1865.] Notes on Central Asia. 115 
better favoured regions of the West. It was here, namely, in Djun- 
garia, and on the fertile and smiling banks of the Ili 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 Huropean 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 
‘Plano Carpini (1246), Andre Songjumel (1249) and Wilhelm 
Rubriquis (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 Getum of 
Armenia (likewise in the middle of the thirteenth century) for the pur- 
