36 Heviews — Elisee Reclus on " The Earth." 



continents, North, and South America form one pair; Europe and 

 Africa another, and Asia and Australia the third. The duality of 

 North and South America is evident to every child who understands 

 "the use of the globes;" but when a comparison is attempted 

 between this and any other pair, the author is constrained to draw 

 more or less on his imagination. He owns that Europe might be 

 looked upon as a mere geographical appendix of Asia ; but he dis- 

 poses of this objection by the fact that " at some previous epoch it 

 [Europe] was separated from Asia by a sheet of water, which 

 stretched from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Obi, through the 

 present Euxine, Caspian, and Aral Seas." He does not stop to 

 inquire what was the condition of the African continent at that 

 period ; whether the Sahara was submerged, and whether the whole 

 face of the sub-aerial land was not so altered in contour that it pre- 

 sented' no analogy with the continents of the present day. Again, 

 confining ourselves to the land-surface of the world as it exists 

 to-day, is not the division between the continents of Europe and 

 Asia purely arbitrary ? It is not political, because portions of 

 both the Eussian and Turkish Empires extend into Asia. It is not 

 philological ; for, if it were, the peninsula of Hiadostan would be 

 joined to the remainder of the region inhabited by the nations which 

 speak languages belonging to the Indo-European family. And it is 

 neither ethnological nor theological, for similar reasons to those that 

 it is not political. 



The author finds little difficulty in pointing out a series of 

 similitudes between South America and Africa ; but in comparing 

 them with Australia, he is compelled to exercise his idealism to even 

 a greater extent than in liis comparison of Europe and Asia with 

 America, and especially in his attempt to construct an isthmus com- 

 parable with that of Suez or Panama. This essential feature he finds 

 represented in the Sunda Islands, which he justly enough regards as 

 " the piles of a demolished bridge." 



M. Eeclus does not, however, consider his similitudes to be mere 

 fancies. He regards them as the evidences of the action of two sets 

 of forces which have for ages been exerted at right angles to one 

 another. He points to a series of circles of geographical phenomena, 

 such as the " circle of fire," which extends from the chain of the 

 Andes across the southern ocean ; to " the circumpolar circle of 

 coasts" around the North Pole; to the "circle of inland seas and 

 lakes" represented by the Mediterranean, the Euxine, the Caspian, 

 the Siberian and American lakes, and the Bay of Fundy ; also to the 

 " semicircle of deserts," which is arranged obliquely across the 

 continents of Asia and Africa. All these, with the directions of the 

 axes of the northern continents, show, in his opinion, that they are 

 the result of a set of forces acting obliquely to the Equator. 



The other set of forces he considers to have produced the distri- 

 bution of the southern continents in three lines parallel to the 

 meridian. "To this complication," he observes, "is due the apparent 

 irregularity of the double continents in the Old World ; for there the 

 two axes of formation cross, and consequently there, too, is produced 



