the elevated regions from which the waters first retreated, (geologists in general were long averse to the theory of elevation), must also have received the first germs of civilisation. Hebraizing systems of geology, and views connected with the Deluge and supported by local traditions, favoured these assumptions. The intimate connection between time and space, between the beginnings of social order and the plastic character of the surface of the earth, lent to the supposed “uninterrupted Plateau of Tartary” a peculiar importance, and an almost moral interest. Acquisitions of positive knowledge, the late matured fruit of scientific travels and direct measurements, as well as of a fundamental study of Asiatic languages and literature especially those of China, have gradually demonstrated the inaccuracies and exaggerations of those wild hypotheses. The mountain plains (ὁροπέδια) of Central Asia are no longer regarded as the cradle of civilization and the primitive seat of all arts and sciences. The ancient nation of Bailly’s Atlantis, happily described by d’Alembert as “having taught us everything but their own name and existence,” has vanished. The supposed inhabitants of the Oceanic Atlantis had already been treated, in the time of Posidonius, in a no less derisive manner. (Strabo, lib. ii. p. 102; and lib. xiii. p. 598, Casaub.) A plateau of considerable but very unequal elevation, having the names of Gobi, Scha-mo (sand desert), Scha-ho (sand river), and Hanhai, runs in a SSW.-NNE. direction, with little interruption, from Eastern Thibet towards the mountain knot of Kentei south of Lake Baikal. This swelling of the ground is probably anterior to the elevation of the mountain chains by which it is intersected; it is situated, as already remarked, between 79° and 116° long. from Paris, (81° and 118° E. from Greenwich). Measured at right angles to its longitudinal axis, its breadth is, in the south between Ladak, Gertop, and H’lassa, (the seat of the great Lama,) 720 geographical miles; between Hami in the Celestial Mountains, and the great bend of the Hoang-ho near the In-schan chain, hardly 480; and in the north, between the Khanggai, where the great city of Karakhorum once stood, and the chain of Khin-gan-Petscha, which runs north and south (in the part of the Gobi traversed in travelling from Kiachta by Urga to Pekin) 760 geographical miles. The whole extent of this swelling ground, which must be carefully distinguished from the far more elevated mountain range to the east, may be approximately estimated, taking its inflections into account, at about three times the area of France. The map of the mountain ranges and volcanoes of Central Asia (Carte der Bergketten und Vulkane von Central-Asien), constructed by me in 1839, but not published until 1843, shows in the clearest manner the hypsometric relations between the mountain ranges and the Gobi plateau. It was founded on the critical employment of all the