Thus we discover the characteristic type which was impressed on Europe from the very first. Its relation to the world could not be understood by the ancients, as to them half of the earth lay in unbroken darkness. Only by experience, only by the advance of civilization, and by comparison with all the other continents, could this insight be gained. Doubtless many similar relations yet remain unknown and unsuspected, which will some day come to the light. The earth, as a planet, is only a grain of seed-corn sown by the Creator, enriched with powers of unfolding to infinite perfection in the unexplored future. What we now perceive are only the elementary principles—our knowledge only a motley; but even this is not without its uses, and is worthy of patient mastery. Europe, so broken in its coast, and rifted far toward its center by arms of the sea, has been affected in all its civil and social history to a very great extent. This is the first natural condition of its progress, the true physical basis of the fact that, upon the most limited of the continents, the greatest historical diversity has sprung up. It is not absolute size, but relative, which gives the pre-eminence; not the raw material, the mere mass, but its articulation, its form, which here, as everywhere, gives mind the mastery over matter. As in the animal and vegetable world there is, amid all the diversity of forms, a constant advance from a lower to a higher plane, manifesting itself in the complexity of the organs; so, in the so-called unorganized side of nature, we see the same characteristic as soon as we have grasped the whole mutual system of adaptations. The most general study of the differences between the continents exhibits an analogous harmony and correlation. As the simple, broad-leaved, solid cactus, or bunch-trunked euphorbia, (peculiar to the dry sand steppes of America and Africa,) appear branchless and without foliage,—the lower and undeveloped forms of vegetation,—so, too, the regions to which they are indigenous are the unbroken plains of North America, or the plateaus of still less broken Africa. The broken coast-line of Asia and Europe is analogous to that higher development which we find in the palm and in the full, round crown of the European fruit-tree, which bears blossoms and fruit as far as the very extremities of the branches. In the animal organization, the articulation of Europe is to be compared with the complex hand of man, so far superior to the prehensile organs of lower creatures, that Buffon saw in that feature alone the manifestation of man’s place among the animal kingdom.