China Ergebnisse eigener Reisen, und darauf gegründeter Studien

Abstract

WE are glad to welcome the appearance of the first volume of this long-promised work from the pen of the well-known geologist and geographer, Baron v. Richthofen. We content ourselves at present with a general account of the work, hoping in an early number to be able to examine it in detail. The author has enjoyed rare facilities for the accumulation of material, and has improved them so thoroughly that the published results of his researches will assume a leading position among the late additions to scientific literature. In 1860 he accompanied Count Eulenberg on his mission to China and Japan for the purpose of closing commercial treaties between these lands and the German states. On the return of the expedition Baron v. Richthofen lingered behind, attracted by the many unsolved problems of the Celestial Empire. Up to 1872 he devoted himself to a systematic, thorough investigation of the geography and geology of China, traversing in the course of seven different journeys the whole eastern part of the empire from Canton to Corea, and penetrating westward to the sources of the Yang-tze-Kiang and the frontiers of Thibet. The essential aims of the traveller were to place on a scientific basis the geography of the land, determining the hypsometric relations, and the laws governing the conformation of the mountain-chains, to examine the general geological structure, especially in its relations to the great basins of Central Asia, and to study the laws of climatic changes. Other scientific questions received a minor consideration, and the intellectual life of the people was left entirely out of view. The present volume forms little more than an introduction to the elaboration of the immense number of observations made during the long series of years, which will form the body of the work. It is mainly occupied with an extensive and complete description of the growth of our knowledge with regard to China, forming a valuable index to the literature on this country. No small amount of space is devoted to the book, “Yü-Kung,” or imperial geography, forming the sixth in the series of historical works attributed to Confucius, and covering the period 2357–720 B.C. The remaining portion of the volume is occupied with the geographical relations of China to Central Asia, and contains a most important study of the loess regions of Northern China. They are not only considered in their relations to the saline steppes of Central Asia, but are compared with all the great loess formations known, and supply the basis for an interesting theory with regard to the formation in the one case of fertile valleys, as those of the Nile and Mississippi, and in the other of sandy wastes. Scarcely less valuable is the clear and distinct picture afforded of the whole mountain system of this portion of Asia. The author finds the laws governing the conformations so simple, that less time was required to determine the system than would have been necessary for a tenth of the area in Europe. In a closing chapter on the problems of modern scientific geography, the author sharply defines the province of his science, drawing clearly the limits between it and political geography, ethnography, and kindred sciences. The method to be used in the solution of these problems he defines as “the uninterrupted consideration of the causal, mutual relations between the earth's surface from its various points of view, terrestrial physics, and the atmosphere on the one side, and between these elements and the organic world in its broadest sense on the other side.” Of the three volumes yet to appear, one will be devoted to palæontology, in which the author will be assisted by Dr. Kayser, Dr. Schwager, Prof. Schenk, and other able geologists The remaining two will contain the author's extended researches into the coal-fields of China, regarded by him as more valuable than the deposits in the United States of America—the geological structure of the land, the climatic phenomena, the population as affected by these two agencies, the river system, means of transport by land and water, chief productions, mercantile possibilities, &c. A generous grant from the Emperor of Germany has permitted the publication of the work in a most sumptuous style, and the introduction of numerous carefully executed maps and illustrations wherever opportunity is offered by the text.

China. Ergebnisse eigener Reisen, und darauf gegründeter Studien,

Von Ferdinand Freiherrn von Richthofen. Band I. (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1877.)