434 COSMOS. 



Stanislas Julien, to treat of them fully in my work on Central 

 Asia. 43 The relative distances of the volcano of Pe-.shan 



43 Humboldt, Asie Centrale, t. ii, pp. 7 61, 216, and 335364; 

 Cosmos, vol. i, p. 244. The mountain-lake of Issikul, on the northern 

 slope of the Thian-shan, which was lately visited for the first time by 

 Eussian travellers, I found marked on the famous Catalonian map of 

 1374,* which is preserved as a treasure among the manuscripts of the 

 Paris library. Strahlenberg, in his work entitled Der nb'rdliche und 

 ostliclie Theil von Europa und Asien (Stockholm, 1730, s. 327), has the 

 merit of having first represented the Thian-shan as a peculiar and inde- 

 pendent chain, without however being aware of its volcanic action. He 

 gives it the very indefinite name of Mousart, which, as the Bolor was 

 designated by the general title of M us tag, which particularizes nothing, 

 and merely indicates snow, has for a whole century occasioned an 

 erroneous representation, and an absurd and confused nomenclature of 

 the mountain-ranges to the north of the Himalaya, confounding meridian 

 and parallel-chains with each other. Mousart is a corruption of the 

 Tartaric word Muztay, synonymous with our expression snowy chain, 

 the Sierra Nevada of the Spaniards, the Himalaya in the Institutes of 

 Menu, signifying the habitation (alaya)o snow(/ama), and the Sineshan 

 of the Chinese. Eleven hundred years before Strahleuberg wrote, under 

 the dynasty of Sui, in the time of Dagobert, king of the Franks, the 

 Chinese possessed maps, constructed by order of the Government, of 

 the countries lying between the Yellow River and the Caspian 

 Sea, on which the Kuen-liin and the Thian-shan were marked. It was 

 undoubtedly these two chains, but especially the first, as I think I have 

 shown in another place (Asie Centr. t. i, pp. 118 129, 194203, and 

 t. ii, p. 413425), which, when the march of the Macedonian army 

 had brought the Greeks into closer acquaintance with the interior of 

 .Asia, spread among their geographers the knowledge of a belt of 

 mountains extending from Asia Minor to the eastern sea, from India 

 and Scythia to Thin, thus cutting the whole continent into two 

 halves (Strabo, lib. i, p. 68, lib. xi, p. 490). Dicsearchus, and after him 

 Eratosthenes, denominated this chain the elongated Taurus; the 

 Himalaya chain is included under this appellation. " That which 

 bounds India on the north," we are expressly told by Strabo (lib. xv, 

 p. 689), " from Ariane to the eastern sea, is the extremest portions of 

 the Taurus, which are separately called by the natives Paropamisos, 

 Emodon, Imaon, and other names, but which the Macedonians call the 

 Caucasus." In a previous part of the book, in describing Pactriana and 

 Sogdiana (lib. xi, p. 519), he says, "the last portion of the Taurus, 

 which is called Imaon, touches the Indian (eastern) Sea." The terms 

 "on this side and on that side the Taurus," had reference to what was 



[* This curious Spanish map was the result of the great commercial 

 relations which existed at that time between Majorca and Italy, Egypt 

 and India. See a more full notice of it in Asie Centrale, loc. cit. TK.] 



