On Friday week, Sir R. Temple read a most striking
paper before the British Association on the cradle of the Tartar world, the gigantic Asiatic plateau, usually 4,000 feet high,. which stretches from the Himalaya to the Altai and the mountain border of China, covers more than two millions of square miles —two Lidias—and is walled out from civilisation by mountains 20,000 feet high. Though partly desert—as in that strange dried sea, the Desert of Gobi—much more is still fertile, while there is reason to believe it contains some of the richest mineral districts in the world. No territory is so little known to Euro- peans, yet probably from hence came many of the tribes whose pressure drove "the Barbarians" upon Rome; while in the twelfth century its clans so increased in numbers and in a kind of civili- sation, that in the thirteenth century Jenghiz Khan and his suc- cessors ruled armies of 500,000 cavalry, threatened the whole world, and conquered it from the Yellow Sea to the Baltic. A Tartar reigns in China, and the last Emperor of Delhi was a descendant of Jenghiz. We wish Sir R. Temple would tell us why these tribes cannot again grow strong, and, as Mr. Thoby Prinsep gravely predicted, invade India in a strength to which that of Russia would be trifling.
Previous page
