ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS, 87 



I have been the first to show (Asie Centrale, t. i. p. 23, and 118- 

 159; t. ii. pp. 43 1-434 and 465) that the corresponding direction of 

 the axes of the Kuen-liin and the Hindu-Coosh (both being east 

 and west, whereas the Himalaya is south-east and north-west) makes 

 it reasonable to regard the Hindu-Coosh as. a continuation, not of the 

 Himalaya, but of the Kuen-lun. From the Taurus in Lycia to 

 Kafiristan, through an extent of 45 degrees of longitude, this chain 

 follows the parallel of Rhodes, or the diaphragm of Dicearchus. 

 The grand geognostical view of Eratosthenes (Strabo, lib. ii. p. 68; 

 lib. xi. pp. 490 and 511; and lib. xv. p. 689), which is farther de- 

 veloped by Marinus of Tyre, and Ptolemy, and according to which 

 " the continuation of the Taurus in Lycia extends across the whole 

 of Asia to India, in one and the same direction," appears to- have 

 been partly founded on statements which reached the Persians and 

 Indians from the Punjaub. " The Brahmins affirm," says Cosmas 

 Indicopleustes, in his Christian Topography (Montfaugon, Collectio 

 nova Patrum, t. ii. p. 137), " that, a line drawn from Tzinitza (Thinaej) 

 across Persia and Romania, exactly cuts the middle of the inhabited 

 earth." It is deserving of notice that Eratosthenes had so early 

 remarked that this longest axis of elevation in the Old Continent, 

 in the parallels of 35 J and 36, points directly through the basin 

 (or depression) of the Mediterranean to the Pillars of Hercules. 

 (Compare Asie Centrale, t. i. pp. 23 . and 122-138; t. ii..p. 430- 

 434, with Kosmos, bd. ii. s. 222 and 438, p. 188, and note 292, 

 Engl. ed.) The easternmost part of the Hindu-Coosh is the Paro- 

 panisus of the ancients, the Indian Caucasus of the companions of 

 Alexander. The now generally used term of Hindu-Coosh belongs, 

 as may be seen from the Travels of the Arab Ibn Batuta (English 

 version, p. 97), to a single mountain pass on which many Indian 

 slaves often perished from cold. The Kuen-liin, like the Thian-schan, 

 shows igneous outbreaks or eruptions at many hundred miles from 

 the sea. -Flames, visible at a great distance, issue from a cavity in 

 the Schin-khieu Mountain. (Asie Centrale, t. ii. pp. 427 and 483, 

 where I have followed the text of Yuen-thong-ki, translated by my 

 friend Stanislas Julien.) The highest summit measured in the Hindu- 

 Coosh, north-west of Jellalabad, is 3164 toises above the sea (20,132 

 English feet); to the west, towards Herat, the chain sinks to 400 



