The Desert World

The same changes that we observe in the characters of vegetable life as we advance towards the Pole reproduce themselves, the reader will easily understand, as we ascend the mou...

We have seen that the order of Pachydermata, which furnished the Ancient World with the most gigantic species of the terrestrial creation, is represented in the New World by com...

They who study the philosophy of history, of which men talk so much, and know so little; they who seek in the general laws of nature and the physical economy of the globe an exp...

"Blue, and baseless, and beautiful, Did the boundless mountains bear Their folded shadows into the golden air. The comfortlessness of their chasms was full Of orient cloud and u...

When we have crossed the 18th parallel (or nearly so) of north latitude in Africa and the 30th in Asia--the southern boundary of the Rainless District--countries of extreme fert...

To the prodigal Flora of the Tropics, which we shall soon see displaying in the virgin forests its exuberant fecundity, corresponds a Fauna no less rich, and marked by a singula...

Next to man, the most dangerous enemies of the peaceful herbivora are the great Carnivora of the _Felidæ_ genus, in whose first rank zoologists and poets were formerly wont to p...

"The noonday sun Now shone upon the Forest, one vast mass Of mingling shade.... Like restless serpents, clothed In rainbow and in fire, the parasites, Starred with ten thousand...

Nature, said Linné, is admirable above all in the smallest things: _Natura maxime miranda in minimis_. He might, perhaps, have more justly said, _Natura non minus miranda in min...

The Steppes of Tartary and Mongolia, interrupted, says Humboldt,[33] by chains of mountains of various aspects, separate the ruder peoples of Northern Asia from the primitive ra...

The facts actually ascertained in reference to the Flora of the plains of Central Africa, although as yet of a limited character, form as a whole too comprehensive a subject to...

The Ancient Continent possesses, in addition to the great apes of which I have already spoken, the Macaucos, the Cynocephali, and the Anthropomorphes, other apes of more erect,...

The _Flora_ of a region where nature provides no genial fertilizing rains, and whose soil is simply a shifting sand, moistened only in certain places by a brackish water, must n...

Some thousands of years ago--no long period in the history of creation, though so far outstripping the written records of man--gigantic animals, with huge trunks and ivory tusks...

I do not think that in all Europe, nor, indeed, in the entire Temperate Zone of the Old World, exists such an agglomeration of plants and trees as may merit the appellation of "...

As soon as we pass beyond the narrow borders of the Nile valley we encounter the Desert. Egypt _is_, in fact, the Nile; the Nile makes, recreates, preserves, fecundates Egypt, w...

The Malayo-Polynesian race has also been designated, and much more felicitously, the Neptunian or Pelagian, because it peoples exclusively the peninsulas and islands of the grea...

Besides those species of which we have just spoken, and which man has subjugated to his service, the Steppes nourish a host of other animals which seem for ever destined to a sa...

The mantle which Flora has spread over the naked body of this earth is, says Humboldt, unequally woven. Thickest in those places where the sun soars to a great altitude in a clo...

Of all the provinces, as yet uninhabited or only scantily peopled, which compose the northern regions of the New World, none offer so vast an extent of prairies as that which is...

We have seen in a preceding chapter that the great terrestrial and aquatic birds ("Waders") of the wild plains of the Ancient World have few analogues in America, and that the s...

The genus Orang-Outang (_Simia Satyrus_), or "Wild Man of the Woods," is a native of the islands of Borneo, Sumatra, and Java, and of a limited portion of the Malayan peninsula....

The first naturalists who explored the littoral of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands were struck with astonishment at the sight of the strange and almost monstro...

In the Steppes and Deserts of Sand we have seen men ignorant and wild, semi-brutalized in manner and tastes, and miserable in condition: some sedentary and peaceful, cultivating...

The desert has its own meteorology; it is the theatre of peculiar phenomena, which one observes in no other part of the globe. Its climate, at least in the sandy region, is rema...

Reference has been made to the numerous troops of wild horse which haunt the Steppes on this side of the Oural. Similar troops of these animals wander over the whole extent of t...

I have said that under the same parallels of latitude, or under neighbouring parallels, the physiognomy of the virgin forests was everywhere nearly the same, and hence we must s...

In countries which enjoy an always elevated temperature, the excess of their fertility is not much more favourable than extreme dryness to the material and moral development of...

The savannahs and marshes of the ancient continent are frequented by birds of great stature: Cursores, Raptores, and Palmipeds. The colossus of the feathered world, the _Ostrich...

The Sandy Deserts may with equal, nay, with greater accuracy, be entitled Salt Deserts, Rainless Deserts, Seas of Sand; for they present at one and the same time all these chara...

When I use the terms "Men of the Desert," "Populations of the Desert," evidently I must not be understood to employ them in their absolute sense. Man, no more than that other so...

It is of their own free choice, to shelter themselves from the burning arrows of the sun, to enjoy the dense shadows and delicious coolness of the great trees, and, without doub...

To the various populations which occupy the Arctic regions of both the Old and the New World, the general appellation of Hyperboreans is sometimes given. Do these populations tr...

Savagery is evidently the primitive condition of man. But while for certain races it has only been the first period of a more or less rapid progressive evolution, a movement in...

The artist who wishes to represent the broad expanse of Ocean's "liquid plain," does not fail to animate it with the white canvas of the labouring ships. If he paints the Desert...

The traveller who starts from the southern extremity of the Dead Sea encounters a succession of deserts. To the east extend wide plains, covered with ruins, where upwards of thi...

Geographers have given the name of the "fifth division of the globe" to that immense archipelago, or rather, that mass of archipelagoes which remote geological convulsions have...

The Breton "Cornwall" has been called by a popular French writer, "the Arabia Petrea of Brittany." But we might, perhaps, with greater justice apply to this sombre region, peopl...

Crossing the Channel, and surveying the limited expanse of our own "beloved England," we become aware of certain districts which belong to the Desert World. Through the ceaseles...

To those whose imaginations have been kindled by glowing pictures of the African Sahara and the Arabian wilderness, it will be, perhaps, a matter of surprise to learn that even...

The Deserts of the Australian interior have been laboriously traversed, not, as we have seen, without much suffering, and even sacrifice, by a handful of intrepid travellers, wh...

Hitherto we have only been speaking of miniature deserts, of the more limited of the world's wildernesses, where some degree of victory seems to reward man's arduous struggle wi...

The Dunes form the extreme line of the Brittany coast for nearly two hundred miles, from the Adour to the Garonne. They are hills of white sand, as fine and soft as if it had be...