straight on, and yet come back to the port from which they set out. Voyages from England to Australia are made by sailing down the coast of Africa, round the Cape of Good Hope, and then eastward across the Indian Ocean. But voyages from Australia to England are very commonly made by sailing still eastward from Australia, across the South Pacific Ocean, round Cape Horn, and then over the Southern and the Northern Atlantic Ocean, till the ship reaches England again, after having sailed quite round the world.

nearer

(5). The earth is not a perfect round, however. It is flattened a little at the Poles, which are the parts at the very top and bottom of a map of the globe. These parts are nearly fourteen miles the centre of the earth than the Equator, or middle part, is. At the Equator itself, indeed, the earth is not perfectly round, its diameter being at one point two miles less than at another.

2. DISTRIBUTION OF SEA AND LAND.

1. The surface of the earth is composed of LAND and SEA-the land being the parts of the world rising above the waters, which cover every other part.

2. Nearly three-fourths of the surface of the earth are thus hidden by a greater or less depth of water; the remaining fourt forming continents and islands rising to a greater or less height above the wide waters.

3. It is supposed that to fill up the awful hollows which hold the seas, and to make the world a smooth ball, not only would all the land now above their surface be needed, but a mile in depth besides, all over the earth. That is, the surface of the hard crust of the earth would then be a mile below the present level of the There would thus be water enough to cover all the world, including the dry land, with an ocean at least a mile deep.

sea.

4. The dry land is not distributed over the surface of the globe in any uniform arrangement. On the contrary, if you take a school globe, you will find that you can turn it so that nearly all the land will be on one side, and nearly all the ocean on the other.

Thus the Land is nearly all on one half of the globe, while the other is nearly all Water. It is a curious result of this that the side of the world on which the Dry Land lies is heavier than the calculations make the polar diameter Herschel made it 26'478.

*The exact results of the latest 27:47 miles less than the Equatorial.

other or Watery side, by about eight times the weight of all the dry land on the globe. You can think how this is, if you remember that the watery side not only wants the hills and mountains of the other side, but has a vast hollow filled with water, while the land side is solid from the mountain tops to the centre.

5. A line may be drawn overland, without crossing water, from Sierra Leone, in Africa, across the Isthmus of Suez, to near Shanghae, in Eastern China. This is the longest continuous extent of land on the globe, measuring a third of its whole circumference. On the other hand, on a line drawn round the world, north, through the Atlantic, past Greenland, through Behring's Straits, and south, through the Northern and Southern Pacific Oceans, a ship might circumnavigate the world almost without seeing land.

6. There is not much land with land opposite to it on the other side of the globe, that is, antipodal* land. The north island of New Zealand is opposite Spain; Australia is opposite the middle of the Atlantic; the East Indies are opposite the plains of South America; and the southern part of that continent is opposite China and part of Tartary. Only a twentieth part of the land of the earth has land opposite to it, the rest has water on the other side.

7. This arrangement of the land and water on the globe has a great influence on the climate and characteristics of the land, and on the distribution of men, animals, and plants, and also on the currents of the sea, and on the direction and force of the winds.

3. THE CONTINENTS OF THE GLOBE.

I.

1. Viewed as a great whole, the higher parts of the land of the globe girdle the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Beginning with South Africa, we have a great elevated region, or plateau, extending across the continent, from the Cape of Good Hope to the course of the river Niger, then stretching up its eastern side, and forming the highlands of Abyssinia. Next come the great table lands of Arabia and of Persia; next, the great table land of Asia, extending past the north of India to the north-eastern border of

From the Greek words, anti, opposite to, and pous, podos, a foot. People at the Antipodes are, thus, people whose feet are opposite to ours.

the continent, and reaching out towards the vast mountain range of America, which, beginning at the Polar Seas, stretches down the west coast to Cape Horn. The steeper side of these vast elevated tracts almost always faces the Pacific and Indian Oceans. In Africa, the higher mountains are on the east side; the wonderful range of the Himalaya faces the Indian Ocean; and the vast range that runs down the two American continents slopes steeply to the Pacific.

2. The lowlands of the world stretch round the Atlantic and the Arctic Oceans. Thus, in the Eastern Hemisphere, the northern half of Africa is low along the Atlantic; then comes the great plain, on the west and northern part of Europe; then come the steppes of Asia, which reach along the whole northern half of that continent to the far east, skirting the Arctic Ocean.

In the Western Hemisphere, we find the Atlantic girdled by the great lowlands of North America, which stretch from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, and, in South America, by the vast plains of the Orinoco, Amazon, and Paraguay rivers, and the Pampas to the south. The extreme north of North America is also low, along the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Australia, except on its eastern part, is a great lowland.

