ANNOTATIONS ANE ADDITIONS. 91 



this chain follows the parallel of Rhodes, or the diaphragm 

 of Dicearchus. The grand geognostical view of Erastos- 

 thenes (Strabo, Lib. ii. p. 68; Lib. xi. p. 490 and 511; 

 and Lib. xv. p. 689), which is farther developed by Marinus 

 of Tyre, and Ptolemy, and according to which " the con- 

 tinuation of the Taurus in Lycia extends across the whole 

 of Asia to India, in one and the same direction," appears to 

 have been partly founded on statements which reached the 

 Persians and Indians from the Punjaub. "The Brahmins 

 affirm," says Cosmas Indicopleustes, in his Christian Topo- 

 graphy, (Mountfaugon, Collectio nova Patrum, T. ii. p. 137) 

 " that a line drawn from Tzinitza (Thinse) across Persia and 

 Romania, exactly cuts the middle of the inhabited earth." It 

 is deserving of notice that Eratosthenes had so early remarked 

 that this longest axis of elevation in the Old Continent, in 

 the parallels of 35-^ and 36, points directly through the 

 basin (or depression) of the Mediterranean to the Pillars of 

 Hercules. (Compare Asie Centrale, T. i. p. 23 and 122- 

 138; T. ii. p. 430434, with Kosmos, Bd. ii. S. 222 and 

 438, p. 188, and note 292,Engl. ed.) The easternmost part of 

 the Hindu-Coosh is the Paropanisus of the ancients, the 

 Indian Caucasus of the companions of Alexander. The now 

 generally used term of Hindu-Coosh, belongs, as may be seen 

 from the Travels of the Arab Ibn Batuia (English version, 

 p. 97), to a single mountain pass on which many Indian 

 slaves often perished from cold. The Kuen-liin, like the 

 Thian-schan, shews igneous outbreaks or eruptions at many 

 hundred miles from the sea. Flames, visible at a great 

 distance, issue from a avcity in the Schin-khieu Mountain. 



