With the discovery of America begins a new period in the history of man and of nations in their civil relations. The enlargement of territory occasioned by it was not greater than the enlargement of the bounds of thought. The old world had been developed earliest, had gone as far as it could go; it had to wait till another great step should be taken before it could go on in its course. The highest progress of the human race, the complete development of its possibilities, was not possible till man should, in his wanderings from east to west, compass the globe, and take possession of it, not for a day, but for all time. The primitive settlements in Mexico, Peru, and Yucatan could not sustain themselves in consequence of their isolation; navigation was in its rudest stages, and it needed to be in its highest before the world should be bound together closely enough to advance in all its parts toward the goal of a perfect civilization. Those primitive colonies perished therefore, as Canaan perished before Israel, and were replaced by others. The reason of this lay in the isolation of the land-masses of the earth. Had America been discovered and made accessible to the old world before the diffusion of the Gospel and the establishment of the Christian Church, it would have been too early, and heathenism might have had its grandest triumph and its loftiest temples in the new world. The way was not open as yet for the high moral development of the race; and the highways of civilization were not made till the most modern times, when all was in readiness for the great advance which we are witnessing now. The contrast to the great continental hemisphere is found in Australia, a land-mass of no insignificant size, situated at the center, or very nearly at the center of the great oceanic hemisphere, and surrounded by hundreds of groups of islands, generally of quite unimportant magnitude. The name Australia was fitly chosen; it indicates its true relations to the Southern or Austral ocean. As Africa is the true South to the eastern hemisphere, Australia is the true South to the great continental land-mass of the whole globe. As the earth has two magnetic north poles, and two north poles of cold, one of the former in Siberia, north of Lake Baikal, and east of Cape Taimura, 110° east of Greenwich; the other in the neighborhood of Melville Island, in North America, 102° west longitude from Greenwich, so there are, in a physical sense, two south poles, (we do not refer to the magnetic ones and the poles of cold,) a continental south pole in Africa, a marine or maritime south pole in Australia.