But not the southern extremities alone of the continents exhibit this wedge-like form; it is repeated also in the northern countries of Europe and Asia. In Europe we discover the working of the law in the peninsulas of Spain, Italy, Greece, the Morea, and the Crimea, and also in the great Scandinavian peninsula. The same phenomenon is repeated on a scale far more imposing in Asia, in the great countries of Arabia, India, and Farther India, Corea, and Kamtchatka; also in both halves of America. Exceptions are rare. In Great Britain, the pointed extremity is toward the north, and the greatest breadth at the south; but this is a peculiar case, and has its exceptional causes; and perhaps with reason, for this island has hitherto maintained an individual and exceptional character in the development of modern civilization. Various explanations have been offered for the almost star-shaped figure which the combined body of great peninsulas assume, radiating, as it were, from the center of the land hemisphere. This is seen very strikingly in looking at a horizontal projection of the northern hemisphere, viewed from the North Pole. There has been evidently the working out of some great design in this, and the forces employed must have been of the first order of magnitude. Clöden attributes it to the rotation of the earth in its plastic, formative-state. Link ascribes it to electrical forces, generated at the time the earth’s crust was hardening into its present consistency. J. R. Forster finds an explanation in the theory, that formerly great currents, now not existing, passed, or sought to pass, from south to north or northwest. He attributes to these the parallelism of the great gulfs which indent the coast-line of the old world, the uniform abruptness of the shores at the south, and the gradual widening of all the great land-masses as we go north. The Atlantic is a channel cleft by those great currents. Behring’s Straits is a smaller one; but everywhere else the effort was incomplete, and no opening was effected, except in the straits of minor importance, which separate island from island, or from the main land. The fossils discovered by Pallas seemed to favor this theory, but later investigation has showed that they do not. Link overthrew Forster’s theory, yet the phenomenon is worthy of study. Viewed on a map of the land hemisphere, constructed according to Mercator’s projection, it is a storehouse of interesting observations and studies, and is to be recommended to the student’s careful attention. We must pass over the theories; scholars disagree as to the cause; Pisis ascribes it to a hidden law of geometric construction; Necker, Brewster, and Dana, to magnetism. We must simply accept the facts for the present.