ut Tabbas.

["Marco Polo has been said to have traversed a portion of (the
Dash-i-Kavir, great Salt Desert) on his supposed route from Tabbas to
Damghan, about 1272; although it is more probable that he marched further
to the east, and crossed the northern portion of the Dash-i-Lut, Great Sand
Desert, separating Khorasan in the south-east from Kerman, and occupying a
sorrowful parallelogram between the towns of Neh and Tabbas on the north,
and Kerman and Yezd on the south." (Curzon, _Persia_, II. pp. 248 and 251.)
Lord Curzon adds in a note (p. 248): "The Tunogan of the text which was
originally mistaken for Damghan, is correctly explained by Yule as Tun-o-
(i.e. and) Kain." Major Sykes writes (ch. xxiii.): "The section of the Lut
has not hitherto been rediscovered, but I know that it is desert
throughout, and it is practically certain that Marco ended these unpleasant
experiences at Tabas, 150 miles from Kubenan. To-day the district is known
as Tun-o-Tabas, Kain being independent of it."--H. C.]

NOTE 2.--This is another subject on which a long and somewhat discursive
note is inevitable.

One of the Bulletins of the Soc. de Geographie (ser. III. tom. iii. p.
187) contains a perfectly inconclusive endeavour, by M. Roux de Rochelle,
to identify the _Arbre Sec_ or _Arbre Sol_ with a manna-bearing oak
alluded to by Q. Curtius as growing in Hyrcania. There can be no doubt
that the tree described is, as Marsden points out, a _Chinar_ or Oriental
Plane. Mr. Ernst Meyer, in his learned _Geschichte der Botanik_
(Koenigsberg, 1854-57, IV. 123), objects that Polo's description of the
_wood_ does not answer to that tree. But, with due allowance, compare with
his whole account that which Olearius gives of the Chinar, and say if the
same tree be not meant. "The trees are as tall as the pine, and have very
large leaves, closely resembling those of the vine. The fruit looks like a
chestnut, but has no kernel, so it is not eatable. The wood is of a very
brown colour, and full of veins; the Persians employ it for doors and
window-shutters, and when these are rubbed with oil they are incomparably
handsomer than our walnut-wood joinery." (I. 526.) The Chinar-wood is used
in Kashmir for gunstocks.

The whole tenor of the passage seems to imply that some eminent
_individual_ Chinar is meant. The appellations given to it vary in the
different texts. In the G. T. it is styled in this passage, "The _Arbre
Seule_ which the Christians call th