OF CENTRAL AND EASTERN ASIA. 177 



part of the world. These are furnished by the very laudable 

 efforts already alluded to, made by our countrymen in the East, 

 to improve the geography of India, and the neighbouring re- 

 gions, particularly by the recent mission to Caubul. A num- 

 ber of leading points have thus been satisfactorily settled ; and 

 the means are afforded of forming a comparative estimate be- 

 tween Ptolemy's information and that hitherto possessed by 

 modern geographers. 



One of the leading questions in Indian geography, has al- 

 ways been that relating to the course of the five great rivers 

 that water the Punjab. It was ascertained by the gentlemen 

 attached to the Caubul mission, that these, after forming two 

 great branches, at length united into one, and poured their 

 waters into the Indus by that common channel. They had 

 uniformly been represented before as falling by two separate 

 and somewhat distant channels. This is justly noticed by a 

 learned writer in the Edinburgh Review, as one of the most 

 important recent geographical discoveries. It certainly was 

 such to the moderns : but it merely restored the delineation 

 which had been given, nearly two thousand years before, by 

 Ptolemy. His map exhibits the five rivers, which, after form- 

 ing two great branches, unite and fall into the Indus, precisely 

 in the manner described by Mr Elphinstone. Pliny's testi- 

 mony is to the same effect ; he describes the Hydaspes falling 

 into the Indus, quatuor alios amnes afferentem. 



In endeavouring to prove the imperfection of Ptolemy's 

 knowledge relative to the north of India, M. Gosselin point- 

 edly refers to his placing the source of the Ganges in the 

 Imaus (Himalaya) instead of deriving it from Thibet. Here 

 also, however, Ptolemy happens to be in the right. In 1808, 

 the Supreme Government of Bengal, at the instance of the late 

 Colonel Colebrooke, sent a mission to explore the origin of 



Vol. VIII. P. I. Z ' this 



