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48 a railway from the Caspian to the Aral. It should here be stated that if the bed of the Uzboi is to be utilised as the road for this line it will require to be levelled almost as carefully as if it were to receive the Oxus; and consequently the expense in this particular would not be much greater for either project. But is not Herr Kiepert a little rash in making this sweeping assertion, or rather, which is more to the point, do Russian authorities take the same gloomy view of its feasibility? "Whoever knows anything of Russian official and scientilic circles will at once say that they do not, as witness the absurdly over-sanguine meeting of the Imperial Geographical Society just quoted. The principal points of Herr Kiepert' s criticism are the following. He begins by calling attention to the "re-appearance of the great Central Asian sea-serpent, that 'dream of Slav credulity,' the restoration of the Amou Darya, or Oxus, to its ancient bed; and he considers that General Stebnitzki's report of his explorations in 1873-5 brings down to its real proportions a 'warmed-up myth' which has at times dazzled Russian ambition and ignorance, from Peter the Great's days to ours, with the extravagant idea of the possession of an uninterrupted waterway from Moscow to Khulm or Kundus—that is, to within about one hundred miles from the Hindoo Koosh. It has been conclusively shown by Von Gojen and Lerch that the statements and traditions of the ancient Arabs and others, which describe the Oxus as once flowing, not, as now, into the Aral, but into the Caspian, were mere speculative combinations exclusively based on the fact