116 Notes on Central Asia. [No. 3, 



pose of paying homage to the great Khan ; they, however, either left no 

 description of their journey, or else their accounts are so meagre and 

 confused, as for instance, the narrative of Prince (return, that very few 

 of the places mentioned in them can be identified. Much later, in 

 1651, Fedor Isakonitch Baikof, the envoy of the Russian Tsar Aleksei 

 Fedorovitch, proceeded past lake Faisan, and the upper course of the 

 Black Irtysh, and traversed the whole of Djungaria, reaching the 

 Chinese Avail at Huhu-Hoton from whence he advanced to Pekin. 



Although Baikof's marche-route (of course not in the form it is 

 inserted in Wilson's work from which it was derived by Bitter, hut 

 in the shape we find it in Spasskis' " Sibirski Vestnik") can, in 

 the present state of our knowledge of the geography of Central Asia, 

 be pretty readily applied to certain localities, still the information it 

 contains is of a meagre character, and is greatly inferior to native 

 Chinese accounts. 



The Southern border of the country now under consideration, 

 i. e. the gigantic Celestial range, has not been explored by any 

 European traveller up to the present day. The destruction, how- 

 ever, of the kingdom of Djungaria, by the Chinese, led to its being 

 surveyed under the superintendence of the European missionaries 

 Felix d'Arocha and Hallerstein, by whom astronomical points were 

 determined, not alone in the towns of Djungaria and Little Bukhara, 

 but also at the very foot of the Celestial range, as at Hongor Olen 

 the modern Konur-Ulen, and on the Southern shore of lake Issyk- 

 Kul. As the Jesuits have left no record whatever of their having 

 visited any part of the Celestial range, it must be naturally concluded 

 that they themselves did not diverge from the highroads of Central 

 Asia, but detached a party of Chinese topographers, instructed by 

 themselves, to the base of the Celestial mountains. 



The first learned Russian traveller who penetrated into the part 

 of Inner Asia described in the present volume, was the botanist Sivers, 

 who in his hazardous and venturesome journey to the Tarbagatai, in 

 1793, advanced as far as 47° N. Latitude. During the succeeding forty 

 years, not one of the scientific explorers of Western Siberia succeeded 

 in parsing beyond the point previously reached by Sivers. 



The journey of K. A. Meyer in 1826, did not extend beyond the 

 Arkat mountains, Chingiz-tan, and the Karkara district of the Kirghiz; 

 Steppe. The travels of Huinboh.lt, and his associates, in 1828, did 



