The basin of Kashmir, which has been so enthusiastically praised by Bernier, and too moderately estimated by Victor Jacquemont, has also given occasion to great hypsometric exaggerations. Jacquemont found by an accurate barometric measurement that the height of the Wulur Lake, in the valley of Kashmir, near the capital Sirinagur, was 5346 feet. Uncertain determinations by the boiling point of water gave Baron Carl von Hügel 5819 feet, and Lieutenant Cunningham only 5052 feet.[BG] The mountainous districts of Kashmir, which has excited so great an interest in Germany, and whose climatic advantages have lost somewhat of their reputation since Carl von Hügel’s account of the four months of winter snow in the streets of Sirinagur,[BH] does not lie on the high crests of the Himalaya, as has commonly been supposed, but constitutes a true cauldron-like valley on their southern declivity. On the south-west, where the rampart-like Pir Panjal separates it from the Indian Punjaub, the snow-crowned summits are covered, according to Vigne, by basaltic and amygdaloid formations. The latter are very characteristically termed by the natives _schischak deyu_, or devil’s pock-marks.[BI] The charms of the vegetation have also been very differently described, according as travellers passed into Kashmir from the south, and left behind them the luxuriant and varied vegetation of India; or from the northern regions of Turkestan, Samarkand, and Ferghana. Moreover, it is only very recently that we have obtained a clearer view regarding the elevation of Thibet, the level of the plateau having long been uncritically confounded with the mountain tops rising from it. Thibet occupies the space between the two great chains of the Himalaya and the Kuen-lün, and forms the elevated ground of the valley between them. The land is divided from east to west, both by the inhabitants and by Chinese geographers, into three parts. We distinguish Upper Thibet, with its capital, H’lassa (probably 9592 feet high); Middle Thibet, with the town of Leh or Ladak (9995 feet); and Little Thibet, or Baltistan, called the Thibet of Apricots (Sari-Butan), in which lie Iskardo (6300 feet), Gilgit, and south of Iskardo, but on the left bank of the Indus, the plateau Deotsuh, whose elevation was determined by Vigne (11,977 feet). On carefully examining all the notices we have hitherto possessed regarding the three Thibets, and which will have been abundantly augmented during the present year by the brilliant boundary surveying expedition under the auspices of the Governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, we soon become convinced that the region between the Himalaya and the Kuen-lün is no unbroken table-land, but that it is intersected by mountain groups, which undoubtedly belong to perfectly distinct systems of elevation. Actual plains are very few in number: the most considerable are those