MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY. 13 



REPORT OF THE STURGIS-HOOPER PROFESSOR. 



By Professor William M. Davis. 



The preparation of a report on my journey across Turkestan 

 in the summer of 1903 as a member of Mr. Raphael Pumpelly's 

 Carnegie Institution expedition has occupied much time during 

 the past winter. A careful revision has been made, as far as the 

 resources of our libraries permit, of the later Russian explorations 

 in the Aralo-Caspian region, the plains of Turkestan, and the 

 mountains on the south and east, essays by Mushketof, Konshin, 

 Obruchef, and Bogdanovitch having proved especially helpful. 

 The chief results of my own studies are as follows : The large 

 area of the Quaternary Caspian, as recorded in the elevated shore 

 lines at Baku on the west coast and at Krasnovodsk on the east 

 coast, followed a prolonged period of smaller area and low water 

 level, and was not, as the earlier observers supposed, a stage in the 

 reduction from the still larger Pliocene Caspian. The plains of 

 southern Turkestan present every appearance of having been 

 aggraded by the rivers that now flow out upon them, and thus 

 offer an interesting illustration of the condition through which the 

 Great Plains, piedmont to the Rocky Mountains, are supposed to 

 have passed. The Tian Shan, where my party crossed this moun- 

 tain system in the neighborhood of Son-kul and Issik-kul, appeared 

 to have been once worn down to small relief over large areas, be- 

 fore it was warped and raised in blocks to its present altitude and 

 dissected to its present form : while the steppes to the east and 

 northeast of Lake Balkash represent worn-down areas of the same 

 ancient mountain system, not yet again lifted to great altitudes. 

 Lectures upon the journey have been given before the Geograph- 

 ical Societies of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Wash- 

 ington, as well as before the Harvard Travellers Club, in 

 Cambridge, and the Boston Society of Natural History and the 

 Appalachian Mountain Club, in Boston. 



Mr. Ellsworth Huntington, my associate in Turkestan, remained 

 there after my return home, and made an interesting journey 

 through the heart of the Tian Shan to Kashgar in the Tarim basin 



