Viewing page 168 of 234

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

134.

tinguished by the neatness of the soldering and the greater perfection of the finish. Before many years true Mongol design, with its flavor of the North and the West, will have quite faded and the task of the archaeologist will be ever more difficult than it is to-day.

[[underline]]VALUABLE LIBRARIES[[underline]] From a native scholar in Urga, who is a member of the Imperial Russian Academy of Arts and Sciences and whose name must be withheld for the present, I learned the interesting fact that there are extensive libraries of Tibetan, Mongolian and Chinese texts lying scattered on the desert in Inner Mongolia, or rather in the debated Province known as Ordos.

It appears that during the extended Mohametan insurrection of forty years ago several populous Buddhist lamaseries were destroyed and that their libraries lie about the ground, partly covered by sand and well preserved by the dry climate. My learned acquaintance visited this spot, which lies between the Northern bend of the Hwang River, on the North and the great wall of China, on the South, during the summer of 1909. He confided to me that only lack of baggage animals prevented his removing many hundreds of books and manuscripts. That among the specimens which he was able to bring away were examples of extreme value dating form the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of these proved to be unique in Western libraries. He was good enough to suggest an expedition to rescue these books under the joint suspices of the American School at Peking and the Imperial Russian Academy, as he was unable to get funds for the purpose from Russia alone. 
I need not emphasize to this Committee that an opportunity