We had purposed to conclude this paper with a sketch of the journeys of previous travellers in Tibet, and some details of the last very interesting one from which we have derived many particulars, but we have now room for only very brief indications. The name of Tibet appears to have first become known to Europe in the itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish Rabbi, who travelled to the far East about the year 1160. He mentions that country as producing musk, but errs widely in placing it only four days' journey from Samarkand. In the succeeding century, when the flood of Mongolian conquest, under Jenghiz and his successors, dissolved all political barriers, and brought the civilisations of the East and West for the first time in contact, a greater amount of intercourse ensued between Europe and interior Asia than has ever occurred before or since. At the noise of the coming Tartars, Europe stood amazed, and even the bewildered Danes were deterred for one season from starting for their herring fishery on our northern shores, lest they should fall into the hands of this mysterious foe. Pouring over Hungary and Poland to the frontiers of Silesia, they defeated and cut in pieces the duke of that country with his army, and it seemed as if the knell of Christendom had sounded, when providentially the death of the great Khan summoned the host back into Tartary; and the invasion of Western Europe, though often threatened, was never resumed. Embassies from the Roman Pontiff and European princes, at first of intercession and supplication, afterwards on more equal terms, when the dread of the Khan had passed away, were despatched and reciprocated. Monks of Flanders, France, and Italy, visited the seat of the Grand Khan, and a Latin archiepiscopate was established in Pekin. French artists worked in gold and silver for the court of Kara-Korum, and a banished Englishman was the first ambassador from the Tartars to the king of Hungary; whilst Mongols of distinction found their way to Rome, to Barcelona, to Paris, to London, to Northampton. "The arts, the faith, and the language of the nations of Asia became a subject of curiosity and study, and it was even proposed to establish a Tartar chair in the university of Paris."[18] [18] REMUSAT, quoted in Huc. During this extraordinary intercourse, which continued for a century and a half, the lines of travel eastward lay generally to the north of Tibet, and hints of its existence are rare and slight. Marco Polo, indeed, who travelled in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, devotes two of his Herodotean chapters to "the Province of Thibet." A few particulars, such as the existence of powerful dogs, of the musk animal, and the current use of salt in barter, are recognisable, but the country referred to is apparently the wild and rugged region of the Si-fan, towards the east and north-east of Tibet.