国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

I am often asked why, having passed my life till nearly threescore and
ten in geological work, I turned to archeology, and what led me to choose
remote Central Asia as a promising field. To answer this fully here would
carry me beyond the restricted limits of a preface; I shall therefore state the
reasons as briefly as possible.

My geological explorations through Central and Northern China and
Mongolia during 1863 had given me a great amount of material towards a
skeleton geological map of the Chinese empire. I learned then that the
successive dynasties had caused to be made exhaustive reports on the
resources of the empire, covering not only those of the vegetable kingdom
and the exact localities of all useful minerals, but including also fossil bones
from caves in limestone, as well as certain fossil shells of well-defined species,
both of which classes of objects belong in the Chinese materia medica. Topo-
graphical phenomena of extraordinary interest were also recorded. These
printed "geographies" formed a great number of volumes. Here was a
great mass of information adapted to supplementing the material I had
gathered on my journeys. To utilize it I employed for several months three
able native scholars, courteously found for me by the foreign office, to extract
all items of a long series of classes of entries. The voluminous notes thus
obtained were kindly translated for me by Mr. S. Wells Williams, then
Secretary of our legation, aided by some of my missionary friends, and
from them I was able to fill in my skeleton map and construct a "hypo-
thetical geological map" of China, which Baron von Richthofen, in publish-
ing the results of his later and far more extensive explorations, was good
enough to say was remarkably good in its broad outlines. Extracts were
made also from other works, and from maps, including even commented
volumes of the writings of Confucius.

In studying all this material I was naturally struck, as I had been on
my journeys, by the great contrast between fertile China and arid Mongolia,
and by the reaction of the latter upon the former as shown in the repeated
attempts of vast Turanian hordes from the Mongolian table-land to overrun
China. I was impressed, too, by a note on a Chinese map of the Tarim
basin stating that here a large number of cities (between 100 and 200, I
think) were buried by sand in the early centuries of our era. Then, too, on
native Chinese maps the desert of Gobi or Shamo was called Han-hai (dried
sea), and was by native writers said to have been formerly an inland sea.
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