ance there are but thirty that attain
this size." Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt
came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation,
and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of
the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so
eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes
farther--farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says:
"As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for
the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World.... The
man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of
Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of his
steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a
greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the
shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns
upon his footprints for an instant." When he has exhausted the rich soil
of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, "then recommences his adventurous
career westward as in the earliest ages." So far Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the
Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger
Michaux, in his Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802, says that the
common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "'From what part of
the world have you come?' As if these vast and fertile regions would
naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the
inhabitants of the globe."

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente
FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveler and a Governor-General of Canada,
tells us that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New
World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has
painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she
used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World.... The heavens of
America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher,
the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter the
thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger,
the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the
forests bigger, the plains broader." This statement will do at least
to set against Buffon's