The Crimean war poured its light upon Turkey, and under its influence the “sick man of Europe” has become convalescent. His neighbour is now the “sick man of Asia.” He looks wistfully at the remedy of civilisation. Let us hope he may be persuaded to try it. But if Persia is the sick man of Asia, what shall we say of Afghanistan, shut up in his own barbarism, imbued to the core with fanatic bigotry, and steeped in the pride of nationality? Verily, he is very sick—sick unto death. And he knows it, yet he refuses, obstinately and suspiciously, the only remedy that can save his decaying constitution from dissolution. Is he to be left to his fate? or will the physician appear in good time and patch up his broken frame? These are questions for serious reflection, because the patient is our neighbour, and his fate cannot be a matter of indifference to us. The region whose past history and present condition I have thus briefly alluded to is comprised within the fiftieth and seventieth degrees of east longitude, and the twenty-fifth and thirty-fifth degrees of north latitude. Its length is about twelve hundred miles, and its breadth about six hundred. Its most characteristic features are its general elevation, and the fact that no river from its interior reaches the sea. It forms, in fact, a great elevated block, interposed between the basin of the Caspian and the low-lying valley of Turkistan on the north, and the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea on the south, and is bounded east and west by the valleys of the Indus and the Tigris respectively. The area thus limited geographically, in contradistinction to its political boundaries, presents some remarkable physical peculiarities, which may be considered characteristic of the whole region. Its mountain system, its river system, its deserts, and its plains, all offer special features for notice. Its mountains, girding it on all sides, shut it off from surrounding countries. By their internal disposition they divide the region into two distinct parts, and form a natural boundary separating three distinct races—the Persian, the Afghan, and the Uzbak. Its rivers, owing to this internal disposition of the mountains, are directed in three different directions. Those of Persia mostly converge to the south-east of its territory; those of Afghanistan converge to the south-west of its territory; and those to the north of the mountain chain that separates these two systems, flow northward to the swamps, tracts lying between the lower course of the Oxus and the Caspian. Its deserts, too, by the same internal disposition of the mountains, are divided into three distinct sets—those of Persia and Afghanistan, lying one on either side of the mountain range separating these two countries, and that of Turkistan, lying to the north of the same range, in the angle formed by the mountains that converge from east and west to produce it.