72 STEPPES AND DESERTS. 



(Humboldt, Premier Memoire sur les Montagues de Flnde, 

 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 ^Ere 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 Ravanahrada) . 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 \" 



