Note 1286 — Chapter XII · REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY

These marvels were almost never arbitrary inventions. They can usually be traced back to a remote source which was itself an exaggeration or distortion of a true story. See Peschel, Abhandlungen, vol. i, 1877, pp. 9–19. Most of the marvels of India as set forth by Ctesias had their counterparts in Persian and Indian mythology and probably “originated in obscure and disfigured accounts of nature and man in the mountain chains between the upper Indus and the Ganges and on the high plateaus as far as the Tarim Basin” (Doberentz, Erd- und Völkerkunde, in: Zeitschr., vol. xiii, 1881, pp. 41–57).