1886.] Geography and Travels, 877 
Aral basins; it has no river deposits, and Caspian shells extend 
far up it. Our author classes the sandhills into dunes—river 
dunes and lake dunes, formed by the combined action of wind 
and water, and Jaréhans, formed by wind only, and always cres- 
centic or hoof-shaped. 
Asiatic News.—The curious and almost inaccessible country 
of Dardistan and’ Shinoki, on the Upper Indus, peopled by 
Aryans who have embraced Sunni Mahommedanism, was tra- 
versed in various directions by Ahmad Ali, a sub-surveyor. His 
laborious journey is described in the Annual Report of the Indian 
Survey for 1883—84, but scarcely, according to the Marquis of 
orne, with the prominence it deserves. Although M. Need- 
Jam met wijh no rivers answering to the Sanpo in his recent 
journey to Rima; so that it seems almost certain that the Sanpo 
Must turn south much farther to the west, must, in fact, be the 
Dihong branch of the Brahmaputra, the question is not yet set- 
tled by actual exploration. The Dihong, at the highest point 
reached, flows through precipitous gorges in one of the most 
rugged countries of the world, peopled by fierce and independent 
mountain tribes, The Indian Survey Report for 1883—’4 con- 
tains a detailed account, with map, of Lake Palti or Yamdok-cho 
(said to be ring-shaped with a central island), in Southern Thibet. 
The agent of the survey has made a complete circuit of the lake, 
and has proved that the supposed central island is a peninsula, 
Separating two bays. Yamdok-cho means scorpion, and these 
two bays form the claws. The lake lies on the road between 
Shigatze and Lhasa, at an altitude of 13,800 feet. It is embos- 
med by mountains except at its eastern extremity, where the 
heights die away into a verdant plain, on which thousands of cat- 
“and horses graze. Villages and monasteries are dotted around 
the small bays of the shores. Explorations in the Himalayas 
ve brought to light the large Lhobra river, which has been 
ced to within a day’s march of the Bhotan frontier. A native 
Surveyor completed the circuit of Kinchinjinga, so that the 
boundary between Northeastern Nepal and Thibet can now be 
Slineated Tyr. Gottsche who of behalf of the Japanese 
Sovernment has traveled widely over Corea, visiting eighty of 
the 350 district towns, states that granite, gneiss and crystalline 
Schists are predominant in the geology of the peninsula. Here 
and there they are broken by the older volcanic formations. Pal- 
®0z0ic strata occur rarely, and the later sedimentary formations 
That all (?). The only metal in which Corea is rich, is iron. 
e fauna is extensive and interesting from the fact that palzarc- 
i and sub-tropical types meet here. From a communication 
“a M. Nikolsky to the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists, it 
“ppears that Lake Balkash is drying up, the lowering of the level 
Gite to two feet in ten years. Maps of 1852 prove that since | 
«t time a great reduction of surface has taken place. The 
