ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 73 



The erroneous idea of a single vast elevated plain occupy- 

 ing the whole of central Asia, the " Plateau de la Tartarie," 

 took its rise in France, in the latter half of the 18th cen- 

 tury. It was the result of historical combinations, and of a 

 not sufficiently attentive study of the writings of the cele- 

 brated Venetian traveller, as well as of the naive relations of 

 those diplomatic monks who, in the 13th and 14th centuries, 

 (thanks to the unity and extent of the Mogul empire at that 

 time) were able to traverse almost the whole of the interior 

 of the continent, from the ports of Syria and of the Caspian 

 Sea to the shores of the Pacific on the east coast of China. 

 If a more exact acquaintance with the language and ancient 

 literature of India had dated farther back among us than 

 half a century, the hypothesis of this central plateau, occupy- 

 ing the wide space between the Himalaya and the south of 

 Siberia, would no doubt have had adduced in its support an 

 ancient and venerable authority from that source. The 

 poem of the Mahabharata appears, in the geographical 

 fragment Bliischmakanda, to describe " Meru" not so much 

 as a mountain as an enormous elevation of the land, which 

 supplies with water at once the sources of the Ganges, those 

 of the Bhadrasoma (Irtysh), and those of the forked Oxus. 

 These physico-geographical views were intermingled in 

 Europe with ideas of other kinds, and with mythical reveries 

 relating to the origin of mankind. It was said that the ele- 

 vated regions from which the waters first retreated, (geologists 

 in general were long averse to the theory of elevation), must 

 also have received the first germs of civilisation. Hebraizing 

 systems of geology, and views connected with the Deluge 



