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Show 90 STEPPES AND DESERTS. ness j and I could not therefore compare my determinations of the height of perpetual snow in the Cordilleras of Quito, or the mountains of Mexico, with any corresponding determinations in the East. The important journey of Turner, Davis, and Saunders to the highlands of Thibet does indeed belong to the year 1783, but Colebrooke justly remarks, that tl1e elevation given by Turner to the Schamalari (lat 28° 5', long. 89° 30', a little to the north of Tassisudan) rests on foundations as slight as those of the so-called measurements of the heights seen from Patna and the Kafiristan by Colonel Crawford and Lieutenant Macartney. (Compare Turner, in the Asiatic Researches, vol. xii. p. 234, with Elphinstone's Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, 1815, p. 95, and Francis Hamilton, Account of Nepal, 1819, p. 92.) The excellent observations and writings of Webb, Hodgson, Herbert, and the brothers Gerard, have thrown great and certain light on the elevation of the colossal summits of the Himalaya j yet, in 1808, the hypsometric knowledge of this great Indian chain was still so uncertain that Webb wrote to Colebrooke: "The height of the Himalaya still remains a problem. I find, indeed, that the summits visible from the high plain of Rohilcund are 21,000 English feet above that plain, but we do not know the absolute height above the sea." It was not until the beginning of the year 1820 that it began to be reported in Europe, that not only were there, in the Himalaya, summits much higher than those of the Cordilleras, but also that Webb had seen in the Pass of Nati, and Moorcroft in the Thibetian plateau of Daba and the Sacred Lakes, fine pastures and flourishing fields of corn, at altitudes far exceeding the height of Mont Blanc. These accounts were received in England with much incredulity, and were met by doubts respecting the influence of refraction. I have shown the groundlessness of these doubts in two memoirs (Sur les Montagnes de l'Inde), printed in the Annales de Chimie ct de Physique. The Tyrolese Jesuit, P. Tiefenthaler, who in 1766 penetrated into the provinces of Kemaun and Nepal, had already divined the importance of the Dhawalagiri. We read on his map, "Montes Albi, qui Indis Dolaghir, nive obsiti." Captain Webb always uses the same name. Until the measurements of the Djawahir (lat. 30° 22'1 long. 79° 58'1 altitude 4027 toises, or 25,750 English feet) |