ld division of the world into four quarters is now nearly
effaced by emigration and Atlantic cable, yet the great historic
question about the globe is not how it is divided, here and there, by
ins and outs of land or sea; but how it is divided into zones all
round, by irresistible laws of light and air. It is often a matter of
very minor interest to know whether a man is an American or African, a
European or an Asiatic. But it is a matter of extreme and final
interest to know if he be a Brazilian or a Patagonian, a Japanese or a
Samoyede.

9. In the course of the last chapter, I asked the reader to hold
firmly the conception of the great division of climate, which
separated the wandering races of Norway and Siberia from the calmly
resident nations of Britain, Gaul, Germany, and Dacia.

Fasten now that division well home in your mind, by drawing, however
rudely, the course of the two rivers, little thought of by common
geographers, but of quite unspeakable importance in human history, the
Vistula and the Dniester.

10. They rise within thirty miles of each other,[24] and each runs, not
counting ins and outs, its clear three hundred miles,--the Vistula to
the north-east, the Dniester to the south-west: the two of them together
cut Europe straight across, at the broad neck of it,--and, more deeply
looking at the thing, they divide Europe, properly so called--Europa's
own, and Jove's,--the small educationable, civilizable, and more or less
mentally rational fragment of the globe, from the great Siberian
wilderness, Cis-Ural and Trans-Ural; the inconceivable chaotic space,
occupied datelessly by Scythians, Tartars, Huns, Cossacks, Bears,
Ermines, and Mammoths, in various thickness of hide, frost of brain, and
woe of abode--or of unabiding. Nobody's history worth making out, has
anything to do with them; for the force of Scandinavia never came round
by Finland at all, but always sailed or paddled itself across the
Baltic, or down the rocky west coast; and the Siberian and Russian
ice-pressure merely drives the really memorable races into greater
concentration, and kneads them up in fiercer and more necessitous
exploring masses. But by those exploring masses, of true European birth,
our own history was fashioned for ever; and, therefore, these two
truncating and guarding rivers are to be marked on your map of Europe
with supreme clearness: the Vistula, with Warsaw astride of it half way
down, and embouchure in Baltic,--the