August i i, 1898J 



NA TURE 



347 



Non-official Members. 



(10) Dr. Brauer (Marburg a/L.), Zoologist. 



(11) Dr. zur Strassen (Leipzig), Zoologist. 



(12) HerrF. Winter (Frankfurt a/M.), Scientific Draughts- 



man and Photographer. 

 It is proposed to divide the voyage into three 

 periods : — 



I. From Hamburg round the north of Scotland, passing the 

 Cape de Verdes to Cape Town, for which lOO days is estimated, 

 Cape Town being reached in the second half of November. 



II. From Cape Town, including an examination of the 

 Agulhas Bank and the deep waters to the south, then south- 

 wards to the edge of Antarctic ice, returning northwards through 

 the centre of the Indian Ocean to Coccos and Christmas Island 

 and to Padang. 



III. From Padang to Ceylon, Chagos, Seychelle, and 

 Amirante Islands, to Zanzibar. Then home by Socotra, the 

 Red Sea and the Mediterranean, Hamburg being reached early 

 in June next year. 



On August I the Valdivia left Hamburg, and was 

 accompanied as far as Cuxhaven by Staats-Secretiir von 

 Posadowsky (the Burgomaster of Hamburg), the Directors 

 of the Hamburg-American Line, Prof. Neumayer 

 (Director of the Deutsche Seevvarte), and many scientific 

 men. In wishing success to the expedition, the German 

 Minister dwelt upon the importance of a great State like 

 Germany undertaking work of purely scientific character, 

 such as that in which the members of the expedition were 

 to be engaged ; although no practical outcome was at 

 present visible from researches of the kind, still the 

 acquisition of new knowledge was, he held, one of the 

 first duties of the State. The Chairman of the Directors 

 of the Hamburg- American Line mentioned in his speech 

 that the Directors considered it a privilege to be able to 

 encourage scientific work ; the Company had spared no 

 pains in fitting up the ship and providing it with capable 

 officers, and they expected to lose rather than to make 

 money by the contract that had been entered into. 



The ship left Cuxhaven at 8 p.m. on August i, and 

 during the 2nd and 3rd the dredging and some of the 

 other apparatus were tried for the first time with great 

 success. On the evening of the 3rd she anchored in the 

 Firth of Forth, off Granton, for the purpose of taking on 

 board some additional apparatus, and to permit the 

 members of the expedition to examine the Challenger 

 specimens of deep-sea deposits, as well as to land Dr. 

 von Drygalski (who has been nominated as the scientific 

 leader of the German South Polar Expedition of 1900), 

 Dr. Pfeffer (of the Hamburg Museum), and Sir John 

 Murray, who had accompanied the Valdivia from 

 Hamburg. The members of the expedition were enter- 

 tained at dinner in Edinburgh on the afternoon of the 

 4th, and in the evening the ship sailed again for the 

 Faroe Channel. Geheimrath Dr. Mikulicz, professor of 

 surgery in Breslau, joined the expedition at Edinburgh, 

 and will accompany it as far as the Canaries. 



U 



THROUGH UNKNOWN TIBET} 

 NTIL a little more than thirty years ago our know- 

 ledge of the Tibetan plateau— one of the most 

 remarkable areas on the earth's surface — was exceedingly 

 small, and was very much the same as it had remained 

 since the journeys of Manning and Bogle in the last 

 century. About 1865, natives of India trained by the 

 officers of the Great Trigonometrical Survey were em- 

 ployed in the exploration of portions of Central Asia inac- 

 cessible to Europeans ; and in the course of the next ten to 

 fifteen years great additions to our kn (>vvledge of Southern 

 Tibet and of the trade routes leading to Lhasa from 

 various directions were made by several intelligent and 



1 By M. S. Wellby, Captain tSth Hussars. Pp. xiv + ^afi. (London : 

 T. Fisher Unwin, 1898.) 



NO. 1502, VOL. 58] 



enterprising men, especially those known as Nain Singh^. 

 A.K., and the Mirza. A series of Russian explorations 

 begun by Przevalski in 1870, continued by him for many 

 years, and further prosecuted after his death by Pevtsof 

 and others, added to our maps the main features of the 

 Northern Tibetan escarpment, whilst considerable addi- 

 tions were made from time to time by Carey, Bonvalot 

 and Prince Henry of Orleans, Rockhill, and other 

 travellers ; but still an immense area in the north western 

 part of the plateau was completely unexplored until 1891. 

 This, the highest part of Tibet, extends at least 600 

 miles from east to west, and 250 to 300 from north to 

 south ; and very little, if any, of its surface is less than. 

 16,000 feet above the sea-level. It is intersected by 

 snow-bearing ranges of mountains, and dotted over with 

 numerous lakes, many of which are salt. 



This bleak and barren region is known as the Chang 

 or Chang-tung, and is a wilderness inhabited solely by- 



wild animals. A few nomads drive their flocks and herds 

 to the lower and more grassy tracts on the border of the 

 high plateau for pasture during the summer, but they 

 appear never to visit the greater part of the area. Here 

 is the especial home of the Tibetan antelope and the 

 wild yak, at all events in the summer. 



In 1874-75 ^ traverse of the plateau from Ladak to 

 Tengri Nor and Lhasa was mapped by Nain Singh ; but 

 the region then examined lies at a somewhat lower 

 elevation than the area to the northward, and the latter 

 was first crossed from west to east by Bower and 

 Thorold in 1891. Their route across the Chang, 

 e.xcept in the neighbourhood of the Ladak frontier, lay 

 south of the 34th parallel, still leaving a broad area,, 

 marked as " unexplored " on the Royal Geographical 

 Society's Map of Tibet, published in 1894, between the 

 34th parallel and the Kuenlun. Part of this country was 

 crossed from north to south by Littledale in 1895, in his 

 attempt to reach Lhasa from the northward, his route 



