72 STEPPES AND DESERTS. 



(Humboldt, Premier Memoire sur les Montagnes de Tlnde, 

 in the Annales de Chimie et de Physique, T. iii. 1816, p. 

 303; Second Memoire, T. xiv. 1820, p. 5-55.) 



My views concerning the geographical range of plants, 

 and the mean degree of temperature requisite for certain 

 kinds of cultivation, had early led me to entertain consider- 

 able doubts as to the continuity of a great Tartarian plateau 

 between the Himalaya and the Altai. "Writers continued to 

 characterise this plateau as it had been described by Hippo- 

 crates (De ^re et Aquis, xcvi. p. 74), as " the high and 

 naked plains of Scythia, which, without being crowned with 

 mountains, rise and extend to beneath the constellation 

 of the Bear/' Klaproth has the undeniable merit of 

 having been the first to make us acquainted with the true 

 position, extent, and direction of two great and entirely dis- 

 tinct chains of mountains the Kuen-liin and the Thian- 

 schan, in a part of Asia which is better entitled to the name 

 of "central" than Kashmeer, Baltistan, and the Sacred 

 Lakes of Thibet, (the Manasa and the Eavanahrada) . The 

 importance of the Celestial Mountains, the Thian-schan, 

 had indeed been already surmised by Pallas, without his 

 being aware of their volcanic nature ; but this highly-gifted 

 investigator of nature, hampered by the then prevailing 

 hypothesis of a dogmatic and fantastic geology, firmly 

 believing in " chains of mountains radiating from a centre," 

 saw in the Bogdo Oola (the Mons Augustus, or culminating 

 point of the Thian-schan) such a " central node, from 

 whence all the Asiatic mountain chains diverge in rays, and 

 which dominates over all the rest of the continent \" 



