As the White Sea, (48,500 square miles in area,) the Baltic, (167,000 square miles,) and the yet greater North Sea, have broken through the northern regions of Europe, so on a far more gigantic scale have the inroads of the ocean rifted and sundered North America. This we have learned in our recent frequent voyages to the Esquimaux regions. Baffin’s Bay, Lancaster Sound, Smith’s Sound, Jones’ Sound, Barrow Strait, Fox’s Channel with its uncounted islands, Hudson’s Bay with its 499,000 square miles of surface, Boothia Gulf, Victoria and Georgia Seas, Wellington’s Channel, Melville Sound, Prince of Wales Straits, and very many other water passages and basins divide those northern districts into a vast mesh of islands and peninsulas. The superficial area of all these tracts is on a colossal scale; even the Greenland group is estimated to include 766,500 square miles. Within the past few years this whole Arctic Sea has been the scene of numerous expeditions of discovery, some of them on a princely scale. All this shows that North America is fashioned much more after the analogy of Europe than of South America. The analogy would be much more close, if North America were as favorably affected by climatic conditions as Europe. Both continents are washed at the south as well as at the north by great inland seas, and divided up by them in a manner peculiar to them among all the continents. Of this articulation, America, less favored by climate, has much the larger share. By its admirable harbors, and by the action of the Gulf Stream crossing the Atlantic in two directions, America has been specially fitted to receive the population and civilization of the Old World, and to stand in the closest relations with it. In this, united with the arrangement of its mountain chains and the happy characteristics of its river systems, America bears the palm completely away from Asia. In that continent the colossal rivers of the north have no connection at their sources with the head-waters of the great Chinese, Indian, and West Asiatic rivers. It is entirely different in North America, where the St. Lawrence, Mackenzie, Columbia, Colorado, Mississippi, and Missouri flow from the same region, as from a common center, not separated at their sources by an immense plateau, but forming a single river system, from the mouth of one to that of another, flowing in just the contrary direction. We find, therefore, that there, as in North Europe, civilization has followed the water-courses, and has planted colonies as far north as 70° on the coast of Greenland; while in Asia human habitations cease with 65° N. lat. America seems to be appointed, by its physical conditions, to plant the banner of human progress at the most northern parts of the globe, and to do for the northern hemisphere what Great Britain, through her colonies in Tasmania and South Australia, with their admirable harbors, is doing for the southern.