 one-third of the whole continent of Asia, a portion of Siberia, 

 which alone exceeds by a third the entire surface of Europe, does 

 not reach a normal height of 40 toises. This is, likewise, 

 the height of Orenbourg, on the northern shore of the Cas- 

 pian Sea. Tobolsk does not attain the half of this height, 

 and Casan, which is five times more distant from the shore of 

 the Icy Sea than Berlin is from the Baltic, is scarcely half 

 the height of the last mentioned city. In Upper Irtysch, be- 

 tween Buktormensy and Lake Saysan, at a point nearer the 

 Indian than the Icy Ocean, M. de Humboldt has found that 

 the plains only reached a height of about 800 feet ; this, how- 

 ever, has been called the plateau of Central Asia, and is not 

 half the height of the streets of the city of Munich above the 

 sea-level. The celebrated plateau between Lake Baikal and 

 the Wall of China (the stony desert of Gobi and Cha-mo), 

 which the Russian academicians, MM. Bunge and Fuss, have 

 measured with the barometer, has a mean height of only 660 

 toises, which is nearly the same as that of the Miiggelsbei'g at 

 the summit of the Brocken. There is, moreover, in the centre 

 of this plateau, at the point where Ergi is situated (lat. 45° 31') 

 a cauldron-shaped depression, the bottom of which descends 

 to 400 toises, that is to say, the height of Madrid. " This de- 

 pression," says M. IBunge, in a memoir not yet published, 

 " is covered with Halophytes and species of the genus Arundc, 

 and, according to the tradition ■ of the Mongolians who ac- 

 companied us, It was formerly a great Inland sea." The 

 two extremities of this ancient inland sea are bounded by 

 steep rocks, just like an ordinary sea, in the neighbourhood of 

 Olonbaischan and Zukeldakan. 



The surface of Gobi, in its masses of uniform elevation, and 

 from the south-west to north-west, is twice as large as tliat 

 of all Germany, and will raise the centre of gravity of Asia 



