And looking from the present to the past, we see that as some great tribes of men have given the whole fruits of their natural existence to the world for its future use, so some places, and those of no insignificant size sometimes, have conferred upon the world, the trust which they once held, and now recede, as it were, from view. They were great in the past, and the results of their greatness are now incorporated in the world’s life. The earth is one; and through the agency of what we may call either time or history, all its parts are in ceaseless action and reaction on each other. Though some great districts seem now to have no part to play, the element of time draws them into the great cosmos; they once had a great share in the world’s affairs, and the fruits which they brought to completion are merely in other hands. The earth is, therefore, as was stated in the introduction, a unit, an organism of itself: it has its own law of development, its own cosmical life; it can be studied in no one of its parts and at no special epoch of its history. The past and the future, the near and the remote, are all blended in a system of mutual interdependence, and must be looked at together. This is shown clearly in the past of Asia, and the present of Europe and some parts of the new world, while the history of all central Africa seems to lie wholly in the future. Heretofore it has enjoyed no progress excepting along its northern rim. The middle portion of the old world has outlived its primitive ethnographical impulse, and sunk back into a state of slumberous inaction. Asia, to call this region by its recognized name, has projected its own life from the center to the circumference; by this I mean, that while it seems to be exhausted of its old vigor, other countries inherited its power. The population of Asia is much less than it was in the time of Alexander the Great, much less than during the Mohammedan and Mongolian conquests, when all the habitable parts of that immense continent were bound together by highways of commerce and travel. On the other hand, the coasts are now of much more value and significance than they were in ancient times, and navigation has dotted her sea outline with splendid and populous cities. These seem, by reason of the facilities which steam affords, to be brought near to Europe; while the natives who inhabit central Asia are not only widely separated from the civilized world, but are divided up and set against each other by religious and political enmities of the most bitter kind. This is displayed in its fullest force by the comparative inapproachability of the great mountain chains, the Ural, the Taurus, and the Caucasus, and yet more by the unchanged barbarism of the central tribes, the hostile political relations, lacking all of the amenities and mutual dependencies of European policy, and the deadly antagonism of Mohammedanism and Christianity. This last is the curse which the natives of the earth have