210 THE GREAT RIVER BASINS. 



seems dwarfed and cowed by the neighbourhood of the energetic 

 Anglo-Saxon, is swiftly retiring before it in North America, and in 

 the course of centuries will probably be subjugated by it, even in the 

 southern division of the great Continent. 



A considerable portion of South America, however, is uncultivated, 

 unpeopled, and but imperfectly explored. There the Desert re-appears 

 with 



" The pale, cold aspect of a wearied friend," * 



under its most sharply defined forms and most impressive conditions. 

 The supremacy of the whites over the indigenous tribes is almost 

 nominal ; and if the latter are gradually dying out, the catastrophe, 

 in this instance, is due rather to their own lack of vigour, energy, and 

 capacity, than to the pressure of civilization. 



However rapid may be the growth of population in North America, 

 however great the rapidity -shall we say the avidity ? of the 

 American squatters in their conquest and appropriation of the soil, the 

 Desert still occupies, principally in "the far West" and the North 

 that is to say, in the angle comprised between the line of the great 

 lakes and the Rocky Mountains an area almost equal to the whole 

 of Continental Europe. There we find, as Mr. Johnstone points out, 

 the largest plains in the world. One such, for example, is that 

 immense basin which extends from the mouths of the Mackenzie, in 

 the icy Arctic Sea, even to the remote Delta of the Mississippi, and 

 from the huge chain of the Rocky Mountains, with their piny recesses 

 "and snowy peaks, to the less rugged and more pastoral range of the 

 Alleghanies; a total area of 4,400,000,000 square yards (3,245,000 

 square miles). A table-land of gentle elevation, nowhere above 1500 

 feet, and rarely more than 700 feet high, separates this territory into 

 two secondary basins. 



The north-east, which pours its waters into the Arctic Ocean, 

 Hudson's Bay, and through the Canadian lakes and River St. Law- 

 rence, into the Atlantic ; and, 



* Taylor, " Isaac Comnenus," Poetical Works, ii. 216. 



