of the same type, but of less intensity. The varying amount of precipitation, or of evaporation, caused the lakes to alternately expand and contract. In Pangong itself, the highest beaches indicate that the lake expanded to a level two hundred feet above that of to-day. It then contracted, as the deposits show, and again expanded to a sixty foot level marked by lower beaches. Numerous smaller strands and desposits show that minor oscillations of the lake level, caused apparently by minor changes of climate, were superposed upon the larger oscillations. As all these changes of lake level took place after the severer epochs of the glacial period had passed away, they must have come within the time of man, and the later ones probably within the years covered by history. Hence their study is of importance not only for itself, but in relation to the problem of the influence of climate upon history. Apparently, the change from fluvial conditions of lake expansion to inter-fluvial conditions of lake contraction was characterized by great irregularity in the form of acclerations and reversals of various degrees. If the climate of Pangong from prehistoric times down to the present be represented by a curve descending from a state of severe cold and heavy precipitation to one of comparative warmth and aridity, the descent must not be pictured as regular, but as broken by many minor curves both up and down. Climate, to judge from Pangong, is, and long has been, a more changeable element than is commonly supposed.
On returning to Leh from Lake Pangong, I found that Mr. Barrett had equipped a caravan of fifteen unusually good ponies and five mules. He had also engaged another
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