The erroneous idea of a single boundless and elevated plain, occupying the whole of Central Asia, the “_Plateau de la Tartarie_,” originated in France, in the latter half of the eighteenth century. It was the result of historical combinations, and of a not sufficiently attentive study of the writings of the celebrated Venetian traveller, as well as of the naïve relations of those diplomatic monks who, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (thanks to the unity and extent of the Mogul empire at that time), were able to traverse almost the whole of the interior of the continent, from the ports of Syria and of the Caspian Sea to the east coast of China, washed by the great ocean. If a more exact acquaintance with the language and ancient literature of India were of an older date among us than half a century, the hypothesis of this central plateau, occupying the wide space between the Himalaya and the south of Siberia, would no doubt have sought support from some ancient and venerable authority. The poem of the Mahabharata appears, in the geographical fragment Bhischmakanda, to describe “Meru” not so much as a mountain as an enormous swelling of the land, which supplies with water the sources of the Ganges, those of the Bhadrasoma (Irtysch), and those of the forked Oxus. These physico-geographical views were intermingled in Europe with ideas of other kinds, and with mythical reveries on the origin of mankind. The lofty regions from which the waters were supposed to have first retreated (for geologists in general were long averse to the theories of elevation) must also have received the first germs of civilization. Hebraic systems of geology, based on ideas of a deluge, and supported by local traditions, favoured these assumptions. The intimate connexion between time and space, between the beginning of social order and the plastic condition of the surface of the earth, lent a peculiar importance and an almost moral interest to the Plateau of Tartary, which was supposed to be characterized by uninterrupted continuity. Acquisitions of positive knowledge,—the late matured fruit of scientific travels and direct measurements,—with a fundamental study of the languages and literature of Asia, and more especially of China, have gradually demonstrated the inaccuracy and exaggeration of those wild hypotheses. The mountain plains (ὀροπέδια) of Central Asia are no longer regarded as the cradle of human civilization, and the primitive seat of all arts and sciences. The ancient nation of Bailly’s Atlantis, which d’Alembert has happily described as “having taught us everything but its own name and existence,” has vanished. The inhabitants of the Oceanic Atlantis were already treated, in the time of Posidonius, as having a merely apocryphal existence.[BD]