channel, the Uz-boi, from north of Khiva to the Caspian. The data given by Herodotus as to the Jaxartes do not agree with those of his successors, which may mean either that conditions were subject to change, or that the Father of History, at a distance of fifteen hundred miles from the Jaxartes, could not obtain exact information.
Aristotle, B. c. 348, the next authority on the Caspian Sea, follows Herodotus strictly. A few decades later, Alexander and his generals commissioned some of their subordinates to study the geography of the new regions to which the Greeks had lately penetrated. The geographers did not visit the northern side of the Caspian, but confined themselves to the southern shore south of the Caucasus mountains on the west and of what is now the Sea of Aral on the east. Aristobulus, the geographer of Alexander, is quoted by Strabo as saying that in the fourth century before Christ the traffic from India came down the Oxus River to the Caspian, into which the river apparently flowed; crossed the sea; went up the Cyrus River to its head; down the Phasis to the Black Sea, and so to Europe. A little later, about 300 B. c., Patroclus, the admiral of Seleucus, made a survey of the southern coast of the Caspian. According to his account, the Oxus and the Jaxartes rivers both entered that sea, the mouth of the one being two hundred and forty miles from that of the other. To-day, both streams enter the Sea of Aral, their mouths being about as far apart as they were in the days of Patroclus. Under the present conditions of water supply, it might be possible for the Oxus to flow to the Caspian Sea without entering the Sea of Aral; and even the Jaxartes might possibly pass the Aral depression with-
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