Situation of the Continents in their Relation to Each Other and to their Collective Whole.
The relation which the continents bear to each other arises, primarily, from their position in reference to the cardinal points of the compass. This has been a principle from the earliest times, and the great laws of population may, in their working, be referred to this simple law of grouping.
Asia was known as the Orient, or, in the apt and beautiful German phrase, the Morgenland, or Land of the morning; Europe and the northern rim of Africa, as the Occident, or, in the German, the Abendland, or Land of the evening. In the south lay the torrid regions of the Ethiopians, in the chill north the country of the Hyperboreans. This fourfold division of the earth was for many centuries the only one known; the division into continents being made, according to Herodotus, by the Phenicians. And in very truth, a great principle lay in that rude and primitive division; it was in entire harmony with nature, and, up to the latest times and the opening of a new world, in entire harmony with history also. With Asia, the Orient, is connected indissolubly the development of the ancient world; with Europe, that of the modern. The contrast between these two great divisions is wonderfully analogous to that of morning and evening. The whole culture of the West had its root, its beginnings at the East. The East is not merely the place where the sun begins his daily course; it is the cradle of man, of nations, of dynasties of every sort, in politics, religion, and science. All the old royal houses came into Europe from the East; they are all “children of the sun,” no less than the princely families of India and Persia. The West merely witnesses the progress of what was begun in the East. From the most ancient times onward through the Middle Ages,—from Homer to Dante’s “Purgatorio,”—the West is associated with the kingdom of the dead, with “Hades,” and the “islands of the blest.” And within these two great divisions of Orient and Occident are comprised smaller ones, adapted to more limited conceptions of the extent of the earth, but growing out of the same root with the larger division. Bactriana and India constituted the Orient to the inhabitants of Western Asia, Syria their Occident; Asia Minor was the Orient of the Greeks, Italy and Sicily their Hesperia; while the Romans called Spain theirs.
Between the Orient and Occident, and yet to the south of both, lay the Libya of the ancients, exposed to the sun’s direct rays. In the very middle of the earth, on both sides of the equator, and not at the South Pole, is the true South. There we must seek the phenomena of the tropical world in their culminations. As high noon, the middle point in the hour, is the consummation of the day, so the torrid climes of the equatorial belt, at the very middle of the earth, afford the extremes of luxuriant growth.
The broad tracts of land at the northern polar regions formed the true physical contrast to the Orient and the Occident, as well as to the great South of central Africa. They lay around the North Pole like a vast shield of earth, unbroken except by the comparatively insignificant seas and gulfs of that region. And even where the water has broken its way and severed those northern lands, a submarine volcanic activity is, even now, constantly at work to restore the break, and bind the coasts together. At about 70° N. lat., all the countries of the north are brought into great nearness, and that parallel is a highway of little else than land crossing the North Cape of Europe, Cape Chelagskoy, in Tchooktchee, at the northeastern extremity of Asia, and touching Cape Bathurst, and the Fury and Heckla Straits of North America. North of this highway and of the Georgian Archipelago begins the great group of circum-polar islands.
The break between Asia and North America, at Behring’s Straits, is but fifty-six miles wide; it is the mere outlet of the Sea of Kamtckatka into the Arctic Ocean. The space between the northeast of America and the northwest of Europe is much greater indeed, but, in comparison with the distance between the southernmost points of the old and the new world, insignificant. The distance from northern Norway to Greenland is but about 940 miles.
It is noteworthy that, at the north of the great continental land-mass, where minor seas and channels break through, great volcanic forces are constantly at work, as hinted at above, to restore the unity. In the Sea of Kamtchatka lie the Aleutian islands, extending more than 950 miles, and forming what has been happily termed a bridge from the old world to the new. It consists of more than a hundred rocks and islands, some of which have been thrown up within the memory of man. In 1806, von Langsdorf and Tilesius witnessed the emergence of one of these, with a cone-shaped center, and about twenty miles in circumference. Grewingk has counted more than fifty volcanoes in activity within the limits of this island chain. The Curile islands, more to the south, form another similar volcanic group, extending from Japan to Kamtchatka. In this range there are known to be at least ten volcanoes, 10,000 feet in height.
The same high degree of volcanic activity must have formerly existed between Europe and America, for the traces of it are still visible. And not the traces alone, but a part of the same activity. And doubtless the shallowness of the waters between those continents hints at the same. More accurate explorations, then, will probably reveal multitudes of mountains, thrown up by these submarine forces, but not far enough to emerge and bear the name of islands. Yet many have emerged—those which fringe the shores of Norway, Scotland, and Ireland; the Orkneys, Shetland, and Hebrides islands; the Färoe group, with their blistered surface, their recesses, and volcanic rocks; Iceland, with its hot springs; and Mount Heckla; Jan Mayen, with its frightful craters, and the eastern coast of Greenland; one island, Sabrina, in the midst of the Azore group; which has had three upheavals within two hundred years, in 1638, 1723, and 1811,—all these plainly indicate the presence of tremendous forces, active in the past as well as in the present.
We thus fix the character of the arctic polar lands to be a close drawing together. Europe has, fortunately for itself, the least share in those inhospitable regions; only her pointed northern shores fringe the shores of the polar sea, leaving the great bulk of the great land-mass of the north to the broad shores of Asia and North America, with their neighboring island groups.
