is contrived to indicate the construction or combine with it harmoniously, the endless variety in the conditions ensures a perpetual variety in the product, and the inevitable consequence is novelty and progress. The great models, then, assist, instead of stifling originality, and insipid parodies give way to works which in turn are worthy to become standard examples. Though there can never again be a single style which all will unite in maturing, there is nothing to prevent the disciples of the principal schools from steadily advancing in their several departments. A beginning has been made. Amid much that is trite, fantastic, and mistaken, numerous buildings of our day are a vast improvement on the flat, feeble, dreary productions which prevailed for many preceding generations. The enlightened investigation which has revealed to us the inmost spirit of styles, where our fathers travestied their superficial aspect, is the cause of the change; and no means can be more effectual to help on the movement than a History which takes the tour of the globe, which unfolds the aims and methods of all the leading architectures of the world, and which sets forth in a running, perspicuous criticism the beauties we should emulate and the blots we should shun.

ART. VI. —1. Mémoire sur la partie Méridionale de l'Asie Centrale. Par Nicolas de Khanikoff. Paris, 1862.

2. Mémoire sur l'Ethnographie de la Perse.

Khanikoff. Paris, 1866.

Par Nicolas de

3. Journal of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, St. Petersburg.

4. Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London. Vol. X. No. IV. London, 1866.

5. Le Livre de Marco Polo. Par M. G. Panthier. Par M. G. Panthier. Paris, 1865. 6. Invalide Russe. 1866.

CENT

YENTRAL Asia' is a conventional rather than a strictly geographical title. The name is not confined to that particular portion of Asia which is centrically situated in respect to latitude and longitude. It is rather used as a convenient and general designation for the whole interior of the continent, and is thus made to cover a greater or less extent of territory, according as the writers who employ it refer to the ethnology, or the physical geography, or the political distribution of the countries which are contained within its limits.

In the present sketch, which proposes to consider our sources

of information with regard to these countries, as well as their actual condition and prospects, Central Asia must be understood to mean the regions which intervene between the Russian empire to the north and the British-Indian empire to the south, including, perhaps, a portion of the Persian province of Khorassan to the west, and Chinese Turkestan to the east.

When Alexander von Humboldt, a quarter of a century ago, compiled his celebrated work on the Orography and Comparative Climatology of Central Asia,' though the materials at his disposal for gaining a general acquaintance with those subjects were most abundant, yet he often found himself at fault in searching for precise and trustworthy details. He himself had proceeded no further than Lake Zaisan, at the foot of the southern slopes of the Altai; and the Ili River, which disembogues into the Balkash Lake, at a short distance to the southwest, was the extreme limit of Russian scientific exploration.

At that time no traveller from the North had invaded the solitudes of the Thian-Shan since the Jesuit commission of the preceding century, nor had any adventurous Englishman penetrated as yet to the icy summits of the Kara-koram and Kuen-Luen. Since then, however, vast additions have been made to our accurate knowledge of these regions. Not only have the theodolite and barometer been extensively used along both the mountain-chains, which bound the plateau of Chinese Turkestan to the north and south; but hardy travellers, passing in disguise through the length and breadth of the land, have visited all the principal cities of Central Asia, have mixed familiarly with the tribesmen and villagers, and-except in regard to some par

The Chinese Emperor Tsian-lun (or Khian-loung, according to Klaproth) appointed a commission, consisting of a German Jesuit, Hallerstein, with two assistants, Felix d'Arocha and Espinha, to accompany the expedition which he sent against the Eleuths of Zungaria in 1755, for the purpose of determining the astronomical position of all the principal sites in Central Asia; and the results of their observations were subsequently embodied in an official map published at Pekin. This map was translated by Klaproth, from a comparison of several copies, and published by him at Berlin in 1833; and it has served as the basis of all our Central Asiatic geography until modern times. The Russians, indeed, who through M. Zakharof, Consul at Kulja, have recently acquired a more authentic register of the Jesuit observations, still maintain their rigid accuracy; but our Indian Trigonometrical Survey, which has been now pushed into Tartary, does not bear out this favourable verdict to the same extent-Mr. Johnson's planetable survey, for instance, giving 79° 25' for the approximate longitude of Khoten, while the Jesuit Register has 80° 21'. The Jesuit survey extended westward as far as the Sari-kul Lake, and northward to the valley of the Talas. No account of the journeyings or personal adventures of these remarkable explorers is believed to be extant, but the Jesuit College published at the time, from their Reports, a very interesting record of the military and political events of the expedition.—(See 'Lettres Edifiantes,' tom. xxvii.)

ticular

ticular localities which still stand out in isolated inaccessibilityhave made us almost as well acquainted with the manners and customs, the dialects, the religions and the ethnic relations of the races intervening, between Russia and India, between Persia and China, as with the inhabitants of any other part of the East. To describe in any detail the sources from which such information has been derived, would be neither very easy, nor very interesting. A brief abstract of authorities must suffice, explanations only being added, where the travels are but little known to the public, or where their authenticity is questioned.

