The continent of America, if the stony records of the Past are read
aright, claims to be the oldest instead of the newest portion of the
globe. [According to some geologists, Labrador was the first part of
our globe's surface to become dry land.] Bowing to this opinion of
geologists till they see cause to express a different one, we will, in
consequence, commence our survey of the world and its inhabitants with
the Western Hemisphere. From the multitude of objects which crowd upon
us, we can examine only a few of the most interesting minutely; at
others we can merely give a cursory glance; while many we must pass by
altogether,--our object being to obtain a general and retainable
knowledge of the physical features of the Earth, the vegetation which
clothes its surface, the races of men who inhabit it, and the tribes of
the brute creation found in its forests and waters, on its plains and
mountains.
As we go along, we will stop now and then to pick up scraps of
information about its geology, and the architectural antiquities found
on it; as the first will assist in giving us an insight into the former
conditions of extinct animals, and the latter may teach us something of
the past history of the human tribes now wandering as savages in regions
once inhabited by civilised men.
Still, the study of Natural History and the geographical range of
animals is the primary object we have in view.
Though the best-known portions of the Polar Regions are more nearly
connected with North America than with Europe or Asia, we propose to
leave them to be fully described in another work. It is impossible, in
the present volume, to embrace more than the continental parts of the
Western World.
Looking down on the continent of North America, which we will first
visit, we observe its triangular shape: the apex, the southern end of
Mexico; the base, the Arctic shore; the sides, especially the eastern,
deeply indented, first by Hudson Bay, which pierces through more than a
third of the continent, then by the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and further
south by Chesapeake Bay and the Bay of Fundy. On the western coast, the
Gulf of California runs 800 miles up its side, with the Rio Colorado
falling into it; and further north are the Straits of Juan da Fuca,
between Vancouver's Island and the mainland, north of which are numerous
archipelagoes and inlets extending round the great peninsula of Yukon to
Kotzebue Sound.
Parallel with either coast we shall see two great mountain-systems--that
called the Appalachian, including the chain of the Alleghanies, on the
east, and the famed Rocky Mountains on the west--running from north to
south through the continent.
We shall easily recollect the great water-system of North America if we
consider it to be represented by an irregular cross, of which the
Mississippi with its affluents forms the stem; Lake Superior and the
River Saint Lawrence, including the intermediate lakes, the eastern arm;
the Lake of the Woods and its neighbours, Lake Winnipeg and the
Saskatchewan, the western arm; and the northern lakes of Athabasca, the
Great Slave Lake, and the Mackenzie River, the upper part of the cross.
If we observe also a wide level region which runs north and south
between the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, bounded on either side
by the two lofty mountain ranges already mentioned, we shall have a
tolerably correct notion of the chief physical features of the North
American continent.
Arriving at the northern end, we shall find it reaching some four
degrees north of the Polar Circle, though some of its headlands extend
stilt further into the icy sea. Beyond it stretches away to an unknown
distance towards the Pole a dense archipelago of large islands, the
narrow channels between them bridged over in winter by massive sheets of
ice, affording an easy passage to the reindeer, musk-oxen, and other
animals which migrate southward during the colder portion of the Arctic
winter.