AMERICA THE OLD WORLD.
Louis Jean Rodolophe Agassiz, the distinguished naturalist. Born in Motier, near the Lake of Neufchâtel, Switzerland, in 1807; died at Cambridge, Mass., December 14, 1873. From his "Geological Sketches." By permission of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Publishers, Boston.
First-born among the continents, though so much later in culture and civilization than some of more recent birth, America, so far as her physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the New World. Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, hers the first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth beside; and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there above the sea, America already stretched an unbroken line of land from Nova Scotia to the far West.