Enlarging, as it does, toward its southern extremity, North America approaches a trapezoidal shape, like Asia, and, as in Asia also, the size of the main body preponderates greatly over that of the extremities. Several of these extremities, too, extend toward the east and south, and only a few toward the west. To the North American peninsulas and islands belong the northeasterly island group of Greenland, (which for centuries was considered to be a peninsula, but which, since Parry’s discoveries in 1820, has been known to be a group of independent islands,) Bank’s Land, Boothia Felix, Cockburn, Melville’s Peninsula, Labrador, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Florida, the latter 59,000 square miles in area. The northeast of North America is everywhere much cut up by inlets of the ocean, larger bays, gulfs, and sounds. This is the main characteristic of the shore of the northern United States and Canada. As all these open toward Europe, the situation of this whole region has been especially adapted to the most speedy advance in civilization. The pride of the American can no more plume itself on an independent progress than can that of the European; to the former, Europe is the Orient from which he receives, in an already advanced stage, what the European receives from Asia, his own Orient. The less important peninsulas of North America, and the side most destitute of them, are turned toward the northern Pacific. To this region belong the Russian possessions, the desolate wastes of Aliaska, and, farther to the south, the peninsula of Old California, which has begun, within the last ten years, to play an active part in the world’s affairs. But all three of these are capable at present of little independent advance. They must wait till they feel the impulse of the civilization of the older American States, before they take that place to which the newly-organized commercial relations with China and Japan seem to be leading the way. North America enjoys a great advantage over Europe in the possession of large inland lakes or seas. The prevalence of articulation and of the adjacent islands is not toward the south, but toward the polar and sub-polar regions, (from 40° to 50° N. lat.,) as in Europe. And although many of these islands and peninsulas are as yet but little known, still the progress of discovery has been so rapid within the past few years, that it would seem, by European analogies, that an important history is yet in store for them. For there is a great kinship between these northern regions of America and the Scandinavian and North Russian domains of Europe. And we know well that no degree of cold has ever intimidated civilization from penetrating in the latter to the very confines of the polar world.