Guyot on Carl Bitter. 41 



that they afforded to his mind, the accumulation of a larger 

 number of new observations on most of the countries of the 

 continent of Europe, towards which all his studies seemed to 

 gavitate as towards a natural centre, was in itself a great gain. 

 To these direct impressions from nature also, we may trace 

 the source of that freshness of- imagination and of style which 

 he kept through life, that truthfulness and vividness of de- 

 scription which betrays the man fully conversant with na- 

 ture. 



But an advantage of a still more substantial character re- 

 sulted to Bitter, from that acquaintance with nature so faith- 

 fully kept up. Nowhere more than in Europe do we find 

 gathered within a small compass such a variety of natural 

 regions, each with well-defined characters of land and people. 

 They offer, indeed, to the observer specimens, as it were, on a 

 diminished scale, of the most characteristic physical regions 

 which compose the other continents. In the gigantic system 

 of the Alps and of the Pyrenees, with their snowy peaks, their 

 hardy and energetic races, we see the Caucasus and the Hima- 

 laya. In the fertile plains of Lombardy, that lovely garden of 

 Italy, with its streams, its delta, its lagunes, we study the 

 great plains of the Ganges, encompassed by the high wall of the 

 Himalaya and the moderate heights of Deccan, as the plains of 

 the Po by the Alps and the Apennines. Germany from the 

 foot of the Alps to the sandy plains of the Baltic, gives us a 

 perfect model of these lands of terraces, these forms of transi- 

 tion, as Bitter calls them, which gradually descend towards 

 the low lands, and traversed by secondary chains of mountains 

 form the grand steps through which the Alpine streams have 

 to find their way to the ocean. Towards the East the course 

 of the Danube, cutting through the high barriers which sepa- 

 rate that series of continental basins, the plains of Bavaria, 

 Austria, Hungaria, and pouring its waters into the open and 

 maritime plains of Valachia, forcibly reminds us of the great 

 Chinese streams descending by long steps through similar ob- 

 stacles to the rich plains which border the ocean. The mas- 

 siveness of the Scandinavian chain, with its broad and flat 

 tops, its scattered and isolated peaks, its chasm-like valleys, 

 is not without analogy with the most characteristic portion of 

 the Andes, while its deep fiords, with those of Scotland, scarcely 

 find elsewhere their equal, and remain the most remarkable 

 type of that phenomenon. 



In the races and nations of Europe the variety is scarcely 

 less striking. On one side of the Alps we meet with the quiet 



