verted the Persian monarchy, that Europeans became acquainted with the more remote parts of that continent, then distinguished by the general name of India. The expeditions of Bacchus and of Sesostris, if ever they were performed, have been transmitted to us only in the dress of fables; and though it is probable, that the inhabitants of Tyre may have attained some acquaintance with those regions, yet their knowledge seems not to have been communicated to the Greeks, and consequently no part of it has reached modern times.

Alexander's discoveries.] Alexander, who appears to have had more liberal views, and greater political sagacity, than generally belongs to mere conquerors, was careful to examine the countries through which he passed. Men of learning were always attached to his army, who made such surveys of the various regions and their inhabitants, as the state of science and the time allowed for their observations would permit. When we are informed that such information as could be obtained from the natives of the different countries was carefully noted, we have some reason to be surprised at their ignorance of the periodical rains by which the progress of the army was at last intercepted; and also to conclude, that the inhabitants of even the eastern parts of Persia had little intercourse with that part of Asia which now passes by the name of India. When Alexander found that his army was unwilling to proceed farther by land, his generals, Lagus, Nearchus and Aristobulus, embarked upon the Indus. The fleet sailed about 1000 miles before it reached the ocean; and, having surveyed the country upon the banks, it continued its voyage along the coast, till it arrived at the Persian gulf.

Egyptian and Syrian discoveries.] Seleucus, who succeeded Pythó in the sovereignty of the eastern part of Alexander's conquests, is said not only to have undertaken an expedition into India, but to have penetrated as far as Pataliputra on the Ganges. Of this expedition, however, we have received only a few hints from writers of doubtful authority; and the whole is considered as being involved in obscurity and uncertainty. Whatever was the extent of this expedition, or mission, the ancients seem not to have acquired from it any new knowledge of India. Antiochus the Great, 98 years after the expedition of Seleucus, penetrated into India; but, like that of his predecessor, his expedition gave no new information concerning the country invaded. In a short time, the Syrians were expelled from their Indian possessions; but the Bactrians are supposed to have preserved a commercial intercourse with India, till their country was overrun by a powerful horde of Tatars. The benefits of commerce began gradually to impress themselves on the minds of eastern politicians; and, instead of conquest, attempts were made to establish an intercourse of trade. Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, appears to have been sensible of the advantages afforded by the situation of his country with regard to intercourse with the eastern and western parts of the world. The commodities of India were brought by his vessels into the Red sea; and, being conveyed overland to Alexandria, they were thence distributed to every part of Europe then kuown. This commerce seems long to have bestowed on the Egyptian monarchs a wealth and power disproportioned to the extent and population of their territories. But the Egyptians were not the only nation whose local situation gave them advantages for conducting a commerce with India. The Syrians, who possessed that branch of the Indian ocean called the Persian gulf, enjoyed equal if not superior advantages of situation. In the commerce with India, however, they never rivalled the Egyptians; and for

this Dr Robertson gives several reasons. The Persians, from religious motives, were always averse to navigation, either upon the rivers or upon the ocean. The consequence was, that they were unacquainted with maritime affairs. They had no fleet, and patiently suffered the Egyptians to remain masters of the sea. The few Syrian monarchs who endeavoured to establish the commerce of their country were induced, by their ignorance of the nature of the Caspian and Black seas, to commence a correspondence between India and Europe in that direction; and, while they were thus forming idle schemes, the Egyptians were accumulating wealth and power, and their trade was attaining a stability which was not shaken till the domineering politics of Rome deprived them of their independence. The Syrians, indeed, although they did not attempt to communicate with India by sea, carried on a traffic with that country by land. This traffic, which was conducted by caravans passing through the desert of Mesopotamia, seems to have been very considerable; but could not be compared with the more extensive commerce of Egypt. The conquest of Egypt by the Romans relaxed, but could not totally destroy, the vigour of its trade. Besides, Roman luxury demanded the goods of India, and Egypt was the best medium through which they could be procured. An improvement in navigation, introduced soon after Egypt became a Roman province, gave greater facility to the intercourse with India. Mariners had hitherto cautiously crept along the shore, from headland to headland; and had thus rendered the voyage not only tedious, but dangerous. But Hippalus, who had long been engaged in this navigation, observing the regularity of the monsoons, or periodical winds, boldly turned his vessel from the mouth of the Arabian gulf into the Indian ocean; and, after what was reckoned an adventurous voyage, arrived safely at Musiris, on the Malabar coast. Such an enterprise appeared so extraordinary, that, to perpetuate the memory of the projector, the wind which carried vessels to India was called by his name. Notwithstanding this important improvement, a voyage between the mouth of the Arabian gulf and India, with the return, occupied almost a year.

