Senry H. Soworth — Elevation of Eastern Asia. 157 



widened. The only valley in the Himalayas I have yet seen that is 

 shaped like a glacier valley is the Spiti valley. The greater part of 

 it is 11,000 feet above the sea, and its bottom, especially in the 

 upper part of the valley, is broad and flat, while the bounding 

 mountain sides rise abruptly in a wall-like manner at a high angle, 

 and send no sharp projecting spurs into the valley " {id. p. 68). 



Lastly Strachey, a very judicial observer, says, writing in 1880, 

 " Till now no geological evidence has been adduced to indicate in 

 this region anything corresponding to the Glacial epochs of Northern 

 Europe, to which these former extensions of the glaciers could be 

 attributed " (Ency. Brit. vol. xi. p. 831). 



The evidence from the Himalayas must therefore be taken as 

 proving emphatically the absence of anything like the glacial 

 phenomena of Europe there. Notwithstanding the enormous height 

 of that range, and its consequent efficiency as a condenser, and not- 

 withstanding its close presence to a great sheet of water in Central 

 Asia now dried up, it shows no traces of that great growth of glaciers 

 which marked the same period in Europe and North America. I 

 have no other explanation to give save and except the one I offered 

 in regard to the similar phenomena in the Ural chain, namely, that 

 this great mass and congeries of mountains was then non-existeiat. 



If we turn to another kind of evidence, namely, that of the salt 

 lakes, which are found scattered over the vast area occupied by the 

 Highlands of Eastern Asia, we can scarcely escape the conclusion 

 that they have formed within a not distant period a more or less 

 continuous sheet of water, perhaps connected with the sea which 

 once occupied the Uralo-Caspian depression. Humboldt reports a 

 Mongol tradition that the part of the Desert of Gobi towards Erghi 

 once formed the bottom of a sea more than a hundred leagues in 

 diameter. The district is strewn with, salt lakes, and the saline 

 plants growing there are of the same species as the plants growing 

 on the borders of the Caspian (Humboldt, Tableaux de la Nature, 

 vol. i. pp. 95-97). 



The Chinese reports about the country of Lob Nor are to the 

 same effect, and are probably based on an induction from its physical 

 appearance. Valikhanof says of Kashgaria : " The interior of the 

 country is a sandy desert, the peculiar features of which first become 

 visible in the eastern slopes of an imdulating range of hills, of no 

 great width, between Yaiiyshahr and Yarkand. From this region it 

 gradually widens as it runs to the eastward, where it forms the vast 

 Gobi devoid of all vegetation, though interspersed with reservoirs of 

 brackish water, and where the sand is heaped in such lofty ridges 

 that the inhabitants give them the name of Gag (mountain). The 

 parts that lie at the foot of the mountains have a clayey soil, strewed 

 with small stones, and in some places impregnated with salt " 

 (Michell's Essays on Central Asia, pp. 110-111). 



"There are many lakes in Little Bokhara," says the same writer, 

 " all lying along the borders of the inner desert, and containing 

 brackish water" (id. p. 118). Dr. Stolizcka, who accompanied Sir 

 Douglas Forsyth's mission, speaks of the entire soil in the valley of 



