Gobi
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Gobi. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
go'be, a vast stretch of desert in central Asia. It was at one time, no doubt, the bed of an inland sea. The ancient coast line may still be traced. It still receives a number of streams whose waters sink finally beneath the sand. The largest lose themselves in the sand or empty into salt lakes. The more fertile parts of the Gobi Desert are inhabited by pastoral people with their flocks. Caravan routes leading from China across the Gobi westward to Russia are still important routes of commerce. The Russians, who are great tea drinkers, will have no other tea except that which has been brought by caravan. They claim that a sea journey ruins the quality of tea. Marco Polo, who visited this district, wrote as follows: "You ride some five days through the sands, finding none but bad and bitter waters; then you come to a city at the edge of the desert." The actual dimensions are about 1,800 miles from east to west, and 400 from north to south. The general surface is about 4,000 feet above sea level. It is largely composed of hills and valleys of sand. See Desert
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
DESERT OF, the Shamo or "sand-sea" of the Chinese, an immense tract of desert country, occupying nearly the center of the high tableland of eastern Asia, between lat. 35° and 45° N., and lon. 90 ° and 110° E., and extending over a large portion of Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan. Its length is probably about 1,800 miles; mean breadth, between 350 and 400 miles; area, 300,000 square miles. Its general elevation is over 4,000 feet above sealevel. The East Gobi is occupied by different tribes of the Mongolian race, who have numerous herds of camels, horses, and sheep. In the West Gobi are some nomadic tribes of the Tartar race. This tract is supposed at one time to have been a great inland sea. In 1917, motor car service was inaugurated to carry freight across the desert between Kaljan and Urgi.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts treat the Gobi mainly as a caravan barrier and repeat the belief that it "was at one time, no doubt, the bed of an inland sea"; geologists now explain it instead as a high, cold rain-shadow desert cut off from moisture by the Himalaya and the Tibetan plateau, though its rocks do preserve far older seas. Just two years after Collier's noted the 1917 motor-freight service between Kalgan and Urga, Roy Chapman Andrews's American Museum of Natural History expeditions began work there, and in 1923 at the Flaming Cliffs they announced the first recognized dinosaur eggs, along with Protoceratops and Velociraptor; the Gobi is now among the world's richest dinosaur fossil grounds. The caravan tea trade the 1910 account thought "still important" is gone, replaced by the Trans-Mongolian railway of the mid-1950s and paved highways; Kalgan is now Zhangjiakou and Urga is Ulaanbaatar. Modern concerns are new ones: the desert's margins are expanding, its spring dust storms reach Beijing and Korea, and China has planted vast shelterbelts against them.
Written for this edition, 2026.