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then been made. It is, on the whole, wonderfully accu- rate, and even to-day it ranks as a standard work upon the Siam of half a century ago. He knew, chiefly through native reports, the names and relative positions of all the provinces of Siam; he described each of these with a fair amount of detail, from Chieng Mai on the Me- ping, and Luang Prabang on the Mekong, to the Malay States of the Peninsula; and his estimates of the total population of the country, 6,000,000 souls, and its divi- sion into races, were fairly correct so far as can now be judged. Of the Mekong he possessed no personal know- ledge, and he merely repeated information supplied to him by natives, but he had obtained a fair idea of its size and of the direction in which it flows from Luang Prabang through Laos.

In 1855 Sir John Bowring was sent to Bangkok on a special mission, and in his published account of his visit a considerable amount of information is given con- cerning the past history of Siam and Siamese relations. with the West. Bowring, however, had no opportunity of materially adding to the facts collected by his prede- cessors.

In 1856 Mr. D. O. King returned to Bangkok after nearly a year spent in Eastern Siam and in Kambodia. He had ascended the Bang Pa Kong from Bangkok to Pachim and Muong Kabin, and thence had made his way over a "military road," which had been constructed five and twenty years earlier, to the Tasawai River. He had spent some time at Batambang, and thence had paid visits to Chantabun and to the gold mines situated be- tween Batambang and the Menam valley. Leaving