Here, then, is the primary element of history; the laws of continental arrangement are the starting-point. Mathematics has thrown a network of meridians and parallels over the surface of the globe; but these lines exercise little influence over the course of history. The symmetry and regularity which they suggest do not belong to the earth; the earth is not bounded, like a crystal, by right lines. There is a freer play than that mathematical mark of parallels and meridians suggests; there is an interdependence of the great land districts of the globe that these regular lines do not indicate; a higher law of order, evolving the most perfect results from elements seemingly the most discordant. The Pyramidal Forms of the Great Land-masses, and their Southward Direction toward the Oceanic Hemisphere. The great land-mass of the globe accumulates in size as we advance toward the North Pole. South of 55° S. lat., the continental form disappears, and the tracts discovered of late years in the neighborhood of the South Pole are apparently islands, or rather long ice-coasts, whose continental form is very doubtful. The great land division, embracing both the old and the new worlds, reaches to about 80° N. lat., and the extreme points come even yet nearer to the Pole. The distances of one body from another, as, for instance, from Greenland to Iceland, are very small, in comparison with the immense spaces which divide the southern points of the continent, where the hundreds of miles of separation at the north expand into thousands. Expansion of the land-mass is the law at the north, contraction at the south. The great land formations terminate in wedge-shaped extremities, a fact observed by Lord Bacon, J. R. Forster, and Steffens; America ending at Cape Horn, 55° S. lat., Australia, which may be considered to embrace Tasmania or Van Diemen’s Land, at the southern extremity of the latter, 45°, and Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope, 35° S. lat., respectively. Humboldt gave the name of “Pyramidal Structure” to this cone-shaped form of the great land-mass, which, it will be observed, all are directed toward the south. This pyramidal structure contributes very much, unquestionably, to the diminished heat of the southern hemisphere, and has given a great predominance to the population of the northern in comparison with the southern; and not in respect to number alone, but also to mental and moral force of character.