The characteristic differences in races, and their relative
numerical distribution over the Earth's surface, are conditions affected not
by natural relations alone, but at the same time and specially, by the
progress of civilization, and by moral and intellectual cultivation on which
depends the political superiority that distinguishes national progress.
Some few races, clinging, as it were, to the soil, are supplanted and ruined
by the dangerous vicinity of others more civilized than themselves, until
scarce a trace of their existence remains. Other races, again, not the
strongest in numbers, traverse the liquid element, and thus become the first
to acquire, although late, a geographical knowledge of at least the maritime
lands of the whole surface of our globe, from pole to pole.
I have thus, before we enter on the individual characters of that portion of
the delineation of nature which includes the sphere of telluric phenomena,
shown generally in what manner the consideration of the form of the Earth
and the incessant action of electro-magnetism and subterranean heat may
enable us to embrace in one view the relations of horizontal expansion and
elevation on the Earth's surface, the geognostic type of formations, the
domain of the ocean (of the liquid portions of the Earth), the atmosphere
with its meteorological processes, the geographical distribution of plants
and animals, and, finally, the physical gradations of the human race, which
is, exclusively and every where, susceptible of intellectual culture.
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