But the contrast of the great central region to the broken coast is so great and complete, that the advanced culture along the sea-line has not penetrated far into the interior, nor changed the habits of the nomadic tribes which fill Central Asia, and whose representatives we have in the Mongolians, Toorkomans, Kirgheez, Bukharians, Calmucks, etc. Still less could it reach the distant north, to which, with all the splendor which we associate with everything oriental, the civilization of the southern coasts is utterly wanting. To this element of superficial size, the immense and almost insuperable obstacles which Nature has placed so thickly in Asia may be added, and also the immense variety of natural productions which climates so different as those of the different parts of the continent exhibit. Extending from the equator to the north frigid zone, Asia affords a home for the most diversified kinds of plants and animals, and shows, too, hardly less variety in its eastern and western extremes than in its northern and southern. The characteristics of the Chinese flora and fauna are very widely different from those of Hither Asia. In the east, we have the sago-tree and the tiger; in the west, the date-palm and the lion. The north gives us moss, the coniferæ, and the reindeer, in contrast with the bread-fruit tree, the sugar-cane, the broad-leaved banana, the elephant, rhinoceros, tapir, and monkey of the south. The inexhaustibleness of the Asiatic continent is not more visible in all this wealth of productivity than in the abundance as well as the variety of human life. Though Asia has been the mother of the world, and has sent out so many and so eminent races, it has not been to the depletion of the parent country. In race, figure, color, manner of life, nationality, religion, political and social bonds of union, forms of government, culture, language, it is so richly diversified, that no continent, viewed historically, can be compared to it. Asia seems to have been created to send forth its fruitful scions of life to all the other great divisions of the earth. Europe, the Occident. The smallest of the three continents of the Old World, its superficial contents are the largest in proportion to the amount of coast-line. Only on the east side has it a land frontier; and there it has its widest extent from north to south. Like Asia, it is bordered on three sides by the ocean. Asia seems like a mighty trunk, at whose western extremity the broken and serrated Occident is found, advancing in breadth from north to south, but articulating into arms of various size from east to west, till it loses itself in the peninsulas of the Atlantic coast. The nearer to Asia, the broader is Europe, and the more akin to the Asiatic character; the farther from it, the more minute become its subdivisions, and the more varied its character.