1805.] Notes on Central Ada. 115 



better favoured regions of the West. It was here, namely, in Djun- 

 garia, and on the fertile and smiling hanks of the Hi and Irtysh, that 

 the migrating hordes lingered for some time, both, as it were, to 

 venture out into the unknown plain stretching before them far away 

 into the sandy ocean that separates Europe from Asia, until a new 

 tide of popular migration forced them at last to strike their tents, 

 and depart westwards from their mountainous halting grounds. It is 

 also in the valleys of Djungaria that a few existing rude monuments, 

 crude traditions, geographical names, and remnants of tribes who, in 

 many cases, have lost their native dialect by intermixture with other 

 races (the result of which appears in the name of Kassak or Kerghiz 

 Kaisak), serve the scientific explorer as the only links for identifying 

 the obscure and fragmentary allusions concerning these migrated 

 hordes, which occur in Chinese and Russian chronicles. 



Although the physical and ethnographical characteristics of Central 

 Asia have attracted the constant attention of some of the most learned 

 men, such as Humboldt, Ritter, Abel Remusat, and Klaproth, the 

 researches of these leaders of science could only be based on the 

 most meagre data, namely on the dry and one-sided Chinese narratives 

 which found a place in Chinese literature, from the period of the 

 dismemberment of the Djungarian kingdom in the middle of the last 

 century, and also on the inaccurate, brief and conflicting accounts and 

 itineraries of a few Asiatics, who succeeded in visiting Djungaria and 

 Little Bokhara with caravans. All these materials were collected 

 and carefully collated by Ritter and Humboldt ; nevertheless this 

 region remained up to the most recent period, like the interior 

 of Africa, completely inaccessible to European science. 



Even Marco Polo, the most enterprising and reliable traveller of 

 the middle ages, did not visit this region, but proceeded eastwards to 

 China by a route that lay southward of the Celestial range. A few 

 other travellers, it is true, passed through Djungaria ; these were 

 Piano Carpini (1246), Andre Songjumel (1249) and Wilhelm 

 Rubricjuis (1252) ; and they probably journeyed by way of lake Faisan 

 to Karakorum the capital of the Mongol Khans. 



The same route was traversed by some of the subjugated Western 

 princes, such as Yaroslof and Alexander Nevski of Russia and Gretum of 

 Armenia (likewise in the middle of the thirteenth century) for the pur- 



