Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/17

 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

the last ten years the exploration of High Asia which, on our side at least, had long been languid, has revived and advanced with ample strides. So rapid, indeed, has been the aggression upon the limits of the Unknown that in the contemplation of a future historian of geographical discovery it may easily seem that the contraction of those limits in our age might fitly be compared to the rapid evaporation of the cloud with which the breath has tinged a plate of polished steel.

It is hardly a dozen years since our mapmakers had to rely for the most important positions in Chinese Turkestan on the observations of the Jesuit surveyors of the eighteenth century; and as late as the publication of that well-known work of the Messrs. Michell, 'The Russians in Central Asia,' the issue, in the appendix to that book, of a new and corrected transcript of those data, was regarded as of some geographical moment. The incidental notices contained in fragmentary extracts or translations from medieval Persian writers, and the details given in Chinese geographical works, often hard to understand, often themselves (like Ptolemy's Tables) only a conversion into written statement of the graphic representations of loose and inaccurate maps, were painfully studied by those who desired to enlarge or recompile the geography of the great Central basin which lies between the Himalya and the Thian Shan. Indeed, from Samarkand eastward to the caravan-track which leads from the Russian frontier at Kiakhta to the gate of the Great Wall at Kalgan, a space of 47 degrees of longitude, we were entirely dependent on