Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Beyond And Within The Isthmus Of
Panama, But Eastward Of The Cordillera Of The Andes, The Mountains
Scarcely Attain, Over An Extent Of 600,000 Square Leagues, The Height
Of The Scandinavian Alps, The Carpathians, The Monts-Dores (In
Auvergne) And The Jura.
(* The southern hemisphere, owing to the
unequal distribution of seas and continents, has long been marked as
eminently aquatic;
But the same inequality is found when we consider
the globe as divided not according to the equator but by meridians.
The great masses of land are stinted between the meridian of 10
degrees west, and 150 degrees east of Paris, while the hemisphere
eminently aquatic begins westward of the meridian of the coast of
Greenland, and ends on the east of the meridian of the eastern coast
of New Holland and the Kurile Isles. This unequal distribution of land
and water has the greatest influence on the distribution of heat over
the surface of the globe, on the inflexions of the isothermal lines,
and the climateric phenomena in general. For the inhabitants of the
central parts of Europe the aquatic hemisphere may be called western,
and the land hemisphere eastern; because in going to the west we reach
the former sooner than the latter. It is the division according to the
meridians, which is intended in the text. Till the end of the 15th
century the western hemisphere was as much unknown to the nations of
the eastern hemisphere, as one half of the lunar globe is to us at
present, and will probably always remain.) One system only, that of
the Andes, comprises in America, over a long and narrow zone of 3000
leagues, all the summits exceeding 1400 toises high.
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