the Georgian women have been long celebrated is by no means over-rated; that their regular features and symmetry of form might have served as the model from which the Grecian artists have produced their finest statues. It is in the adjacent climates of Georgia, Mingrelia, and Circassia,' says Gibbon, that nature has placed, at least to our eyes, the model of beauty, in the shape of the limbs, the colour of the skin, the symmetry of the features, and the expression of the countenance; the men,' he adds, are formed for action, the women for love.' Yet, if we may believe Herodotus, the natives, in his time, were dark-complexioned (MEλavxgoes) and had crisp, curling hair (ovλorgixes); such is the change produced by the mixture of nations and the slow but most powerful influence of climate. The ladies of Georgia, however, not satisfied with those lovely tints which nature has bestowed upon them, have recourse to the odious use of paint. One of their great luxuries is the bath, which they enjoy in perfection at Teflis, where artificial excavations in the rock, situated in deep caverns, are supplied with natural warm water. Here, says an intelligent and entertaining writer,* the Georgian ladies devote a whole day in every week to these baths, and not unfrequently pass a whole night in them; it it here that, reclining in luxurious ease upon their couches, they amuse themselves by staining their hair and their nails; and here also they paint their faces red and white, and, above all, torture themselves to make the eyebrows join,for that Anacreontic charm is absolutely essential in a Georgian beauty. M. Gamba informs us, that the Armenian girls marry at the early age of twelve; he adds, that formerly they were married before they reached the age of ten; but that this was done by their parents to prevent their being demanded by the princes of Georgia either for their own, or for sale to the Persian, harems, as married women were not in request in either of these. 6 On the Consul's return to France, along the western shores of the Caspian Sea, he notices a circumstance which shows how cautious we ought to be in rejecting as fabulous what we are pleased to deem improbable. Plutarch, in his life of Pompey, says, After this action (with the Albanians), Pompey designed to make his way to the Caspian Sea, and march by its coast into Hyrcania; but he found the number of venomous serpents so troublesome, that he was forced to return, when three days' march would have carried him as far as he proposed.'† Now this place answers exactly to the steppe of Moghan, to the * Lettres sur la Caucase et la Georgie. Translated from the German of Madame Freygan. + Langhorne's Plutarch, vol. iv. p. 80. southward southward of the Kour, and upon the shore of the Caspian, respecting which M. Gamba says,— The general opinion in the country is, that in the months of June, July, and August, the steppe or plain of Moghan is so much covered with snakes, that men and horses cannot cross it without the greatest danger; during the rest of the year the snakes retire into the earth and the crevices of the rocks. When the General Zuboff was about to attack Salian, his army encamped about the end of autumn, 1800, and passed the winter on the plain of Moghan. The soldiers, in digging the ground to pitch their tents, were constantly turning up snakes in a state of torpor, &c.'-Gamba, tom. ii. p. 285. We may remark, also, that Mr. Freygan, on his mission from Teflis to Tabreez, passed near some hills bordering the plain to the westward, one of which was named the hill of serpents ;' observing, 'the inhabitants dare not go near it, on account of the numbers of these reptiles.' M. Gamba visited Bakou, in the vicinity of which are found those naphtha pits, which afford to the inhabitants an inexhaustible article of commerce, and of which not less than from seven to eight million pounds weight are annually consumed by Russia and Persia. This naphtha is used to light their houses, to grease the wooden axles of their carriages, and as paint, to preserve different kinds of wood-work; and the Georgians smear it over the sheep and goat-skins in which they keep their wine. At a little distance from the town is an ancient monastery, wherein a few of the disciples of Zoroaster, and two or three miserable Hindoos, are still to be seen adoring the All-holy Flame which is supposed to have been lighted at the creation of the world, and will continue till time shall be no more.' At the four corners of a large altar, chimneys or tubes of a considerable height carry the inflammable gas up into the air, where it is ignited, and a flame issues something like what we have in our own streets, burning continually, night and day. These gaseous lights, and the naphtha pits of Bakou, have been so often described, that we deem it unnecessary to enter upon any detailed account of them.