To many readers, possibly, the name of Tibet calls up but a vague and shadowy image of a sort of eastern Lapland, which serves as a top-margin to the map of Hindostan, and produces lamas, generally understood to be a species of shawl goats from whose fleece the Messrs Nicol make world-renowned paletôts. Our purpose, then, is to define our ideas of the region called Tibet, and to gather together as we may, from old and new sources, some picture more or less dim and fragmentary of the land and its inhabitants. Conquerors and congresses may make rivers the frontiers of polities and zollvereins, but mountains are the true boundaries of races.[9] The Rhine may part Germany from France, but the Vosges, not the Rhine, parts the German from the Frenchman. Not Tweed, but the Grampians, have marked in our native land the marches of Celt and Saxon. On the side of the Five Rivers the Indian population shades gradually from the true Hindoo into the shaggy robber of the valleys west of the Indus; at the extremity of the peninsula the Tamul tribes of the continent have peopled the coast of Ceylon, as the ancient Belgæ peopled the coast of Kent. But along the northern limit of India runs a barrier which, "With snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds," dividing the Caucasian from the Mongolian race now as completely as it did two or three thousand years ago. [9] _Vide_ Greek Lexicon--Ορος--A mountain; Ὁρος--A boundary. From the plains of the Punjab, hard baked beneath the blazing May sun--from the dusty levels of Sirhind, where meagre acacias cheat the eye with promise of shade--from the long lines of thatched pyramids that greet the traveller in the Doab, as he approaches a British cantonment--eastward through the rich misgoverned tracts of populous Oude, that year by year pour forth their streams of stalwart soldiers, servants, and labourers, to push their fortune in the service of the Kumpanee Buhadoor or its representatives--still eastward from the fertile prairies of Tirhoot and Purneea--from the bamboo thickets and rice swamps of northern Bengal--yet far eastward from the _ultima Thule_ of Anglo-Indian power, where the majestic flood of Burrampooter sweeps down into Assam from the unknown hills--from all these "Dusk faces with white muslin turbans wreathed" look northward through the clear morning air on the same mighty Himalaya,[10] stretching beyond their ken its awful barrier of unchanging snow. [10] _Hema-alya_, _i. e._ Hiemis Aula--The abode of snow.