Historical Account of Discoveries and Travels in Asia

- All the forms, both of nature and society, are presented there on a grander scale than in other regions. Its empires are more vast, its capitals more splendid, its population greater perhaps than that of all the rest of the world united. Its palaces, blazing with gold and gems, seem to eclipse all the splendour that shines in the courts of Europe. Asia is traversed by mountains which equal, and probably surpass the loftiest chains of other continents, and which look down from their eternal snows on plains covered with magnificent cities, and all the pomp of cultivation. In Asia, all has continued fixed as by enchantment. We see empires, whose origin is lost in the unknown beginnings of time; a system of laws, institutions, and ideas, which has remained unaltered during thousands of years; a picture of the domestic life of man, as it existed in the earliest ages. In regard to arrangement, the following, after some consideration, appeared the most advantageous. The First Book contains “General Travels through Asia,” including the narratives of those travellers who went over the larger part of it, or passed from one to another of its great divisions. In the succeeding Books the leading natural divisions of Asia, with travels performed through each, are successively treated of.