*- In the consul's progress through Daghestan he found the country well covered with Tartar villages, the inhabitants apparently in easy circumstances, and possessing vast herds of horses and cattle. He was told that in this province, at certain seasons, great numbers of horses die suddenly-from eating, as it is supposed, a particular plant, which M. Gamba has understood to be the absinthium ponticum. When the Russians marched an army into Bakou, they lost in one night two hundred and * Hanway, and more recently, the writer of Lettres sur la Caucase et la Georgie,' give interesting details of these fires, that are never quenched.' 6 fifty of the horses employed in dragging their artillery. The plant is said to produce no ill effects on sheep and horned cattle. Silk, cotton, rice, sesamum, and madder, are the chief articles of produce. The forest-trees are small and stunted. The province of Kouba is said to contain sixty thousand souls, many of them Jews, who are here cultivators of the land, of good character, and in good circumstances. In most parts of Georgia these people can scarcely be said to exist, their place being supplied by Armenians.-The town of Kouba has about five thousand inhabitants, of which the Tartars and Armenians are the most numerous. This town and the country to the northward are so extremely unhealthy, that one-fourth of the Cossack soldiers stationed there are said to perish annually from the effects of the malaria. Of the seven or eight thousand inhabitants of the ancient city of Derbent, which is supposed to have been built by Alexander, or some of his successors, two-thirds are said to be Persians, the rest Jews, Armenians, and Arabs. From hence to the Terek, the surface is diversified with hill and dale, and the fine plains are covered with the flocks and herds of the Tartars. A singular fact is mentioned, which we recollect to have read of elsewhere, we think in Guldenstaedt. Near the Soulak, and in a valley of the Caucasus are found, says our author, two beautiful villages inhabited by a people, active, industrious, sober, laborious, rich, independent; and whose manners and religion have no relation to those of the other nations by whom they are surrounded. They were generally supposed to be the descendants of a colony of Moravian brethren, which induced the Moravians of Sarepta to send thither, some thirty years ago, a deputation of three persons, to fraternise with them; but whether the report was incorrectly stated, or whether the two or three generations that had passed away since the date of their retreat among those mountains had no longer left any trace of their original language, origin, and religion, the deputies returned with the conviction that there was no similitude whatever between them and these people.'-Gamba, tom. ii. p. 370. Kislar, near the mouth of the Terek, is said to be a handsome city, inhabited chiefly by Armenians. It is unhealthy, on account of the delta of alluvium deposited by the river; but the neighbouring country is beautiful and well cultivated. The vineyards, from which good wine is made, the mulberry-plantations to feed the silk-worms, and the numerous orchards of fruit-trees, are all enclosed within fences. But from this place to Astracan is one dead flat, for about two hundred miles, composed of sandy deserts, creeks running inland from the Caspian, swamps, and morasses, without a tree or a bush-where nothing interrupts the line of the horizon except here and there perhaps the solitary hut of a fisherman, or the the tents of some roving Tartars. It seems to be precisely that kind of country which is described by Della Cella as surrounding the Great Syrtis in Africa. It has all the appearance of having been at some time or other covered by the waters of the Caspian. Pallas and Gmelin, indeed, were strongly disposed to think that the Caspian must at one time have communicated with the sea of Azof-and said, none could think otherwise who looked to the low and sandy plain that stretches between the two seas, its saline plants, its soil impregnated with salt, and the abundance of shells peculiar to the Caspian Sea. If the union in question ever existed, however, it must have been at a period antecedent to all history; for Herodotus describes these regions just as we now find them. Nothing, we believe, but damming up the Strait of Constantinople could unite the Caspian and the Black Sea; and this would do more than that-it would convert the great southern steppe of Russia into one vast ocean. It was Various conjectures concerning the Caspian have, in ancient