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Show ANNOTATIONS A D ADDITIONS. 87 I base been the first to show (Asie Centrale, t. i. p. 23, and 118- 159; t. ii. pp. -!31-±3-! and 465) that the corresponding direction of the axes of the Kucn-ltin and the Hindu-Coosh (both being east and west, whereas the Himalaya is south-east and north-west) makes it reasonable to regard the Hindu-Coosh as a continuation, not of the Himalaya, but of the Kuen-ltin. From the Taurus in Lycia to Kafiri tan, through an extent of 45 degrees of longitude, this chain follows the parallel of Rhodes, or the diaphragm of Dicearchus. The grand geognostical view of Eratosthenes (Strabo, lib. ii. p. 68 i lib. xi. pp. 490 and 511; and lib. xv. p. 689), which is farther developed by Marinus of Tyre, and Ptolemy, and according to which "the continuation of the Taurus in Lycia extends across the whole of Asia to India, in one and the same direction," appears to have been partly founded on statements which reached the Persians and Indians from the Punjaub. "The Brahmins affirm," says Cosmas Indicoplcustes, in his Christian Topography (Montfaugon, Collectio nova Patrum, t. ii. p. 137), "that a line drawn from Tzinitza (Thinre) across Persia and Romania, exactly cuts the middle of the inhabited earth." It is deserving of notice that Eratosthenes bad so early remarked that this longest axis of elevation in the Old Continent, in the parallels of 35~ 0 and 36°1 points directly through the basin (or depression) of the Mediterranean to the Pillars of Hercules. (Compare Asie Centrale, t. i. pp. 23 and 122-138 i t. ii. p. 430- 434, with Kosmos, bd. ii. s. 222 and 438, p. 188, and note 292, Engl. ed.) The easternmost part of the Hindu-Coosh is ~he Paropanisus of the ancients, the Indian Caucasus of the companions of Alexander. The now generally used term of Hindu-Coosh belongs, as may be seen from the Travels of the Arab Ibn Batuta (English version, p. 97), to a single mountain pass on which many Indian slaves often perished from cold. The Kuen-ltin, like the Thian-schan, shows igneous outbreaks or eruptions at many hundred miles from the sea. Flames, visible at a great distance, issue from a cavity in the Schin-khieu Mountain. (Asie Centrale, t. ii. pp. 427 and 483, where I have followed the text of Yuen-thong-ki, translated by my friend Stanislas Julien.) The highest summit measured in the HinduCoosh, north-west of Jellalabad, is 3164 toises above the sea (20,132 English feet) i to the west, towards Herat, the chain sinks to 400 |