[ 294 ] 



Shetooder; but the natural aspect of a country is a far better criterion 

 for decision in these matters than the fluctuating names of rivers, 

 of which how abundant and how varied are those of the Panjab may 

 be known from the laboured enumeration of them by a RECENT 

 WRITER, whose indefatigable industry and whose profound erudition, 

 exerted on a barren, but important, subject of Eastern inquiry, 

 will excite admiration when perhaps those rivers shall cease to 

 flow *. On this ground of argument, Major Rennel conjectures their 

 position mighthave been between Ardone and Debalpour, the Dsedalla 

 of Ptolemy. After the above solemn and decisive testimony from the 

 page of Grecian history, that Alexander advanced no farther east- 

 ward than the Hyphasis, it would be an useless expenditure of my 

 own and my readers' time, to examine the details of Oriental writers, 

 (although sanctioned by a solitary passage in Justin-f ,) respecting the 

 conquest, by Secander, of the remotest eastern regions of Asia, thus 

 realizing his own ambitious dreams, and enumerating the immense 

 presents which were paid as the price of peace by Keid, the potent 

 sovereign of ulterior India, and by Kha-Khan, an unheard-of em- 

 peror of China, in bars of gold, in rich silks, in costly furs, in bags of 

 musk, and in aroma tic woods |.. If the SHAH NAMEH and SKANDER 

 NAM EH contain nothing on this subject more consonant to pro- 



* I cannot omit this opportunity of acknowledging my private as well as public obliga- 

 tions, during the progress of my two Works, now rapidly approaching to completion, to the 

 respectable author of The Voyage of Nearchus; and I most cordially join with another cele- 

 brated, but unknown, writer of the day, to whom also I am under the deepest obligation for 

 well-meant, but, I fear, ill-merited, applause, in opinion that " it is impossible to name such 

 another work as DR. VINCENT'S, with all the learned illustrations, produced under the labour 

 and constant pressure of so important an occupation as the conduct of a great public school." 

 Shade of Pope, p. 74, second edition. 



t Justin positively asserts that the Gangaridae were among the nations conquered by the 

 Macedonians. Lib. xii. cap. 8. 



J See Mirkhond apud Tcxeira, p. 105. 



