24 Address of Sir R. I. Murchison 
The truth is, that, when it was thus loosely said, that both 
the Oxus and Jaxartes flowed into the Caspian, we must make 
due allowance for the ignorance of the ancients of the northern 
rtion of this vast region, particularly of the course of the 
Soxaticm which no one of them had fully explored, and at the 
mouth of which none of them had arrived. 
If, indeed, we rely on the sagacious Rennell, he, in his great 
work on the ‘ Geographical — of Herodotus,’ may be said 
to have established this point, for, in speaking of the old ge- 
ographers, he says, “ they understood the Aral to be included 
in the Caspian, since they knew of but one expanse of water 
in that quarter ; for the Cyrus and Araxes, Oxus and Jaxartes, 
were all supposed to fall into the same sea.” This he contrasts 
ot from native hea 
In his able essay on the ¢! f Life of Alexander the Great,’ Wil- 
liams distinctly lays down, in his map of that period, the seas 
of the Aral and Caspian as distinct bodies of water. The 
same separation is given by Rennell, in his map of the twenty 
satrapies of Darius wy and, whilst in it he indicates 
ow. ea flowing into the Caspian, and the Jaxartes into the 
pen he shows a how the two seas were separated by 
what he terms the high plateau of Samob, the Ust-Urt of the 
Thirlwall, in his ‘ History of Greece,’ plainly leads 
us to roe that the Greeks could have known no thing of the 
region of the Sea of Aral and the mouth of the Jaxartes, ex- 
cept what they derived from the reports of the King of Kha- 
rasmia, who came from a distance in the north to visit Alex-~ 
erage In short, aug is no historical evidence psoas to 
said, 1 ee 
‘On the point of the pe eehistone iomatien, of the m 
the Cas concur with Humboldt. “If we as- 
standing the diminution of surface which the Caspian and 
: fae have undergone in the historical anor from 
