pon 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 traveller 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 account of this
part of the world and its productions.

Linnaeus said long ago, "Nescio quae facies _laeta, glabra_ plantis
Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect
of American plants;" and I think that in this country there are no, or
at most very few, _Africanae bestiae_, African beasts, as the Romans
called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for
the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles of the
centre of the East Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants
are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveller can lie down in
the wo