The wedge-shaped plateau of Patagonia is not at all benefited, as previous analysis would lead us to expect, by its long coast and by the nearness of the islands of Terra del Fuego. The fruitful island of Tasmania is far more valuable to Australia than is this island to Patagonia, and even Iceland is a more productive neighbor to Norway. The Terra del Fuego group, embracing a territory of 29,000 square miles, although hard by the South American coast, only injures it instead of blessing it, for it imperils shipping and harbors a population so degraded that they have no wants which can stimulate the rudest civilization. With a precipitous, craggy coast, without trees and without grass, covered only with moss, and belonging strictly to the polar world, it must give a habitation to the very lowest and most degraded of the human race, isolated from the world, and only casually visited when winds and storms throw mariners upon its shores. Not every island is to be considered, therefore, as a gain to the adjacent main land. If Terra del Fuego lay at the mouth of the La Plata River, it would have become a valuable auxiliary to Brazil. The worth of an island is relative, not absolute. The Antilles group is the great insular formation contiguous to Central America. Its area, though comprising 94,700 square miles, is not one-tenth as great as that of the great Sunda group. By situation and physical conditions, it is much more closely connected with North than with South America. The Caribbean Sea is twice as large as the Mediterranean, the one having 801,800 square miles, and the other 1,675,800 square miles. It has been, therefore, more difficult to make the larger tributary to the advance of civilization than the smaller. North America has entirely taken the palm from South America in the progress of its culture, just as has uniformly been the case with all the continents of the northern hemisphere compared with the southern; and yet the tropical southern continent is far more profusely endowed with the gifts of nature than the temperate northern one. The northern half, on the other hand, enjoys a far greater advantage in its broken coast-line, numerous bays, gulfs, islands, peninsulas, harbors, as well as by reason of its greater want of conformity to a rigid triangular form.