A few years afterwards, a Fleming named Rubruquis was sent on a similar mission, and had the merit of being the first traveller of this era who gave a correct account of the Caspian Sea.
In the Volga section of the Caspian Sea fish are caught to the value of about £I,000,000 annually; in the Ural section over 40,000 tons of fish and nearly 1500 tons of caviare are obtained.
The most famous Arsaces was the chief of the Parni, one of the nomadic Scythian or Dahan tribes in the desert east of the Caspian Sea.
The depression westward of the Caspian and Aral basins, and the original connexion of these seas, have also come under the close investigation of Russian scientists, with the result that the theory of an ancient connexion between the Oxus and the Caspian has been displaced by the more recent hypothesis of an extension of the Caspian Sea eastwards into Trans-Caspian territory within the postPleiocene age.
In fact, nearly the whole of the region between the Caucasus and the Perso-Turkish frontier on the south, from the Caspian Sea on the one side to the Black Sea on the other, was embroiled in a civil war of the most sanguinary and ruthless character, the inveterate racial animosities of the combatants being in both cases inflamed by religious fanaticism.