This polar world, as we may call it, in contradistinction to the Orient and the Occident, is not separated from more southerly regions by any great physical line of demarkation. The arctic circle is a mere mathematical line 66½° N. lat.; it has no geographical character whatever. The true polar world reaches in some places far beyond this mathematical barrier, bringing all its characteristics with it; while, on the other hand, it withdraws, at a few other places, nearer to the Pole. Were the polar world more broken up than it is by inland seas, and separated from the great land-mass by broad channels, it would be far more isolated in its whole character than it is. It is this immediate contiguity of the polar world with the great land-mass which opens it to whatever civilization it may be able to receive. And there is the same unity in the polar world that there is in the tropical world. The same phenomena which appear in one part of it are repeated in every other part. There are, of course, subordinate modifications found, but everything essential, which is discovered in one part, is discovered in every other part. There is no distinction into “new world” and no “old world;” the new world and the old coincide amid the arctic pole.
The characteristic of the polar world, next to this of unbrokenness, is the simplicity, or what might be called the monotony of its productions and all its features; the uniform reproduction of the same plants and animals, as well as of geological forms. Even Lapland, which is the farthest removed from the Pole of all the arctic regions, manifests, in its rounded and polished granite and gneiss and its deep and sharply-defined cuts, the same uniformity. The syenite found at Lake Imandra displays the same characteristics as that found on the islands in the White Sea, and on the shores of Greenland. The tops of the mountains, instead of being green, are all white with the lichen, commonly known as reindeer moss. And as with the geological formations and the vegetable kingdoms, so with the animal kingdom. Elsewhere are found bears, foxes, reindeer, seals, and walruses; the feathered tribes partake of the general monotony of structure, and man not less. The range of his development is extremely limited, and his character little different, whether in northern Asia or northern America.
America forms the real West of the great land-mass, the true Occident of the earth, young as yet, but to receive as its gift the entire culture of the East, and to advance by giant steps to a position of independent influence. Already it has far surpassed Asia in industry and civilization. The old world was the preparation for the new. Almost everything which the new world enjoys and values was the gift of the old. Its most ancient monuments of religion, architecture, and art are closely linked to those of the old world. Hieroglyphics have been found among the Peruvians and the Mexicans. In like manner embalming of princes, the engraving of astronomical data upon rocks, were borrowed from the East.
The historic character of America is more striking in respect to newness than the physical features of the water hemisphere. Buffon supposed that the American continent is of more recent formation than the old world, assigning for his opinion that it is more submerged, because smaller in area, than the eastern land-mass; because, also, the plants which demand moisture are predominant over those which depend on a dry climate; and because the forms of homologous animals—the elephant, rhinoceros, crocodile, turtle, apes, and serpents, for instance—do not attain the same size as in Asia and Africa. But waiving this, we use the name New World, only with significance in its connection with history.
With the discovery of America begins a new period in the history of man and of nations in their civil relations. The enlargement of territory occasioned by it was not greater than the enlargement of the bounds of thought. The old world had been developed earliest, had gone as far as it could go; it had to wait till another great step should be taken before it could go on in its course. The highest progress of the human race, the complete development of its possibilities, was not possible till man should, in his wanderings from east to west, compass the globe, and take possession of it, not for a day, but for all time. The primitive settlements in Mexico, Peru, and Yucatan could not sustain themselves in consequence of their isolation; navigation was in its rudest stages, and it needed to be in its highest before the world should be bound together closely enough to advance in all its parts toward the goal of a perfect civilization. Those primitive colonies perished therefore, as Canaan perished before Israel, and were replaced by others. The reason of this lay in the isolation of the land-masses of the earth. Had America been discovered and made accessible to the old world before the diffusion of the Gospel and the establishment of the Christian Church, it would have been too early, and heathenism might have had its grandest triumph and its loftiest temples in the new world. The way was not open as yet for the high moral development of the race; and the highways of civilization were not made till the most modern times, when all was in readiness for the great advance which we are witnessing now.
The contrast to the great continental hemisphere is found in Australia, a land-mass of no insignificant size, situated at the center, or very nearly at the center of the great oceanic hemisphere, and surrounded by hundreds of groups of islands, generally of quite unimportant magnitude. The name Australia was fitly chosen; it indicates its true relations to the Southern or Austral ocean. As Africa is the true South to the eastern hemisphere, Australia is the true South to the great continental land-mass of the whole globe. As the earth has two magnetic north poles, and two north poles of cold, one of the former in Siberia, north of Lake Baikal, and east of Cape Taimura, 110° east of Greenwich; the other in the neighborhood of Melville Island, in North America, 102° west longitude from Greenwich, so there are, in a physical sense, two south poles, (we do not refer to the magnetic ones and the poles of cold,) a continental south pole in Africa, a marine or maritime south pole in Australia.
This country, the largest of islands or the smallest of continents as we may choose to designate it, the most remote of all the great divisions from the center of the land hemisphere, has been the last to feel the pulses of civilization. There, therefore, is to-day the most rapid, the most amazing advancement to be witnessed on the earth; it has crowded centuries into decades, and with its shores adorned even now, in its youth, with states and cities, it cannot longer be called a land left behind in the world’s advance. It has inherited all that was finished in the knowledge and culture of the continental world; what the people of that world have toiled for years to win, becomes at once the birthright of the Australians. It is only an instance of the truth of Humboldt’s remark, that the more full the world is of ideas, the more rapid is its progress—a remark which throws the strongest light upon the connection of geography with history.