352 
tTNIFOEMITr OF COJfFIGUEATIOJC. 
five^groiips are all nearly of an average Iieight of from 500 
to /OO toises; and the culminant points (maxima of the 
hues of elevation) from 1000 to 1300 toises. That uni- 
formity of structure, in an extent twice as great as Europe, 
appears to me a very remarkable phenomenon. No summit 
east of the Andes of Peru, Me.xico, and Upper Louisiana, 
rises beyond the limit of perpetual snow.# It may be 
added, that with the exception of the Alleghanies, no snow 
falls sporacacally in any of the eastern systems which we 
have just examined. Prom these considerations it results 
and above all, from the comparison of the New Continent 
with those parts of the old world which we know best, with 
Europe and Asia, that America, thrown into the aquatic 
hemispheref of our planet, is still more remarkable for the 
continuity and extent of the depressions of its surface, than 
lor the height and continuity of its longitudinal rido-e. 
Beyond and within the isthmus of Panama, but eastward 
of the Cordillera of the Andes, the mountains scarcely 
attain, over an extent of 600,000 square leagues, the height 
of the Scandinavian Alps, the Carpathians, the Monts-Dores 
(in Auvergne), and the Jura. One system only, that of the 
• Not even the White Mountains of the state of New Hampshire, to 
which Mount Wastiington belongs. Long before the accurate measure- 
ment of Captain Partridge, I had proved (in 1801), by the laws of the 
decrement of heat, that no summit of the Wliite .Mountains could 
attain the height assigned to them by Mr. Cutlet, of 1600 toises. 
t The southern hemisphere, owing to the unequal distribution of seas 
and continents, has long been marked as eminently aquatic ; but the same 
inequality is found when wc consider the globe as divided not according to 
the equator but by meridians. The great masses of land are stinted 
between the meridian of lO” west, and 1.50° east of Paris, while the hemis- 
phere eminently aquatic begins westward of the meridian of the coast of 
Greenland, and ends on the east of the meridian of the eastern coast of 
New Holland and the Kurile Isles. This unequal distribution of land 
and water has the greatest influence on the distribution of heat over tlie 
surface of the globe, on the inflexions of the isothermal lines, and the 
climateric phenomena in general. For tlie inhabitants of the central parts 
of Europe the aquatic hemisphere may be called western, and the land 
hemisphere eastern ; bccau.se in going to the west we reach the former 
sooner tlian the latter. It is the division according to the meridians 
which is intended in the text. Till the end of the 15th century, the 
western hemisphere was as much unknown to the nations of the eastern 
hemisphere, as one lialf of the lunar globe is to us at present, and will 
probably always remain. 
