274 



SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES. 



Volume I. Page 6. 



Colonel Prejevalsky here, and I think elsewhere, gives 

 Daban as the Mongol equivalent for ' mountain range.' 

 In this I cannot but think he is mistaken. Ddbdn in 

 oriental Turki (and presumably in Mongol, if it be a Mongol 

 word also) means, not a 7'ange, but a pass, or what is in 

 Savoy called a col. Thus, on one of the routes from India 

 to Yarkand there is a pass called the YangJii Ddbdn, 

 ' the New Pass.' ' New Range ' would be nonsense ; but 

 ' Yanghi-daban-Range,' as some maps have it, is lawful 

 nomenclature. 



The Pass is that feature in a mountain range which 

 most interests travellers, and which they hear most fre- 

 quently named ; passes always have names ; ranges, 

 among people who have no books of geography, are apt to 

 have none. Hence, with imperfect knowledge of the 

 language, it gets assumed that the name of a Pass is the 

 name of a Range. 



This occurs in various languages. In maps of China 

 we find mountain ranges called by such names as Pe-ling 

 and Tsin-ling, as if /i//g were ' mountain range.' But /ing 

 is * a pass.' Tsin-ling-j-Z/^;/, ' the mountain of the Tsin 

 Pass,' would be right. Hue, again, in spite of all the 

 monstrous Tibetan passes that he traversed, never dis- 

 covered that La in Tibetan meant a Pass and not a moun- 

 tain. And this leads him to his preposterous derivation 

 of Potala, or as he chooses to call it BonddJia-La, the 

 Vatican of the Dalai-Lama, from Buddha-La, ' mountain of 

 Buddha ' (the words would really mean ' Buddha Pass '), with 

 which it has as much to do as Ben Nevis with the hill- 



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