Southern Spain, resembles Morocco, more than Navarre; Provence, resembles Algeria, rather than Dauphiny; Senegambia, the Amazon, rather than the Red Sea; and the great valley of the Amazon, is more like to the moist regions of Africa than it is to its arid neighbors, Peru, Chili, &c.
The symmetry of the Atlantic is still more striking in its under-currents and the winds and breezes that sweep over it. Their action potently helps to create these analogies, and to form what we may call the fraternity of the shores.
The principle of Geographical unity, will be more and more sought for in the maritime basin, where the waters and the winds, faithful intermediaries, create the relation, the assimilation, of the opposite shores. Far less can we ask this illustration of Geographical unity from the mountains, where two slopes frequently present to you, under the same latitude, both a Flora and a population absolutely different; on the one slope, eternal summer, on the other, eternal winter, according to the aspect of each. The mountain rarely gives unity of country; far more frequently, duality, discordance, actual diversity.
This striking state of the case was first pointed out by Borg. de Saint Vincent, and has since, in a thousand instances, been confirmed by the discoveries of Maury.
In the immense valley of the sea, beneath the double mountain of the two continents, there are, strictly speaking, only two basins:—
1. The basin of the Atlantic;
2. The great basin of the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific.
We cannot give the name of basin to the indeterminate cincture of the great Austral Ocean, which has no boundary save that on the north it is touched by the Indian Ocean, the Coraline and the Pacific.
The Austral Ocean alone exceeds in extent all other seas together, and covers almost one-half of the entire globe. Apparently, the depth of that sea is in proportion to its extent. While recent soundings of the Atlantic give a result of 10,000 to 12,000 feet, Ross and Denham found in the Southern Ocean from 14,000 to 46,000 feet. Here, too, we may note the mass of the Antarctic ice, infinitely more vast than the Arctic. We shall not be very wide of the truth, if we say that the southern hemisphere is the world of waters, the northern the world of land.
He who sails from Europe to cross the Atlantic, having been fortunate enough to get clear of our ports in which he too frequently is imprisoned by the westerly wind, and having cleared the variable zone of our capricious seas, speedily gets into the fine climate and constant serenity which the N. E. breezes, the genial trade-winds, spread over sea and sky. Above and around, everything favors him, everything smiles upon him, but, as he approaches the Line, the inspiring breezes cease to breathe balmily upon him, and the air is almost suffocating. He enters the circle of those calms which prevail under the Equator, and present unchangeably their barrier between our northern trade-winds and those of the south. Heavy mists and clouds are all above and around him, and the tropical rains descend in mighty torrents. Bitterly the seaman complains of those gloomy and deluging clouds, but only for their gloomy screen what scathing beams would descend upon the poor dizzy heads, and be reflected in smiting power from the bright, broad mirror of the Atlantic? But for those torrents which fall upon the other face of our globe, the Indian Ocean and the sea of Coral, what would be their fermentation in the craters of their antique volcanoes! That dark mass of blackest clouds, once the terror of the navigator and the obstacle to navigation, that sudden and dense night extended over those broad waters form precisely the safeguard, the protecting facility which softens our passage and enables us, sailing southward still, to meet again the bright sun, the clear sky, and the balmy mildness of the regular winds.