as well as modern times, exercised the ingenuity of man. thought by the ancients, who were little acquainted with the effect produced by evaporation,* that a sea into which the waters of the mighty Volga, the Kuma, the Terek, the Cyrus or Kour, the Oural, and various minor streams, were constantly pouring, would necessarily overflow the low and flat parts of the surrounding country, unless there were some outlet for the water to escape; and thus, although Herodotus had given a sufficiently accurate description of the Caspian as an inland sea, unconnected with any other, yet Strabo, five hundred years afterwards, was persuaded that it communicated with the Northern Ocean by a narrow strait: Pliny, indeed, adopted the same opinion, and it prevailed even in the days of Justinian. In more modern times, the Caspian has been supposed by some to be connected with the Palus Mootis, by others with the Persian Gulf, and by a third set again with the Black Sea, by subterraneous passages: we have been told that at the mouth which is supposed to open in the last-mentioned sea, is found a species of sea-weed that grows only on the shores of the Caspian; and the same thing has been said of leaves and branches of plants appearing at certain seasons in the Persian Gulf, that grow only on the southern shores of the Caspian near Ghilan and Mazanderan. The Black Sea theorists add that, near the Cas * The same opinion prevailed in more modern times. Considering,' says Herbert, how that these mighty rivers are incessantly vomiting their full-gorged watery stomachs into it (the Caspian), in reason it may be granted, that it would overflow its banks, did it not as well empty as receive; for that is but a weak assertion that the sun attracts equally by vapours to that excess of water which is poured in.'-Herbert's Travels. + Herod. Clio. The voyagers Struys and P. Avril, and also Kompfer, suppose these gulfs of communication to exist. pian vortex of this supposed passage, a species of fish is caught peculiar to the Euxine. Even Gibbon, in describing the shores of the Phasis, talks of the hollowness of the ground appearing to indicate the subterraneous channels between the Euxine and the Caspian.' There is a story which has run the round of the geographical dictionaries, and is erroneously attributed in them to Athanasius Kircher, which says that, in olden time, a fish was taken from the Caspian Sea with a golden ring about its tail, whereupon men read this inscription-Mithridates mihi dabat in urbe Sinope libertatem et hoc donum.' Such a story might well be considered worthy of Kircher, a man of much learning but small sense, and strangely deficient in the faculty of discriminating truth from fiction. He has, however, fables enough of his own, and should not be saddled with this story; though, indeed, he borrows a legend not unlike it from Abulhassen, showing how a certain bashaw of Suez, having caught a dolphin of monstrous size, fixed a plate of brass to the branchia of the animal, with this inscription in Arabic letters—' Amed Abdalla Bassa Suez tibi vitam unà cum hoc munere donavit, anno Hegira, 720'-and how this same dolphin was afterwards caught near Damietta, in the Mediter ranean. Dismissing these puerilities, we may observe that, according to a very general opinion, the waters of the Caspian have long been on the decrease: and this on the whole accords with the observation of the Chevalier Gamba-who mentions some facts that give colour to another idea, namely, that there are certain periodical variations in the increase and decrease of its waters. He tells us that, no longer ago than four years, vessels drawing eighteen feet water navigated places which at present will admit of none drawing more than fifteen; that, not many years ago, the walls of Bakou were washed by the waves of the Caspian, from which they are now so distant, that the imperial navy no longer frequents as usual that bay, but anchors at the island of Sara; that new islands, one of them several miles in length, have appeared at a distance from the western shore. We are further informed that, about a century ago, at the mouth of the Terek, there was a town on an island in the sea, of the name of Toumin, which is at present covered by the waves; but the most extraordinary statement, and that which would prove the variations' in the increase and decrease of the Caspian beyond a doubt, if true, is, that some time ago there appeared above the surface of the water, more than two versts from the shore, the summit of a building, * Ath. Kircheri Mundus Subterraneus, lib ii. cap. 13. + It is stated by Hanway, that in his time (now nearly eighty years ago) 'ships can be moored head and stern forty fathoms off shore.' the |