“The facts noticed by Sven Hedin have thus another meaning—­the desert to the east of the lakes, which he discovered, was formed, not by Lob-nor, which is situated 1 deg. southwards, but by the Koncheh-daria, in its unremitted deflection to the west.  The old bed Ilek, lake-shaped in places, and having a belt of salt lagoons and swamps along its eastern shores, represents remains of waters belonging, not to Lob-nor, but to the shifting river which has abandoned this old bed.

“These facts and explanations refute the second point of the arguments which were brought forward by Sven Hedin in favour of his hypothesis, asserting the existence of some other Lob-nor.

“I accept the third point of his objections, namely, that the grandfathers of the present inhabitants of the Lob-nor lived by a lake whose position was more to the north of Lob-nor; that was mentioned already by Pievtsov, and the lake was Uchu-Kul.

“Why Marco Polo never mentioned the Lob-nor, I leave to more competent persons to decide.

“The only inference which I can make from the preceding account is that the Kara-Koshun-Kul is not only the Lob-nor of my lamented teacher, N. M. Prjevalsky, but also the ancient, the historical, and the true Lob-nor of the Chinese geographers.  So it was during the last thousand years, and so will it remain, if ‘the river of time’ in its running has not effaced it from the face of the Earth.”

To Kozlov’s query:  “Why Marco Polo never mentioned the Lob-nor, I leave to more competent persons to decide,” I have little hesitation in replying that he did not mention the Lob-nor because he did not see it.  From Charchan, he followed, I believe, neither Prjevalsky’s nor Pievtsov’s route, but the old route from Khotan to Si-ngan fu, in the old bed of the Charchan daria, above and almost parallel to the new bed, to the Tarim,—­then between Sven Hedin’s and Prjevalsky’s lakes, and across the desert to Shachau to join the ancient Chinese road of the Han Dynasty, partly explored by M. Bonin from Shachau.

There is no doubt as to the discovery of Prjevalsky’s Lob-nor, but this does not appear to be the old Chinese Lob-nor; in fact, there may have been several lakes co-existent; probably there was one to the east of the mass of water described by Dr. Sven Hedin, near the old route from Korla to Shachau; there is no fixity in these waterspreads and the soil of this part of Asia, and in the course of a few years some discrepancies will naturally arise between the observations of different travellers.  But as I think that Marco Polo did not see one of the Lob-nor, but travelled between them, there is no necessity to enlarge on this question, fully treated of in this note.

See besides the works mentioned above:  Nord—­Tibet und Lob-nur Gebiet... herausg. von Dr. G. Wegener.  Berlin, 1893. (Sep. abd. Zeit.  Ges. f.  Erdk.)—­Die Geog. wiss.  Ergebnisse meiner Reisen in Zentralasien, 1894-1897, von Dr. Sven Hedin, Gotha, J. Perthes, 1900.