It is only within the present year that it has been trigonometrically measured with exactness, and as I learn from India through the same channel, “that a new measurement of the Dhawalagiri still leaves it the first place among all the snow-crowned summits of the Himalaya,” this mountain must necessarily have a greater elevation than the 28,072 feet hitherto ascribed to it.[CD] The point of deflection in the direction of the chain is, near the Dhawalagiri, in 81° 22′, east longitude. From thence the Himalaya no longer follows a due west direction, but runs from S.E. to N.W., as a vast connecting system of veins between Mozufer-abad and Gilgit, merging into a part of the Hindoo-Coosh chain in the south of Kafiristan. Such a turn and alteration in the line of the axis of elevation of the Himalaya (from E.-W. to S.E.-N.W.) certainly indicates, as in the western region of our European Alpine mountains, a different age or period of elevation. The course of the Upper Indus, from the sacred lakes of Manasa and Itavana-hrada, (at an elevation of 14,965 feet,) in the vicinity of which this great river takes its origin, to Iskardo, and to the plateau of Deotsuh (at an elevation of 12,994 feet), measured by Vigne, follows in the Thibetian highlands the same north-westerly direction as the Himalaya. Here are situated the Djawahir, whose height was long since accurately determined at 26,902 feet, and the Alpine valley of Caschmere (never visited by winds or storms), where, at an elevation of only 5346 feet, lies the lake of Wulur, which freezes every winter, and whose surface is never broken by a single ripple. After considering the four great mountain systems of Asia, which, in their normal geognostic character, are true parallel chains, we must turn to the long series of _alternating_ elevations following a direction from north to south, and which extend from Cape Comorin, opposite to the island of Ceylon, to the Icy Sea, alternating between the parallels of 66° and 77° east longitude, from S.S.E. to N.N.W. To this system of meridian chains, whose alternations remind us of faults in veins, belong the Ghauts, the Soliman chain, the Paralasa, the Bolor, and the Ural range. This interruption of the profile of the elevation is so constituted, that each new chain begins in a degree of latitude beyond that to which the preceding one had attained, all alternating successively in an opposite direction. The importance which the Greeks (probably not earlier than the second century of our era) attached to these chains running from north to south, induced Agathodæmon and Ptolemy (_Tab._ vii. et viii.) to regard the Bolor under the name of Imaus as an axis of elevation, which extended as far as 62° north latitude into the basin of the lower Irtysch and Obi.[CE]