3. Round each Pole there is a great icy region. In winter, the sun is not seen for months together, and the cold is so great that the sea is nearly all strongly frozen over, the snow lying so universally on the landscape that it is almost impossible to tell where the land ends and the sea begins. The Antarctic or Southern Pole is much colder than the Arctic or Northern, and must present much the appearance our own land presented long ages ago, in what is called the glacial, or ice period. Voyagers who have navigated its seas, tell us that they sailed along a great wall of solid ice, unbroken and impenetrable, rising in some places from one hundred and fifty to three hundred feet in awful perpendicular.

4. The regions on the edge of the northern icy sea are barren, or covered with mosses and lichens. It is thus along the extreme north of Asia, America, and Europe. The soil throughout this vast stretch is permanently frozen to a great depth, all that the sun can do in summer being to thaw the surface to the depth of a few inches. There is no land in the Southern Hemisphere girdling in the icy sea in this way.

5. Stretching southward from this zone of barren land is the Temperate Forest region, which reaches, in North America, from the middle part of Alaski on the north-east, across the continent, to

the Atlantic, stretching to the south, across its breadth, cn a line with the Northern United States and California. In the northern part of this vast forest belt the trees are mostly fir, pine, birch, aspen, larch, willow and alder; in the southern half the beech, the oak, the chestnut, the maple, and all other hard-wood trees flourish. In the eastern hemisphere we find the same characteristics reaching in a broad zone from Sweden and Norway in Europe, across the great plain of Siberia to the east coast of Asia. Hard-wood forests, separated from this great zone in position, are found also in Asia Minor and Western Persia.

4. THE CONTINENTS OF THE GLOBE.

II.

1. Coming stili south, a region of pasture land succeeds that of the great forests. In North America it takes the name of "prairies" and "savannahs," and forms vast tracts, destitute for the most part of trees, but covered with rich pasture, reaching in a broad belt from the edge of the forest land on the north-that is, from the line of Illinois and Iowa, with a bend northward at the Saskatchewan Valley-across the continent, over all the wide country drained by the Upper Mississippi, to the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, its southern limits extending nearly to the Gulf of Mexico.

In Europe, a large part of Southern Russia consists of such unwooded pasture land, called there "steppes," and passing thence into Asia, where it reaches across the whole of the northern part of the continent, between the high table land on the south and the forest zone on the north. It is over these illimitable plains that the Tartar* tribes wander with their countless flocks.

2. In the southern hemisphere, or the half of the world from the Southern Pole to the Equator, there is a belt of similar prairie or pasture land. The immense plains of South Africa, famous as grazing land; the great sheep and cattle pasture lands of Australia; and the wide "pampas" or plains of South America, extending from the mountains of Brazil to the deserts of Patagonia form this zone.

3. A great desert region succeeds the pastoral country in the

This word should be Tatar. The European races in their horror at the Huns, when invaded by them, called them Tartars, as if they came from Tartarus-that is, from the bottomless pit.

northern hemisphere. In Africa, the greatest extent of such waterless and barren land anywhere found, is met with in the Sahara, which covers a space greater than all Europe, with dry, sandy, and stony ridges and plains. A great part of the Sahara lies slightly below the level of the Mediterranean; so that if a canal were opened from that sea into it, we should have a vast lake by which easy communication might be had with Central Africa. The great desert of Arabia comes next, as we go eastward, then the salt deserts of Persia, and others extending northward round the Caspian and the Aral seas, to the region of "steppes" or pasture plains. The "Thur," or Indian desert, which is a continuation of the Persian deserts, on the other side of the Indus, comes next; and finally, there are vast desert regions on the great table land of Asia, reaching through Mongolia to the borders of Manchouria, where they form the great Gobi desert. In North America there is a great region of barren waste, stretching from the neighbourhood of the Salt Lake, in Utah, to the north of Mexico. It is known as the great American desert.

4. A similar belt of desert is met with in the southern hemisphere. The whole of Central Australia belongs to it-vast treeless and waterless plains reaching far and near. In South America it reappears in the great deserts in the north of La Plata, on both sides of the central Andes, and in the barren and rainless coast-line at the foot of the mountains. In Africa there is the great Karroo desert of Cape Colony, the deserts on the Orange River, and the vast Kalahari desert which fills the central part of the south of the continent.

5. THE CONTINENTS OF THE GLOBE.

III.

1. Between the equatorial regions and this great zone of desert there is another belt of pasture land. In Africa there are rich grassy, wooded, and arable countries to the south of the Sahara. India has a wide tract of similar soil; and in Thibet and Western China extensive pastures reach to the south from the great desert of Gobi; while in China proper wide regions are under high cultivation. This is in the north hemisphere. In the south hemisphere we have the rich lands of central South Africa, described by Livingstone and other travellers. In Northern Australia there are similar tracts, known as the "Plains of Promise;" and in South