118 PLANTH SCHLAGINTWEITIANA. 
“Though the variation in topographical configuration is, necessarily, 
very great in mountain systems of such dimensions, three principal 
chains predominate throughout—the Himalaya, the Karakorum, and 
the Künlün. The central chain it is, the Karakorum, which forms 
the watershed to the north of the Himalaya, not the Kiinliin, as it had 
been supposed till then, and as one finds it still traced in most maps. 
The existence, indeed, of the Karakorum as a chain, about parallel 
to the Himalaya, and exceeding it in the average height of its crest, 
was perfectly unexpected, even to me and my brothers, and when 
already in Tibet, before we, as the first, crossed the Karakorum and 
the Kiinliin. Native information is of remarkably little use in such 
cases ; first of all, since mathematical instruments are absolutely neces- 
sary for arriving at accurate general conclusions, and, not less, since 
such natives only are good judges of nature who have attained already 
a pretty high degree of culture; when this is not the case, natives 
either exaggerate features and phenomena of nature, or are altogether 
unacquainted with them,” 
** To the north of the three chains I first advanced in 1856, then ac- 
companied by my brother Robert. My brother Adolphe did the same 
on a somewhat different route in 1857, and he advanced even as far 
north as Kashgar; but there, on the 26th August, 1857, he was bar- 
barously assassinated. Six years later, in the winter of 1863-4, a 
native assistant was sent to Yarkand by Captain Montgomerie, Super- 
intendent of the North-Western Departments of the great Trigono- 
metrical Survey ; the man, though an Indian native and Mussulman, 
was also killed, but his papers, and finally, those of. my poor brother, 
were saved. I have not yet seen any numerical geographical data 
obtained by the expedition of Mr. Johnstone to Elchi in 1865. The 
principal results we had obtained, viz. that the Karakorum is the domi- 
nating chain of High Asia, running nearly parallel to the Himalaya, 
and that its drainage discharges itself to the north by depressions in 
the Künlün, in remarkable analogy with the southern discharge round 
and aeross the chain of the Himalaya—has been corroborated by the 
progress of the detailed survey.” 
“ In reference to the distribution of the plants, it has to be men- 
tioned, that Tibet is not to be considered as a plateau, but as a lon- 
gitudinal valley, drained to the west by the Indus and Satlej, to the 
cast by the Dihong ; the central separation is situated in Gnarikhor- 
