The Old World, with its vast deserts and its arid and elevated steppes and table-lands, contrasted with the New World with its humid and fertile valleys and savannas and prairies and its boundless primitive forests, is like the exhausted Indian corn lands contrasted with the peat meadows. America requires some of the sand of the Old World to be carted on to her rich but as yet unassimilated meadows. * * * * * Guyot says, “The Baltic Sea has a depth of only 120 feet between the coasts of Germany and those of Sweden” (page 82). “The Adriatic, between Venice and Trieste, has a depth of only 130 feet.” “Between France and England, the greatest depth does not exceed 300 feet.” The most extensive forest, “the most gigantic wilderness,” on the earth is in the basin of the Amazon, and extends almost unbroken more than fifteen hundred miles. South America the kingdom of palms; nowhere a greater number of species. “This is a sign of the preponderating development of leaves over every other part of the vegetable growth; of that expansion of foliage, of that _leafiness_, peculiar to warm and moist climates. America has no plants with slender, shrunken leaves, like those of Africa and New Holland. The Ericas, or heather, so common, so varied, so characteristic of the flora of the Cape of Good Hope, is a form unknown to the New World. There is nothing resembling those Metrosideri of Africa, those dry Myrtles (Eucalyptus) and willow-leaved acacias, whose flowers shine with the liveliest colors, but their narrow foliage, turned edgewise to the vertical sun, casts no shadow.”[123] * * * * * The white man derives his nourishment from the earth,—from the roots and grains, the potato and wheat and corn and rice and sugar, which often grow in fertile and pestilential river bottoms fatal to the life of the cultivator. The Indian has but a slender hold on the earth. He derives his nourishment in great part but indirectly from her, through the animals he hunts.[124] * * * * * “Compared with the Old World, the New World is the humid side of our planet, the _oceanic, vegetative_ world, the passive element awaiting the excitement of a livelier impulse from without.”[125] * * * * * “For the American, this task is to work the virgin soil.” “Agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else.”[126]