Knowledge of the Greeks and Romans.] The commerce maintained by the ancients with India seems to have added little to the precision of their knowledge respecting that part of the world. This necessarily arose from the imperfect mode in which they attempted to ascertain the longitudes and latitudes of different places; and hence that confusion in the accounts of ancient geographers, which renders it nearly impossible, even after painful investigation, to ascertain the situation of the places described by them. Among those who have laboured in this department, may be reckoned D'Anville among the French, and Rennel among the British. Yet the reasonings of these authors, though often convincing, have been frequently controverted; and Gosselin, a late writer, concludes, with much plausibility, that the knowledge of the Indian coast attained by the ancients, never extended beyond the straits of Malacca. That part of Asia which was tolerably well known to the ancients was divided by them into the Hither and Farther Asia,-Asia Citerior and Ulterior. The former contained only Asia Minor, which was considered by them as a peninsula terminated by a line drawn from Sinope to the common boundary between Cilicia Aspera and Campestris, or the Mountainous and Lowland Cilicia. The latter contained the remainder of Asia. Under the early Roman emperors, however, the remoter parts of Asia seem to have been visited by land, and the western peninsula of India by sea. Even in the 2d century we find

that the Sinae, or Eastern Indians, were known to Ptolemy, as well as Taprobane or Ceylon, and Jabadia, the Java-duipa of the Indians, or Java of our maps. Yet Strabo and Pliny suppose that the northern end of the Caspian communicated with the northern ocean, although their predecessor Herodotus was much better informed on this point.

Knowledge of the Middle Ages.] The commerce of the Romans with the eastern parts of Asia, was continued, with little accession to geographical knowledge, till the dissolution of the empire. When Egypt was conquered by the Saracens, trade was prosecuted with new vigour, and more accurate information was obtained than had ever been acquired by the Greeks or Romans. But, as this information was detailed wholly in Arabic, the greater part of Europe could be little profited by the discoveries now made. The trade with the East underwent different revolutions, and was successively conducted by different nations. It is not, however, the purpose of this sketch to trace the history of commerce, but of the progressive discovery of Asia; and it seems therefore sufficient to remark that, notwithstanding the increased vigour of trade, little was added for some centuries to the knowledge of eastern countries. The victorious progress of the Mongols, who finally threatened Silesia itself, called the attention of Europe to the regions inhabited by this warlike people; and the popes did not consider it beneath them to despatch embassies to the Mongolian khans. The journals of Ascelin, Plancarpin, and Rubriquis, record missions effected by them in the 13th century, and furnish the earliest notices we possess of Tartary and the country of the Mongols. In the 13th and 14th centuries Christian missionaries penetrated as far as Pekin; but the greater part of their relations have long since been allowed to crumble into dust in the libraries in which they were deposited. It would appear that these Asiatic travellers had been preceded by the Jew, Benjamin of Tudela in Navarre, who wrote an account in 1160 of all the curious things which he had seen in his Asiatic travels. At last Italian merchants found their way into the Black sea, and the Caspian; and for the space of two centuries the Genoese and Venetians conducted a busy commerce with India and China by caravans. Of all these travelling merchants the most distinguished was Marco Polo, a Venetian, who about the year 1271, penetrated as far as China, and mentions many Indian countries under the names by which they are still known. His work, in which he gives an account of his travels, laid the foundation of modern Asiatic geography. During the 14th and 15th centuries, religion, politics, and commerce united their influence to attract the attention of Europeans towards America. It would appear from the relation of Francis Balducci Pegoletto, who travelled from Azof to China about the year 1335, that this journey was of much easier accomplishment then than it has been considered even in very recent times. Haithon, an Armenian, gave the world an account of his native country; and Oderic de Portenau and Mandeville supplied various details respecting Asia; but all these writers have mixed up fable largely with their narratives. Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, envoy from Henry III. of Castile to Tamerlane, in 1403, wrote an account of his voyage to Samarcand. John Schilderberger of Munich, who served in the army of Tamerlane, and other khans, about the year 1427, wrote an account of his various travels, which is however of little real value to the geographer. A far more useful work was the relation of Josaphet Barbaro, the Venetian ambassador, who visited Tana, or Azof, in 1436, and Persia in 1471.

Vasco de Gama and Columbus.] If the ancients ever sailed round Af

rica, the circumstance appears either to have been unknown to or disbelieved by the Europeans after the revival of learning. Even the ancients themselves seem to have doubted the authenticity of the narrative of the Phoenicians' circumnavigation of Africa said to have been performed at the desire of Pharaoh Necho, since Ptolemy believed that the Indian ocean was an inland sea, and that the African shore, instead of verging from the Arabian gulf towards the W. had an easterly direction, and was connected with the most remote parts of the continent of Asia. Whatever truth may be in the voyages of the Egyptians and Carthaginians, or whatever may have been the opinions of a few of the learned who speculated upon the narratives of these voyages, it is certain that they had little influence upon the public mind; and that the belief of the possibility of a passage to India, by the southern extremity of Africa, was gradually induced by the progress of Portuguese discoveries, along the western coast of that continent. Of the progress of these discoveries, an account has been already given. The discovery of this passage to India did not strike the minds of Europeans with the same astonishment as the voyage in which Columbus discovered America. Then Columbus undertook a project, which certainly was adventurous, which all thought rash and many thought absurd, and he laid open a vast continent, the existence of which had not even been suspected. The direction of the African coast had made the existence of a passage to India in that way extremely probable. When the southern point of Africa was attained, the reality of such a passage was almost demonstrated. Vasco de Gama's voyage, therefore, in which he reached Calicut on the Malabar coast, although celebrated by his countrymen, as having opened to them a source of opulence and power, argued no superiority either in abilities or courage; his voyage had been traced by his predecessors, as far as the cape of Good Hope. When he had doubled this cape, and sailed a few degrees to the N., he found himself in seas with which European mariners were well-acquainted, and surrounded with countries to which European merchants had long traded. The extent of unknown coast traced by De Gama, therefore, did not equal what had been traced by several of his predecessors. The discovery of the new world, and of the passage to India by the cape of Good Hope, gave a sudden and unexpected turn to the commerce of Europe. The wealth of America was poured into Spain; and the luxuries of the East were, by the Portuguese, brought to Europe, much more expeditiously and cheaply than could be effected by such as trafficked by the old route.

