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Show TEI'PE AND DE EU:rs. 27 the vicinity of the widely extended heat-radia.ting desert. Herds of antelope and wift-footed o triche roam through these vast regions; but, with the exception of the watered Oa es or islands in the sea of sand, some groups of which have recently been discovered, and whose verdant shore are frequented by nomade Tibbos and Tuaricks, (6) the African De ert mu t be regarded as uninhabitable by man. The more civilized nations who dwell on its borders only venture to enter it periodically. By trading routes, which have remained unaltered for thousands of years, caravans traverse the long distance from Tafilet to Timbuctoo, and from l\Ioorzouk to Bornou ; adventurous undertakings, the possibility of which depends upon the existence of the camel, the " ship of the desert/' (9) as it is called in the traditionary language of the Eastern world. These African plains occupy an extent nearly three times as great as that of the neighboring Mediterranean Sea. They are situated partly within1 and partly in the vicinity of the tropics; and on this situation their peculiar character depends. In the eastern part of the Old Continent, the same geognostic phenomenon occurs in the temperate zone. Uii the plateaux of Central Asia, between the gold mountains or the Altai and the Kuen-lun, (1°) from the Chinese wall to beyond the Celestial mountains, and towards the sea of Aral, there extend, through a length of many thousand miles, the most vast, if not the most elevated, Steppes on the surface of the globe. I have myself had the opportunity, fully thirty years after my South American journey, of visiting a portion of them; namely, the Calmuck Kirghis Steppes between the Don, the Volga, the Caspian, and the Chinese lake Dsaisang, being an extent of almost 2800 geographical miles. These Asiatic Steppes, which are sometimes billy and sometimes interrupted by pine forests, possess (dispersed over them in groups) a far more varied vegetation than that of the Llanos and Pampas of Cara.ccas and Buenos Ayres. The finest part of these plains, which is inhabited by Asiatic pastoral tribes, is adorned with low bushes of luxuriant, white-blossomed Rosacere, and with Fritillarias, Tulips, and Cypripedias. As the torrid zone is characterized on the whole by a disposition in all vegetation to become arborescent, so some of the Asiatic |