Address to the Royal Geographical Society of London : delivered at the anniversary meeting on the 24th May, 1852 : preceded by observations on presenting the royal medals of the year / by Sir R.I. Murchison.

  • Murchison, Roderick Impey, 1792-1871.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address to the Royal Geographical Society of London : delivered at the anniversary meeting on the 24th May, 1852 : preceded by observations on presenting the royal medals of the year / by Sir R.I. Murchison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    54/72 (page 54)
    with those described by the brothers Strachey to the west of the Lake of Manasarowar, and that there is no plain (properly so called) of Tibet, though the rivers flow for some distances in broad valleys before they are encased in the mountain gorges through which they escape. Much in- terest too will attach to the phenomena of glacial action, which Dr. Hooker and Dr. Thomson (of whom I am about to speak) have the materials to illustrate; and I shall be much mistaken if their data will not bear out the inferences long cot.tended for by the school of geolo- gists to which I belong, that all true “moraines” of even the most gigantic glaciers have restricted limits; and, consequently, that no erratic blocks which (unaccompanied by “moraines”) have been trans- ported for hundreds of miles from the source of their origin, can ever have been moved thither by solid terrestrial ice, though they may have been conveyed in floating ice-rafts. This generalization, and the views I referred to on presenting the gold medal to Captain H. Strachey, are, indeed, in good part derived from, and sustained by the researches of Dr. Thomson. Leaving Major Cun- ningham, the accomplished director of the Tibet mission, with whom (by order of Lord Hardinge) this zealous botanist traversed the Himalaya from Simla in 1847, he passed to Le whilst Major Cunning- ham proceeded to explore the antiquities of the valley of Kashmir,* and Captain H. Strachey to survey the Upper Indus. Dr. Thomson examined the valley of the Shayuk to Iskardo; and after visiting Rondu on the Indus, re-traversed the whole chain by Kashmir to Jamu in the Punjaub. In his next journey he travelled across the Himalaya, on a hitherto unexamined route, to the Tibetan valley of Zanskar, and thence again to Le; whence, ascending the Nubra River to the north, and crossing lofty glaciers, as described in our Journal,']' he descended into the valley of the Shayuk at Sassar, 15,000 feet above the sea, where vast streams of ice, descending from heights of 23,000 feet, cross and dam up the River Shayuk. From that point, a journey of five days through an uninhabited moun- tainous country, brought him to the Kara Korum pass of the Kuen Lun Mountains, elevated about 18,500 feet above the sea, and bor- dering the possessions of Gholab Sing and the province of Yar- kand in China. Dr. Thomson’s work, now in the press, contains an account of his most adventurous and remarkable journeys during two * Major Cunningham published, I am told, an elaborate and learned account of these antiquities in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal ; and I have also been assured that he is a good Tibetan geographer, and has prepared maps of a portion of the country he visited, which we have not yet seen in England. f Vol. xix. p. 29.