Modern discoveries.] Other nations followed up these discoveries, and gradually laid open the southern and eastern coasts of this continent. The Dutch, who had already supplanted the Portuguese in the greater part of their Indian possessions, first navigated to Japan. Van Diemen, governor-general of Eastern India, sent an ambassay in 1641 to Laos; and two years afterwards an expedition to the N. which discovered Jesso, Tchokta, and some of the southern Kuriles. Towards the end of the 17th century, Kaempfer, a German physician, employed by the Dutch company, visited and described Japan; and missionaries traversed China, Annam, and Central Asia. In 1603 Benoit-Goes travelled from Lahor to China, across Little Bucharia and the desert. Pierre d'Andrada saw the Himalayas in 1624. Bernier, a French physician, travelled in Hindostan and Cashmir in 1664; and a crowd of European voyagers now described Asia Minor, Palestine, Persia, and India. Siberia, known to the Russians in 1499,

was conquered by the Cossack Jermak in 1578. Kupilof was the first to reach the sea of Otchotsk in 1639; and Deschneff, in 1648, explored the frontiers of Asia from the mouth of the Kovyma to the Anadir. No settlement however was made upon Kamtschatka until a much later period. Behring, by his first voyage executed in 1728, determined the position of the eastern extremity of Asia. In 1739, Spangenberg explored Jesso and the neighbouring islands. In 1787 La Perouse discovered the strait betwixt Jesso and Tchotka, and explored the opening of the gulf of Tartary. Broughton followed in 1797, and sailed through the straits of Sangaar. Captain Krusenstern was the last European who visited these coasts; he completed the survey of Tchotka in 1805.

Travellers in the Interior.] Although Jenkynson penetrated from the Caspian to Khiva in 1557, the same attempt has very recently foiled M. Mouravief, a Russian traveller. Betwixt 1733 and 1743, J. F. Gmelin explored Siberia and the Abbe-Chappe in 1760, and Pallas from 1768 to 1774, followed up his route. S. T. Gmelin, Gueldenstadt, and M. Klaproth, have described the Caucasus and Georgia; and Humboldt is now (1830) travelling in the same quarter.The Russians have likewise added considerably to our knowledge of Central Asia by the embassies which they have sent from time to time to China since 1691. The Chinese missionaries of the 16th and following century have likewise supplied us with accounts of that empire, which have been corroborated by the Dutch embassies of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the still more recent English accounts.Of course we owe almost all our knowledge of Hindostan to British travellers exclusively. Bogle travelled in Tibet in 1774; Turner in Bootan and Tibet in 1784; and Kirkpatrick in Nepaul in 1793. Since the commencement of the 19th century, Webb, Moorcroft, and Fraser, have explored the sources of the Ganges, crossed the Himalaya, and visited a part of Little Tibet. In 1782, Forster travelled into Cashmir, traversed Afghanistan, and Chorasan, and reached the Caspian. In 1808, Elphingstone penetrated into Afghanistan; and in 1810 Pottinger visited Beludschistan and Persia. The latter country was visited in the 17th century by Pietro della Valle, Thevenot, Tavernier, Herbert, and Chardin; afterwards by Hanway, Otter, Bruguiere, and Olivier; and still more recently by Morier, Ouselay, Jaubert, Malcolm, and Ker Porter. Rich and Buckingham have explored Mesopotamia; Niebuhr, Ali Bey, Seetzen, and Burckhardt have given us accounts of Arabia; Volney, Chateaubriand, and Clarke, have described Palestine; and Beaufort has visited the coasts of Caramania. Gauttier has examined the shores of the Black sea, and professor Eichwald of Wilna is now travelling in the surrounding districts.Beauchamp has fixed the geographical position of many places in Asiatic Turkey; and Tournefort, Chandler, and Leake, and most of the Persian travellers, have described that country.

Natural Divisions.] The great natural divisions of this continent, exclusive of the eastern islands of the Indian archipelago, have been thus arranged by Malte Brun:

NATURAL DIVISIONS OF ASIA.

Government of Caucasus; Abasia;
Circassia, Georgia, &c. Daghestan;
Shirwan.

Anatolia; Caramania; Sivas; Trebisond;
Islands of Cyprus, Rhodes, &c.

I. Region of Caucasus

II. Region of Asia Minor