74 STEPPES AND DESERTS. 



and supported by local traditions, favoured these assumptions. 

 The intimate connection between time and space, between 

 the beginnings of social order and the plastic character of 

 the surface of the earth, lent to the supposed " uninterrupted 

 Plateau of Tartary" a peculiar importance, and an almost 

 moral interest. Acquisitions of positive knowledge, the 

 late matured fruit of scientific travels and direct measure- 

 ments, as well as of a fundamental study of Asiatic languages 

 and literature especially those of China, have gradually 

 demonstrated the inaccuracies and exaggerations of those 

 wild hypotheses. The mountain plains (opoiredia) of Central 

 Asia are no longer regarded as the cradle of civilization and 

 the primitive seat of all arts and sciences. The ancient 

 nation of Bailly's Atlantis, happily described by d'Alembert 

 as " having taught us everything but their own name and 

 existence," has vanished. The supposed inhabitants of the 

 Oceanic Atlantis had already been treated, in the time of 

 Posidoiiius, in a no less derisive manner. (Strabo, lib. ii. 

 p. 102; and lib. xiii. p. 598, Casaub.) 



A plateau of considerable but very unequal elevation, 

 having the names of Gobi, Scha-mo (sand desert), Scha-ho 

 (sand river), and Hanhai, -runs in a SSW.-NNE. direc- 

 tion, with little interruption, from Eastern Thibet towards 

 the mountain knot of Kentei south of Lake Baikal. 

 This swelling of the ground is probably anterior to the 

 elevation of the mountain chains by which it is intersected ; 

 it is situated, as already remarked, between 79 and 116 

 long, from Paris, (81 and 118 E. from Greenwich). 

 Measured at right angles to its longitudinal axis, its breadth 



