DR. HEDIN'S TARANTASS ON THE KIRGHIZ STEPPES.
had left untold. For furniture it has a large writing-table and a small bedstead. "I go from the one to the other," he says. The windows are wide open, day and night. On the walls are books, and all the books are books of travel.
Sven Hedin is still a young man. He was thirty-two last February. Yet his last journey was the third journey of exploration which he has undertaken in Asia. Until he was about twenty he intended to become a Polar explorer. He relinquished this project because it seemed to him that the dark region of Central Asia offered a field of wider scientific interest than the frozen seas of the North; and Hedin's scientific interests have a very wide range. In the first place a geographer, his studies embrace all the many sciences which are in relation to geography. This science he has studied with passionate application ever since he could read. Before he was seventeen he drew maps which fill five large volumes—exquisite examples of draughtsmanship they are. There are maps of the constellations; maps giving the routes followed by every Polar traveler; maps hypsometrical, topographical, statistical; maps geological and zoōlogical; executed with characteristic neatness and thoroughness.
When Hedin was twenty, he interrupted his studies at Upsala to take a post as tutor at Baku. "In my spare time," he said, "I studied languages which were likely to be of use to me in the journeys I had already projected. I studied the Tartar dialect of Turkish. I also learned Persian. I had very good teachers, and I would learn them." He earned $160 by his year's work as tutor, and employed this sum to take a first journey through Persia, which he has described in his book, "Through Persia, Mesopotamia, and Caucasus." "This journey," said Sven Hedin, "was taken as an apprenticeship to traveling in Asia."
In 1892, because of his acquaintance with Persia, Hedin was attached to a special embassy sent to the Shah of Persia by the King of Sweden, and again visited the country. In the autumn of the same year he finished his university career, taking the degree of Doctor of Philosophy; and then, the following year (1893), he began to prepare for his famous journey of exploration into Central Asia.
"I had always wanted to do this," said Dr. Hedin. "I had read everything that had been written on the subject, especially the writings of Prshewalsky and of Richthofen, and I wished to do many things and to solve many problems. My principal objects, as described in the paper which I read here in Stockholm, in the presence of the King, were, at first—that is to say, before I started on this journey—(1) to study the glaciers in the mountains on the eastern side of the Pamirs; (2) to search for the old Lop-Nor Lake, and thus to settle the controversy between Prshewalsky and
