ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 75 



poem of the Mahabharata appears, in the geographical fragment 

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

 an enormous elevation of the land, which supplies with water at 

 once the sources of the Ganges, those of the Bhadrasoma (Irtysh), 

 and those of the forked Oxus. These physico-geographical views were 

 intermingled in Europe with ideas of other kinds, and with mythical 

 reveries relating to the origin of mankind. It was said that the 

 elevated regions from which the waters first retreated, (geologists in 

 general were long averse to the theory of elevation,) must also have 

 received the first germs of civilization. Hebraizing systems of 

 geology, and views connected with the Deluge and supported by 

 local traditions, favored these assumptions. The intimate connec- 

 tion between time and space, between the beginnings of social order 

 and the plastic character of the surface of the earth, lent to the sup- 

 posed " uninterrupted Plateau of Tartary" a peculiar importance, 

 and an almost moral interest. Acquisitions of positive knowledge, 

 the late matured fruit of scientific travels and direct measurements, 

 as well as of a fundamental study of Asiatic languages and literature, 

 especially those of China, have gradually demonstrated the inac- 

 curacies and exaggerations of those wild hypotheses. The mountain 

 plains (oportfi'Sta) of Central Asia are no longer regarded as the 

 cradle of civilization and the primitive seat of all arts and sciences. 

 The ancient nation of Bailly's Atlantis, happily described by 

 d' Alembert as " having taught us everything but their own name 

 and existence," has vanished. The supposed inhabitants of the 

 Oceanic Atlantis had already been treated, in the time of Posidonius, 

 in a no less derisive manner. (Strabo, lib. ii. p. 102 ; and lib. xiii. 

 p. 598, Casaub.) 



A plateau of considerable but very unequal elevation, having the 

 names of Gobi, Scha-mo (sand desert), Scha-ho (sand river), and 

 Hanhai, runs in a SSW.-NNE. direction, with little interruption, 

 from Eastern Thibet towards the .mountain knot of Kemtei south of 

 Lake Baikal. This swelling of the ground is probably anterior to 

 the elevation of the mountain chains by which it is intersected; it 

 is situated, as already remarked, between 79 and 116 long, from 

 Paris, (81 and 118 E. from Greenwich.) Measured at right 

 angles to its longitudinal axis, its breadth is, in the south between 



