THE HUMAN SPECIES. 125 



converted into marshes and deserts until drained off by a new 

 outlet, and when the sun could act with power in the process 

 cf absorption. Then it was that the emphatica] expressions of 

 "the kings of the isles," and "isles of the west," which desig- 

 nate Europe in the oldest human records, were correct in the 

 strictest sense; and, until the progressive results had been long 

 in operation, man was not able to reach Europe in the strength 

 of numbers, but only by families, or small clans of wanderers, 

 in canoes or rafts, on the northern ice, or at the isthmus of 

 Thrace, before it was rent asunder by a volcanic percussion, 

 and the local deluges of Hellenic mythology took place. 



Russia, west of the Oural chain, exhibits a counter direction 

 of water-courses, which forms a kind of table land in the 

 Vologda province, flowing towards the Caspian and the Eux- 

 ine, and having only inferior rivers turned towards the pole. 

 Hills, or small mountain clusters, commence already to rear 

 their heads amid the marshes and lakes bordering on the Arc- 

 tic shore, through the whole province of Archangel, becoming 

 more elevated westward, after the interval occasioned by the 

 White Sea, till they reach their utmost north and Western 

 limits in the Lapland system. Vologda, and the surrounding 

 high lands of Russia, were then an insulated prolongation of 

 the Oural range, full of forests and marshes, with the Euxine 

 reaching to a great distance inland, and the Chersoncsus (now 

 Crimea) was a rocky island.* At present the southern steppes 

 or^ still composed of sea-sands, and the vegetation consists 

 almost wholly of saline plants, — Artemisia:, Saholcc, and Salt- 

 cornice, — and lakes of salt water are frequent in the eastern 

 parts; but the great affluents towards the south attest the des- 

 iccation of the soil by a progressive diminution of water. The 

 fact applies equally to the Volga, Oural, and Don, as well as 

 to the Borysthenes or Dnieper, and the Boug, the sacred 



* Ai-petri, the culminating point of the Crimea, is estimated at 3500 

 feet above the sea. 



11* 



