406 COSMOS. 



The relative distances of the volcano of Pe-shan (Mont 

 Blanc) with its lava streams, and the still burning igneous 



and the Sineshan of the Chinese. Eleven hundred years before Strah- 

 lenberg 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., p. 118-129, 

 194-203, and t. ii., p. 413-425), which, when the march of the Mace- 

 donian 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 Thinae, 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 Tau- 

 rus ; 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 por- 

 tions of the Taurus, which are separately called by the natives Paro- 

 pamisos, Emodon, Imaon, and other names, but which the Macedo- 

 nians call the Caucasus." In a previous part of the book, in describ- 

 ing Bactriana and Sogdiana (lib. xi., p. 519), he says, "the last por- 

 tion of the Taurus, which is called Imaon, touches the Indian (eastern) 

 Sea." The terms " on this side and on that side the Taurus" had ref- 

 erence to what was believed to be a single range, running east and 

 west ; that is to say, a parallel chain. Strabo was aware of this, for 

 he says, "the Greeks call the half of the region of Asia looking to the 

 north this side the Taurus, and the half toward the south that side" 

 (lib. ii. p. 129). In the later times of Ptolemy, however, when com- 

 merce in general, and particularly the silk trade, became animated, 

 the appellation of Imaus was transferred to a meridian chain, the Bo- 

 lor, as many passages of the 6th book show(Asie Centr., t. i., p. 146- 

 162). The line in which, parallel to the equator, the Taurus range 

 intersects the whole region, according to Hellenic ideas, was first called 

 by Dicasarchus, a pupil of the Stagirite, a Diaphragma (partition wall), 

 because, by means of perpendicular lines drawn from it, the geograph- 

 ical width of other points could be measured. The diaphragma was 

 the parallel of Rhodes, extended on the west to the pillars of Hercules, 

 and on the east to the coast of Thinse (Agathemeros in Hudson's Geogr. 

 Gr. Min,, vol. ii., p. 4). The divisional line of Dicaearchus, equally 

 interesting in a geological and an orographical point of view, passed 

 into the work of Eratosthenes, who mentions it in the 3d book of his 

 description of the earth, in illustration of his table of the inhabited 

 world. Strabo places so much importance on this direction and par- 

 tition line of Eratosthenes that he (lib. i., p. 65) thinks it possible 

 "that on its eastern extension, which at Thinas passes through the 

 Atlantic Sea, there might be the site of another inhabited world, or 

 even of several worlds ;" although he does not exactly predict that 

 they will be found to exist. The expression "Atlantic Sea" may seem 

 remarkable as used instead of the " Eastern Sea," as the South Sea 

 (the Pacific) is usually called, but as our Indian Ocean, south of Ben- 

 gal, is called in Strabo the Atlantic South Sea, so were both seas to 



