PREFACE TO THE SECOND AND THIRD EDITIONS. IX 



Kuen-liin), and the ill-judged neglect of Chinese authorities, have 

 thrown great obscurity around the geography of Central Asia, and 

 have allowed imagination to be substituted for the results of obser- 

 vation in works which have obtained extensive circulation. In the 

 course of the last few months, the hypsometrical comparison of the 

 culminating summits of the two Continents has almost unexpectedly 

 received important corrections and additions, of which I hasten to 

 avail myself. (See pages 63-64, and 88-89.) The determinations 

 of the heights of two mountains in the eastern chain of the Andes 

 of Bolivia, the Sorata and the Illimani, have been freed from the 

 errors which had placed those mountains above the Chiinborazo, 

 but without as yet altogether restoring to the latter with certainty 

 its ancient pre-eminence among the snowy summits of the New 

 World. In the Himalaya, the recently executed trigonometrical 

 measurement of the Kinchinjinga (28,178 English feet) places it 

 next in altitude to the Dhawalagiri, a new and more exact trigono- 

 metrical measurement of which has also been recently made. 



For the sake of uniformity with the two previous editions of the 

 " "Ansichten der Natur," I have given the degrees of temperature in 

 the present work (unless where expressly stated otherwise) in de- 

 grees of Reaumur's scale. The linear measures are the old French, 

 in which the toise equals six Parisian feet. The miles are geo- 

 graphical, fifteen to a degree of the Equator. The longitudes are 

 reckoned from the Observatory at Paris as a first meridian. 



BERLIN, 1849. 



