33.°6 Geneva Lat. 46° 12′ Altitude 1298 feet 49°.8 ————— 63°.5 25°.0 Cherson Lat. 46° 38′ Long. 32° 39′ E. 53°.1 ————— 71°.0 Snow is hardly ever seen on the banks of the Oregon or Columbia river, and ice on the river lasts only a few days. The lowest temperature which Mr. Ball ever observed there (in 1838) was 18°.4 Fahr.[ED] A cursory glance at the summer and winter temperatures given above, suffices to show that a true insular climate prevails on and near the western coasts; whilst the winter cold is less considerable than in the western part of the old continent, the summers are much cooler. This contrast is made most apparent when we compare the mouth of the Oregon with Forts Snelling and Howard, and the Council Bluffs in the interior of the Mississippi and Missouri basin, (44°–46° north lat.,) where, to speak with Buffon, we find an _excessive_ or true _continental_ climate,—a winter cold, which on some days is –32° or even –37° Fahr., followed by a mean summer’s heat, which rises to 69° and 71°.4 Fahr. Footnote 19: p. 8.—“_As if America had emerged later from the chaotic covering of waters._” The acute natural inquirer Benjamin Smith Barton, expresses himself thus accurately:[EE]—“I cannot but deem it a puerile supposition, unsupported by the evidence of nature, that a great part of America has probably later emerged from the bosom of the ocean than the other continents.” I have already elsewhere treated of this subject in a memoir on the primitive nations of America:[EF]—“The remark has been too frequently made by authors of general and well-attested merit that America was in every sense of the word a _new_ continent. The luxuriance of vegetation, the vast mass of waters in the rivers, and the continued activity of great volcanoes, confirm the fact (say these writers,) that the still agitated and humid earth is in a condition approximating more closely to the chaotic primordial state of our planet than the old continent. Such ideas appeared to me, long before my travels in those regions, no less unphilosophical than at variance with generally acknowledged physical laws. These imaginary representations of an earlier age and a want of repose, and of the increase of dryness and inertia with the increased age of our globe, could only have been framed by those who seek to discover striking contrasts between the two hemispheres, and who do not endeavour to consider the construction of our terrestrial planet from one grand and general point of view. Are we to regard the southern as more recent than the northern part of Italy, simply because the former is almost constantly disturbed by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions?