Forty camels have very recently been introduced into Java, from Teneriffe[AZ]. The first experiment has been made in Samarang. In like manner, reindeer were only introduced into Iceland from Norway in the course of the last century. They were not found there when the island was first colonised, notwithstanding its proximity to East Greenland, and the existence of floating masses of ice.[BA] Footnote 10: p. 3—“_Between the Altai and the Kuen-lün_.” The great highland, or, as it is commonly called, the mountain plateau of Asia, which comprises the lesser Bucharia, Songaria, Thibet, Tangut, and the Mogul country of the Chalcas and Olotes, is situated between the 36th and 48th degrees of north latitude and the meridians of 81° and 118° E. long. It is an erroneous idea to represent this part of the interior of Asia as a single, undivided mountainous swelling, continuous like the plateaux of Quito and Mexico, and situated from seven to upwards of nine thousand feet above the level of the sea. I have already shown in my “_Researches respecting the Mountains of Northern India_,[BB]” that there is not in this sense any continuous mountain plateau in the interior of Asia. My views concerning the geographical distribution of plants, and the mean degree of temperature requisite for certain kinds of cultivation, had early led me to entertain considerable doubts regarding the continuity of a great Tartarian plateau between the Himalaya and the chain of the Altai. This plateau continued to be characterized, as it had been described by Hippocrates, as “the high and naked plains of Scythia, which, without being crowned with mountains, rise and extend to beneath the constellation of the Bear.”[BC] Klaproth has the undeniable merit of having been the first to make us acquainted with the true position and prolongation of two great and entirely distinct chains of mountains,—the Kuen-lün and the Thian-schan, in a part of Asia which better deserves to be termed “central,” than Kashmeer, Baltistan, and the Sacred Lakes of Thibet (the Manasa and the Ravanahrada). The importance of the Celestial Mountains (the Thian-schan) had indeed been already surmised by Pallas, without his being conscious of their volcanic character; but this highly-gifted investigator of nature, led astray by the hypotheses of the dogmatic and fantastic geology prevalent in his time, and firmly believing in “chains of mountains radiating from a centre,” saw in the Bogdo Oola (the _Mons Augustus_, or culminating point of the Thian-schan,) such “a central node, whence all the other Asiatic mountain chains diverge in rays, and which dominates over all the rest of the continent!”