3. The mountain system of the Kuen-lün (Kurkun or Kulkun), if we include in it the Hindu-Coosh and its western prolongation in the Persian Elbourz and Demavend, is, next to the American Cordillera of the Andes, the longest line of elevation on the surface of our planet. Where the north-and-south chain of Bolor intersects the Kuen-lün at right angles, the latter takes the name of the Thsung-ling (Onion Mountains), which is also given to a part of the Bolor at the eastern angle of intersection. The Kuen-lün, forming the northern boundary of Thibet, runs very regularly in an east and west direction, in the latitude of 36°. In the meridian of H’lassa an interruption takes place from the great mountain knot which surrounds the alpine lake of Khuku-noor, the Sing-so-hai, or Starry Sea, so celebrated in the mythical geography of the Chinese. The somewhat more northerly chains of Nan-schan and Kilian-schan may almost be regarded as an easterly prolongation of the Thian-schan. They extend to the Chinese wall near Liang-tscheu. West of the intersection of the Bolor and Kuen-lün (the Thsung-ling) I think I have been the first to shew (Asie Centrale, T. i. p. 23, and 118-159; T. ii. p. 431-434 and 465) that the corresponding direction of the axes of the Kuen-lün and the Hindu-Coosh (both being east and west, whereas the Himalaya is south-east and north-west) makes it reasonable to regard the Hindu-Coosh as a continuation, not of the Himalaya, but of the Kuen-lün. From the Taurus in Lycia to Kafiristan, through an extent of 45 degrees of longitude, this chain follows the parallel of Rhodes, or the diaphragm of Dicearchus. The grand geognostical view of Eratosthenes (Strabo, Lib. ii. p. 68; Lib. xi. p. 490 and 511; and Lib. xv. p. 689), which is farther developed by Marinus of Tyre, and Ptolemy, and according to which “the continuation of the Taurus in Lycia extends across the whole of Asia to India, in one and the same direction,” appears to have been partly founded on statements which reached the Persians and Indians from the Punjaub. “The Brahmins affirm,” says Cosmas Indicopleustes, in his Christian Topography, (Mountfauçon, Collectio nova Patrum, T. ii. p. 137) “that a line drawn from Tzinitza (Thinæ) across Persia and Romania, exactly cuts the middle of the inhabited earth.” It is deserving of notice that Eratosthenes had so early remarked that this longest axis of elevation in the Old Continent, in the parallels of 35-1/2° and 36°, points directly through the basin (or depression) of the Mediterranean to the Pillars of Hercules. (Compare Asie Centrale, T. i. p. 23 and 122-138; T. ii. p. 430-434, with Kosmos, Bd. ii. S. 222 and 438, p. 188, and note 292, Engl. ed.) The easternmost part of the Hindu-Coosh is the Paropanisus of the ancients, the Indian Caucasus of the companions of Alexander. The now generally used term of Hindu-Coosh, belongs, as may be seen from the Travels of the Arab Ibn Batuta (English version, p. 97), to a single mountain pass on