Comparative geography

by Carl Ritter

The ancients had little suspicion of all this. Yet the contrast between the land world and the water world did not escape Strabo’s keen glances, and he hints at its effects on man. It is glanced at in one passage of his 15th Book. He is speaking of the effect of the moist air of India in contrast with the dry air of Libya, and shows that he appreciates that these are not without their influence on the constitution of the Indian and of the Ethiopian. “Some,” he says, “rightly ascribe it to the sun, that, in the absence of moisture in their air, the rays burn so deeply into the body of the African; the Indian, on the other hand, is not jet black and curly-haired, because, in his country, he enjoys the moisture in the atmosphere.”

The Position of the Continents and its Influence on the Course of History.

Besides the three great forms spoken of above—the compacted land-mass, the great water-mass, and the subordinate water-mass—the position of the continents leads us to another discovery of prime importance.

The question arises, What relation have the continents, taken separately, to the entire mass which they constitute? What relation do they bear to each other? What influence does the proximity of great land forms exercise? What influence their remoteness from each other? Is the arrangement of the continents fortuitous, or adapted to great ends always held in view by the Creator? Has Nature been left in this to a wild, passionate caprice, or has she been subjected to law, and been compelled to subserve the interests of humanity? And is it not worthy of study, worthy of science, to investigate these things, to master their law, and observe here the workings of the Divine Mind?

In the solar system, we have for a long time minutely studied matters of size and distance, the approach and receding of planets, and observed the effects of all these things with an accuracy which could not be too thorough. In the study of our Earth, this has been neglected, because heretofore those great tracts of land and water have seemed of little mutual influence; because they are fixed forms. Yet they have a greater influence, perhaps, on this very account. Although there is in them no law of gravitation to study, yet there is in them the display of forces no less surprising than those of attraction, and which are to be read in the light, not of mathematics, but in the light of history. It indeed seems self-evident that a grouping of these great forms cannot be without an influence on the progression or retarded development of nations; on the amount of population, the progress of colonization, and the union of States in offensive and defensive alliance. Should a higher Power throw the continents out of their present position and relation to each other, a new history of the world would date from this day.

Here, then, is the primary element of history; the laws of continental arrangement are the starting-point. Mathematics has thrown a network of meridians and parallels over the surface of the globe; but these lines exercise little influence over the course of history. The symmetry and regularity which they suggest do not belong to the earth; the earth is not bounded, like a crystal, by right lines. There is a freer play than that mathematical mark of parallels and meridians suggests; there is an interdependence of the great land districts of the globe that these regular lines do not indicate; a higher law of order, evolving the most perfect results from elements seemingly the most discordant.

The Pyramidal Forms of the Great Land-masses, and their Southward Direction toward the Oceanic Hemisphere.

The great land-mass of the globe accumulates in size as we advance toward the North Pole. South of 55° S. lat., the continental form disappears, and the tracts discovered of late years in the neighborhood of the South Pole are apparently islands, or rather long ice-coasts, whose continental form is very doubtful. The great land division, embracing both the old and the new worlds, reaches to about 80° N. lat., and the extreme points come even yet nearer to the Pole. The distances of one body from another, as, for instance, from Greenland to Iceland, are very small, in comparison with the immense spaces which divide the southern points of the continent, where the hundreds of miles of separation at the north expand into thousands. Expansion of the land-mass is the law at the north, contraction at the south. The great land formations terminate in wedge-shaped extremities, a fact observed by Lord Bacon, J. R. Forster, and Steffens; America ending at Cape Horn, 55° S. lat., Australia, which may be considered to embrace Tasmania or Van Diemen’s Land, at the southern extremity of the latter, 45°, and Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope, 35° S. lat., respectively. Humboldt gave the name of “Pyramidal Structure” to this cone-shaped form of the great land-mass, which, it will be observed, all are directed toward the south. This pyramidal structure contributes very much, unquestionably, to the diminished heat of the southern hemisphere, and has given a great predominance to the population of the northern in comparison with the southern; and not in respect to number alone, but also to mental and moral force of character.

But not the southern extremities alone of the continents exhibit this wedge-like form; it is repeated also in the northern countries of Europe and Asia. In Europe we discover the working of the law in the peninsulas of Spain, Italy, Greece, the Morea, and the Crimea, and also in the great Scandinavian peninsula. The same phenomenon is repeated on a scale far more imposing in Asia, in the great countries of Arabia, India, and Farther India, Corea, and Kamtchatka; also in both halves of America. Exceptions are rare. In Great Britain, the pointed extremity is toward the north, and the greatest breadth at the south; but this is a peculiar case, and has its exceptional causes; and perhaps with reason, for this island has hitherto maintained an individual and exceptional character in the development of modern civilization.

Various explanations have been offered for the almost star-shaped figure which the combined body of great peninsulas assume, radiating, as it were, from the center of the land hemisphere. This is seen very strikingly in looking at a horizontal projection of the northern hemisphere, viewed from the North Pole. There has been evidently the working out of some great design in this, and the forces employed must have been of the first order of magnitude. Clöden attributes it to the rotation of the earth in its plastic, formative-state. Link ascribes it to electrical forces, generated at the time the earth’s crust was hardening into its present consistency. J. R. Forster finds an explanation in the theory, that formerly great currents, now not existing, passed, or sought to pass, from south to north or northwest. He attributes to these the parallelism of the great gulfs which indent the coast-line of the old world, the uniform abruptness of the shores at the south, and the gradual widening of all the great land-masses as we go north. The Atlantic is a channel cleft by those great currents. Behring’s Straits is a smaller one; but everywhere else the effort was incomplete, and no opening was effected, except in the straits of minor importance, which separate island from island, or from the main land. The fossils discovered by Pallas seemed to favor this theory, but later investigation has showed that they do not.