With the ancient and mediæval travels in Central Asia, we do not propose at present to meddle. In the Erdkunde von Asien' of Carl Ritter, and the Asie Centrale' of Alexander von Humboldt will be found a resumé of all our early, as distinguished from our recent, Asiatic knowledge. Profiting by the labours of Abel Remusat, Klaproth, Julien, and Landresse, the two great geographers of Berlin were able to collate the authority of Chinese Encyclopedias and Buddhist travels, with the hearsay evidence of the Greeks and the more circumstantial accounts of

the contemporary Arabs. With the aid of other translations, they drew much valuable testimony from Turkish and Mongolian histories; they further traced the routes of the envoys and traders from Europe, who visited the territories of the great 'Cham of Tartary,' in the middle ages; they examined Missionary journals, and sifted Caravan itineraries, and finally summarised all available reports both of Russian and of English agents; thereby bringing into one focus rays of information from a hundred different quarters, and furnishing for the first time an intelligible scheme of Central Asiatic geography. The subject, as it appears to us, has not since received the consideration which it merits; no attempt having been made to keep the public acquainted with our improved geographical knowledge, notwithstanding that exploration has been carried on ever since, continuously, and with marked success. In this field of honourable emulation Russia is entitled to a very prominent place. As her arms have advanced upon the one side from the Ili River and Lake Balkash to the Issi-Kul Lake and the great Thian-Shan Range, and upon the other from the Aral Sea for twelve hundred miles along the course of the Jaxartes, to Turkestan, Chemkend, Tashkend, and now to Khojend itself, so have the scientific officers, who accompany or precede her army, continued to lay before the world the results of their professional labours. The Journal of the Imperial Geographical Society of St. Petersburg has been enriched for many years past with a series of papers by Semenoff, Golubieff, Veniukoff, Boutakoff, and others, describing the pro

gress

gress of discovery in Zungaria and Russian Turkestan; and inany of these excellent Memoirs-which, among other valuable results, connect all the recent acquisitions of Russia as far south as the Thian-Shan Range with the great Siberian survey, and further determine for the first time, on certain data, a series of astronomical positions along a belt of 30° of longitude from the Aral Sea to the Chinese frontier-have been transferred to the pages of our own Geographical Journal' in London. But these are not the only contributions of Russia to our recent knowledge of Central Asia. A more hazardous, and, in some respects, a more interesting, journey was performed in 1859 by Captain Valikhanoff, the son of a Kirghiz Sultan, who, having entered the military service of Russia and received a professional education, was thus enabled to combine the accomplishments of a European traveller with the free movements of a native of the country. In company with a caravan of traders he crossed the Thian-Shan by the Záúkú defile, and passed the winter in Kashgar and the neighbourhood, collecting much solid information regarding . the geography, the ethnology, the natural productions, and the modern history of Chinese Turkestan, which has been recently made accessible to the English public in the Messrs. Michell's work on 'The Russians in Central Asia.'

Mons. Nicolas de Khanikoff is a Russian traveller of a still higher class. His first introduction to Central Asiatic life was in the suite of Colonel Buteneff, when that distinguished officer was sent to Bokhara on a diplomatic mission during the English occupation of Afghanistan. On this occasion he visited Samarcand, and collected copious topographical details of the city and its neighbourhood (which he afterwards embodied in a statistical account of the Khanat of Bokhara), thereby establishing his claim to be the first European, since the days of Clavijo (in A.D. 1404), who has given us from his personal observation a plan and description of that famous capital of the empire of Timour. After many years of laborious service in Persia, where he relieved the toils of office by an earnest study of Oriental literature and antiquities, Khanikoff was recently employed, in 1858-59, in conducting a scientific expedition through Eastern Persia, which he somewhat fancifully calls, the southern part of Central Asia,' and he has since published two separate volumes giving the geographical and ethnological results of his travels. Both of these works are valuable. The one contains a very careful record of the scientific observations of Khanikoff and his companions, including some most important rectifications of the map of Persia, and an admirable general description of the province of Khorassan; in the other we have an ingenious, if not entirely convincing,

convincing, argument, drawn from a large field of induction, as to the original seats of the Iranian race, together with a good review of the general ethnic relations of the present inhabitants of Persia. Mons. Khanikoff occupies such an eminent place among the Orientalists of the present day, that no apology can be needed for including his two volumes amongst those placed at the head of the present article.

Let us now glance at the progress of English discovery in Central Asia in recent times. Our greatest activity was naturally displayed in connexion with the Afghan war, as the period of Russia's greatest activity has coincided with her conquest of Turkestan. In extending the limits, indeed, of Asiatic empire, war and science march hand in hand, and the difficulties and dangers of the one-and would we could also say the triumphs and rewards-are not less conspicuous than those of the other.

In reviewing our own fortunes during the period in question, it would really seem as if a fatality had attended us, so fewso very few-of the English officers who advanced the cause of geography in Central Asia having lived to wear the laurels which they had earned. Stoddart, who was the first to cross the mountains from Herat to Bokhara, and Arthur Conolly, who travelled by an entirely new route from Cabul direct to Merv and so on to Khiva, Kokand, and ultimately to Bokhara, both perished miserably at the latter place in 1841. D'Arcy Todd, a traveller of some note himself, and to whom we are indebted for the adventurous journeys of James Abbott and Richmond Shakespeare from Herat to Khiva and Orenberg, was killed at the battle of Firoz-shahar. Edward Conolly, the first explorer of Seistan, was shot from the walls of an obscure fort in the Kohistan of Cabul; and Dr. Lord, the companion of Wood in the valley of the Oxus, was killed in the same district and nearly at the same time. Dr. Forbes, a most promising young traveller, was also murdered in Seistan, in 1841; and Lieut. Pattinson, the only officer who ever explored the valley of the Helmend from Zamín-Dawer to the vicinity of the Lake, was butchered by the mutinous Jan-baz at Candahar, soon after the outbreak at Cabul. Col. Sanders, of the Bengal Engineers, who compiled from his own observations an excellent map of the country between Candahar and the Hazareh Mountains to the north-west, also fell a few years later at Maharajpoor; Eldred Pottinger, who on two occasions crossed the mountains direct between Cabul and Herat, survived the Cabul massacre and the dangers of an Afghan captivity, merely to die of fever at Hongkong; and the list may be closed by a name-still more illustrious in the annals

of