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Show ~TEPPES A D DE ERT . 33 of rrewfoundland and to the shores of the Old Continent, and causes We t India cocoa-nut and other tropical fruits to reach the coast of Ireland and Norway. There i still at least, at the present time, an arm of thi current directed from the Azores to the south-east, which ometime produces di aster by carrying hips upon the west coast of Africa, which it trike at a part lined by sand-hills. Other sea coa t (I particularly recall that of Peru between Amotape and Coquim bo) ~how that, in these hot regions of the earth, where rain ne>er falls and where neither Lecideas nor other Lichens (25) germinate, centuries and perhaps thousands of years may elapse before the movable and can afford to the roots of plants a secure holding place. These considerations are sufficient to explain why, with an external similru-ity of form, Africa and South America present so marked a difference of character both in respect to climate and to vegetation. But although the South American Steppe is covered with a thin coating of mould or fertile earth, and although it is periodically bathed by rains, and becomes covered at such seasons with luxuriantly sprouting herbage, yet it never could attract the surrounding nations or tribes to forsake the beautiful mountain valley of Caracca., the margin of the sea, or the wooded banks of the Orinoco, for the treeless and springless wilderness j and thus, previous t.o the arrival of European and African settlers, the Steppe was almost entirely devoid of human inhabitants. The Llanos are, indeed, well suited to the rearing of cattle, but the care of animals yielding milk (26) was almost unknown to the original inhabitants of the New Continent. Hardly any of the American tribes have ever availed themselves of the advantages which nature offered them in this respect. The American race (which, with the exception of the Esquimaux, is one and the same from 65° north to 55° south latitude) has not passed from the state of hunters to that of cultivators of the soil through the intermediate stage of a pastoral life. Two kinds of native cattle (the Buffalo and the l\Iusk Ox) feed in the northern prairies of western Canada and the plains of arctic America, in Quivira, and around the colossal ruins of the Aztec fortress which rises in the wilderness, like an American Palmyra, on the solitary banks of the Gila. The |