136 - STEPPES AND DESERTS. 



by comparing the mouth of the Oregon with Torts Snelling 

 and Howard, and the Council Bluffs, in the interior of 

 the Mississipi and Missouri basin (Lat. 41 46), 

 where, to speak in the language of JBuffon, we find an 

 excessive, or true continental climate, a winter cold, 

 on single days, of -28.4 and -30.6 Eeaumur (-32 

 and 37 Fahr.), followed by mean summer temperatures 

 of 16.8 and 17.5 Keaumur (69 and 71.4 Fahr.) 



( 19 ) p. 10. "As if America had emerged later from 

 the chaotic watery covering" 



An acute enquirer into nature, Benjamin Smith Barton, 

 said long since with great truth, (Fragments of the Natural 

 History of Pennsylvania, P. i. p. 4), " T cannot but deem 

 it a puerile supposition, unsupported by the evidence of 

 nature, that a great part of America has probably later 

 emerged from the bosom of the ocean than the other 

 continents/' The same subject was touched on by myself 

 in a memoir on the primitive 'nations of America (Neue 

 BerlinischeMonatschrift, Bd.xv. 1806, S. 190). " Writers 

 generally and justly praised have repeated but too often 

 that America is in every sense of the word a New Continent. 

 Her luxuriance of vegetation, the abundant w r aters of her 

 enormous rivers, the unrepose of her powerful volcanoes, 

 all (say they) proclaim that the still trembling earth, from 

 the face of which the waters have not yet dried off, is here 

 nearer to the chaotic primordial state than in the Old 

 Continent. Such ideas appeared to me, long before I 

 commenced my travels, alike unphilosophical and con- 



