Place yourself in imagination upon one of the many islands of the Pacific and look to the southward. Behind New Holland you will perceive that the southern ocean touches with its circular wave the two extreme points of the old and the new continents. No land in that antarctic world; not one of those little islands or of those pretended Polar lands which discoverers have marked only to behold their disappearance, and which probably have been but so many icebergs. Water, still water; water without end. From the same post of observation on which I have, in imagination, placed you, in contrast with the great circle of antarctic waters, look eastward, towards the arctic hemisphere, and you may discern what Ritter terms the circle of fire. To speak more precisely, it is an opened ring, formed by the volcanoes commencing at the Cordilleras, passing by the heights of Asia, to the innumerable basaltic isles of the eastern ocean. The first volcanoes, those of America, present, for a length of a thousand leagues a succession of sixty gigantic Beacons whose constant eruptions command the abrupt coast and the distant waters. The others, from New Zealand to the North of the Philippines, number eighty still burning, and a countless host that are extinct. Steering northward, from Japan to Kamschatka, fifty flaming craters dispense their ruddy lights far away to the gloomy seas of the Arctic. In the whole, there is a circle of three hundred active volcanoes around the eastern world. On the other front of the globe, our Atlantic Ocean presented a similar appearance, prior to the revolutions which extinguished most of the volcanoes of Europe and annihilated the continent of the Atlantis. Humboldt believes that that great ruin, only too strongly attested by tradition, was only too real. I may venture to add that the existence of that continent was in logical concordance with the general symmetry of the world, for that face of the globe was thus harmonized with the other. There rose, with the volcano of Teneriffe, which alone remains of them, and with our extinct volcanoes of Auvergne, of the Rhine, &c., those which were to destroy Atlantis. Altogether, they formed the counterpoise of the volcanoes of the Antilles, and other American craters. From these burning or extinct volcanoes of India and the Antilles, of the Cuban and the Javanese seas proceed two enormous streams of hot water, which are to warm the north, and which we may fitly term the aortæ of the world. They are provided, beside or beneath, with their two counter currents which, flowing from the north, bring cold water to compensate the flow of hot water and preserve the balance. To the two streams of hot water which are extremely salt, the cold currents administer a mass of fresher water which returns to the equator, the great electric furnace, where it is heated and made salt.