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Show AN:NOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 75 poem of the Maha.bharat..'t appears, in the geographical fragment Bhischmakanda, to describe "Meru" not so much as a mountain as an enormous elevation of the land, which supplies with water at once the sources of the Ganges, those of the Bhadrasoma (Irtysh), and tho e of the forked O.s:.u . These physico-geographical views were intermingled in Europe with ideas of ot.her kinds, and with mythical reveries relating to the origin of mankind. It was said that the elevated regions from which the waters first retreated, (geologists in general were long averse to the theory of elevation,) must also have receiveJ the first germs of civilization. Hebraizing systems of geology, and views connected with the Deluge and supported by local traditions, favored these assumptions. The intimate connection between time and space, between the beginnings of social order and the plastic character of the surface of the earth, lent to the supposed "uninterrupted Plateau of Tartary" a peculiar importance, and an almost moral interest. Acquisitions of positive knowledge, the late matured fruit of scientific travels and direct measurements, as well as of a fundamental study of Asiatic languages and literature, especially those of China, have gradually demonstrated the inaccuracies and exaggerations of those wild hypotheses. The mountain plains (6po.n:i8•a.) of Central Asia are no longer regarded as the cradle of civilization and the primitive seat of all arts and sciences. The ancient nation of Bailly's Atlantis, happily described by d'Alembert as "having taught us everything but their own name and existence," has vanished. The supposed inhabitants of the Oceanic Atlantis had already been treated, in the time of Posidonius, in a no less derisive manner. (Strabo, lib. ii. p. 102 ; and lib. xiii. p. 598, Casaub.) A plateau of considerable but very unequal elevation, having the names of Gobi, Scha-no (sand desert), Scha-ho (sand river), and Hanhai, runs in a SSW.-NNE. direction, with little interruption, from Eastern Thibet towards the mountain knot of Kemtei south of Lake Baikal. This swelling of the ground is probably anterior to the elevation of the mountain chains by which it is intersected; it is situated, as already remarked, between 79° and 116° long. from Paris, (81 o and 118° E. from Greenwich.) Measured at right angles to its longitudinal axis, its breadth is, in the south between |