of the Issedones, that people who, though righteous in all other respects, had the singular fashion of devouring their dead fathers. The Issedones again obtained by barter the gold from the Arimaspians, a race who had but one eye, and were hardly human[1]. They in turn, so report went, obtained the precious article not by traffic, but by theft from the gold-guarding griffins, who occupied the land where the gold was found. At least Herodotus says, "How the gold is produced I cannot truly tell, but the story is that the Arimaspians, people with one eye, carry it off from the Grypes[2]." He describes elsewhere (IV. 17) this region, which lay beyond the Scythians, where the cold was so great that the ground was frozen hard for eight months of the year, and that it was even cold in the summer season, that the air was so full of feathers that no one could see, by which, as Herodotus very properly explains, the thick falling feathery flakes of snow were meant, and that the cattle could not grow horns. All this seems to point beyond all doubt to the Ural and Altai ranges. Unquestionably there was a well-established trade route extending from the Black Sea through the country inhabited by the Scythians proper, which Herodotus describes as consisting of plains of rich soil, a true description of the fertile steppes of Southern Russia. Then beyond this lay a large area of rugged, stony land, inhabited by a people called Argippaei, who, males and females alike, were born bald. Their territory formed the lower part of a range of lofty mountains. They were a peaceful and a harmless race, dwelling in tents of white felt in the winter. It was easy to learn about them and their country from the Scythian traders who held intercourse with them, as likewise from the Greeks from the factories of the Borysthenes, and from the other Greek trading ports on the Euxine. No man could say of a truth what lay to the north of the "Baldheads," as on that side rose the lofty,.
For the gold-fields of India, cf. Dr Valentine Ball's excellent chapter (IV.) in his Geology of India.]
