In mounting from the plains of India over the arduous passes, ranging from 12,000 to 20,000 feet above the sea, through which the pressure of human need, curiosity, and superstition, has forced a scanty and intermittent stream of intercourse, the traveller, after traversing the last ridge of the Himalaya, instead of having to descend again to the level of the southern regions, finds himself but little raised above a vast table-land, in some places extending in barren wastes of plain, or of bare monotonous hills, intersected by sudden deep valleys or great ravines, in which the rivers flow and the few villages are scattered; in others forming an endless alternation of lofty mountain ranges and low valleys, but the bottom of these last still many thousand feet above the plains of the Indian peninsula. To this elevated region, stretching from the Indus north-west of Kashmeer, to the extremest point of Assam, and somewhat farther east, a space of more than 1500 miles, the name of Tibet applies. The limits of its extent northward are somewhat more vague; but if they be considered to include a breadth of three or four degrees of latitude (33°-36°) towards the western extremity, and of nine or ten degrees (28°-38°) in the eastern and widest part, the estimate will not be far wrong. The identity throughout this "very large and long countrey," (to borrow the expression of an old traveller,) consists in the general use of the same language and customs, the prevalence, except in the extreme west, of the same faith, and the possession of the same religious books, written or printed in a character common to all. To these we might perhaps add the domestication of the shawl-goat and the yak throughout the whole territory. The name of Tibet does not appear to be known, or at least applied, either in the country itself or by its Hindoo neighbours. Tubbet, or Tobot, is stated to have been the Mongolian appellation of a nation who anciently occupied the mountainous country on the north-west confines of China. Our old travellers doubtless learned the word from the Mongols; and from them also it has been adopted as the name of the high country north of India, in all the Mussulman languages of Western Asia. It was more particularly, perhaps, applied in these to Balti and Ladakh, the two most westerly districts, which, in the time of Bernier, were commonly distinguished as Little and Great Tibet. The natives apply to their country the name of Bód or Pót, and as Bhoteeas they are themselves known in Hindostan; though the appellation of Bhotan has in our geography-books come to be confined to a small dependency of Tibet bordering on the north of Assam, where the race comes most closely in contact with our knowledge and the British power, just as our forefathers gave the title of Dutch specially to that fraction of the Teutonic or _Deutsch_ race which most nearly adjoined their shores.