If we supposed Europe to subside to the extent of one hundred fathoms, its area would be reduced to the compass of one-half. The ocean would again cover her low plains, most of which are ancient sea-beds, and there would remain above the waters merely a skeleton of plateaux and mountain ranges, far more extensively indented by bays and fringed by peninsulas than are the coasts existing at the present time. The whole of Western and Southern Europe would be converted into a huge island, separated by a wide arm of the sea from the plains of interior Russia. From an historical as well as a geological point of view, this huge island is the true Europe. Russia is not only half Asiatic on account of its extremes of temperature, and the aspect of its monotonous plains and interminable steppes, but is likewise intimately linked with Asia as regards its inhabitants and its historical development. Russia can hardly be said to have belonged to Europe for more than a hundred years. It was in maritime and mountainous Europe, with its islands, peninsulas, and valleys, its varied features and unexpected contrasts, that modern civilisation arose, the result of innumerable local civilisations, happily united into a single current. And, as the rivers descending from the mountains cover the plains at their foot with fertile soil, so has the progress accomplished in this centre of enlightenment gradually spread over the other continents to the very extremities of the earth. III.—NATURAL DIVISIONS AND MOUNTAINS. The Europe alluded to includes France, Germany, England, and the three Mediterranean peninsulas, and constitutes several natural divisions. The British Islands form one of these. The Iberian peninsula is separated scarcely less {10} distinctly from the remainder of Europe, for between it and France rises a most formidable range of mountains, the most difficult to cross in all Europe; and immediately to the north of it a depression, nowhere exceeding a height of 650 feet, extends from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean. The geographical unity of Europe is represented to the full extent only in the system of the Alps, and in the mountains of France, Germany, Italy, and the Balkan peninsula which are connected with it. It is there we must seek the framework of continental Europe.