Continent

“ Arriving from the horizon, our ship is confronted by the wharf of the Earth; and the continent, emerging, spreads its immense architecture out before us. In the morning distinguished by one great star, as I mount the gangway the earth’s blue apparition appears before my eyes. To defend the sun against the pursuit of the restless ocean, this continent has established the deep-set solidity of its ramparts. Their breaches open into a happy countryside.
For a long time in the full daylight we follow the frontier of another world. ”

“ The morning, then, brought us the astounding news that in the centre of the ocean there has emerged from the depths of the sea a new land, a new continent.
To the five parts of the world has been added a sixth. A great event has occurred. Its hugeness overwhelms us; its beauty delights and captivates us with a divine awe face to face with the marvels of creation. ”

“ You as a botanist are familiar with the evidence that a vast shadowy continent existed in the Pacific—a continent that was not rent asunder by volcanic forces as was that legendary one of Atlantis in the Eastern Ocean. ”

“ The mere existence of a western continent was a phantasy of dream-land, when the mysteries of that mighty waste of waters which separated the then known world from all beyond, was shrouded in obscurity as unfathomable as its deepest depths ”

“ This immense tract of land, the largest known which does not bear the name of a continent, as it is considerably larger than all Europe, is thinly inhabited, even to admiration, at least that part of it that we saw. ”

“ It is impossible for us to realize what a sudden invitation to greed and discord lay in this fair, beautiful, unclaimed continent—eight millions of square miles of land—more than twice the size of all Europe itself. ”

“ Anne. Pray, mamma, is not a continent one of the divisions of the land?
Mrs. Harley. Yes, my dear; for after we have divided the whole globe into land and water, we again subdivide the land into Continents, Islands, Peninsulas, Isthmusses, and Promontories,—the water into Oceans, Seas, Straits, Gulfs, Bays, Lakes, Rivers, and Creeks.
A Continent is a large tract of land containing several countries which are not separated by seas; as Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.
An Island, is a tract of land entirely surrounded by water, as Britain, Ireland, Sicily, &c. ”

“ A great rugged continent, lying hidden in the distant Pacific main, is encountered by [205] human enterprise; and in a few years we witness towns and cities thronging its seaboard, and all along the surf-beaten shores is heard the hum of industry. We mark the inalienable love of home, of the mother-country, in a thousand tokens, and find the measureless ocean bridged by sympathy and memory, and Old England renewed in such forms as make us scarcely conscious of our distance from it ”

“ It is the fate of continents, no less than of the human communities that inhabit them, to have their first origin shrouded in obscurity. When the curtain of darkness begins to rise from our primeval Europe, it reveals to us a scene marvelously unlike that of the existing continent. The land then lay chiefly to the north and northwest, probably extending as far as the edge of the great submarine plateau by which the European ridge is prolonged under the Atlantic for 230 miles to the west of Ireland. ”

“ They form what we may, for convenience, call the bas-relief of the globe.
At the creation of the earth every great continental division received (as every other organism has, regarded by itself, and not in relation to the greater whole of which it forms a part) its own special form. Each continent is like itself alone; its characteristics are not shared by any other. Each one was so planned and so formed as to have its own special function in the progress of human culture. ”

“ It would have been but reasonable to have expected that the opening of an inhabited continent — more than half the land surface of the globe — to the intelligent curiosity of the representatives of the civilization of the Old World, would have contributed largely to the sum and the elements of our knowledge of the origin and history of our human race. ”

“ This original continent has held its own. It took the initial in the building up of North America. Its two lines of direction had the form of a right angle, one projecting northeastward and the other northwestward.
This is the normal plan. It is the structural arrangement, not of this continent only, but of all continents; and the lake-depressions, conforming to the general system, are an additional witness to the common underlying laws and forces of which the earth itself is a grand phenomenon. ”

“ We never forget that on the map of Europe there is the big continent, and away in a corner, by themselves, extraneous, cut off, and "very superior," physically and morally isolated and self-contained, are our two not over enormous islands. ”

“ The wide continent before us is a continent devoid of animal life, save that its pools and rivers abound in fish and mollusca, and that millions and tens of millions of the infusory tribes swarm in the bogs and marshes. ”

“ Thou hast now fallen on the clue of an important mystery, Ensign Dudley. This continent was created with a design. The fact is apparent by its riches, its climate, its magnitude, its facilities of navigation, and chiefly in that it hath been left undiscovered until the advanced condition of society hath given opportunity and encouragement to men of a certain degree of merit, to adventure in its behalf. ”

“ It is now a commonplace, largely in the world of geographical concerns, that the earth has still another continent, unique in character, whose ultimate bounds are merely pieced together from a fragmentary outline. ”

“ When, at a period comparatively recent in the world's history, the discovery was made that, on the face of the as yet unmeasured ocean, there existed a western continent which rivalled in extent the world already known, it became a subject of natural enquiry whether a fact of such momentous importance could for so many thousands of years have remained a secret. ”

“ Or that Silenus knew of the continent of America because Ælianus makes him tell Midas, the Phrygian, that there was another continent besides Europe, Asia, and Africa? A continent whose inhabitants are larger and live longer than ordinary people, and have different laws and customs. A country where gold and silver are so plentiful that they are esteemed no more than we esteem iron. ”

“ A continent equal, at least, in extent, to all the civilized countries in the known northern hemisphere, where new men, new animals, new productions of every kind, might be brought forward to our view, and discoveries be made, which would open inexhaustible treasures of commerce? [48] We can now boldly take it upon us to discourage all expeditions, formed on such reasonings of speculative philosophers, into a quarter of the globe, where our persevering English navigator, instead of this promised fairy land, found nothing but barren rocks, scarcely affording shelter to penguins and seals ”

“ I give credit to the founders of the United States for a better knowledge of geography than that possessed by my countrymen of ancient times and do not assume that the newly formed nation was supposed to comprise the whole continent of North and South America, yet the name chosen is so comprehensive as to lead one naturally to suspect that it was intended to include the entire continent. ”

“ Europe is one continent attached to still another even greater land mass. That other is the continent of Asia, filled with many strange races, all speaking different languages. Even Europe itself is split up into many nations speaking more than thirty different tongues. ”

“ In this great Old-World continent there are many highly individualized areas, each separated from the rest of the continent by strong geographical barriers; it has a dozen [ii] or so of great peninsulas upon its seaboard, many great islands off its shores, and the interior of the land is divided into many separated regions by mountain ridges or by deserts. It is a land where man necessarily fell into variety, because of the isolation that the geography gave. ”

“ In it the ancient world is represented as forming one great continent, divided into two unequal parts by the Mediterranean, and by the Indian Ocean, which is carried from east to west, and comprises a great number of islands. ”

“ Geographers and philosophers supposed that in this portion of the globe there must be some continent or very large island, which would serve, as it were, to counterbalance the immense tracts of land which, to the northward, stretched not only as near the pole, as navigation had been able to proceed, but also west and east, the whole breadth of Europe and Asia. ”

“ CONTINENTS. In the midst of the Sun-Ocean there is a very large continent, besides many of smaller size, which, relatively to the larger, might be called islands. These continents are separated by seas from the large continent and from each other, and are all thickly populated by beings which, though human, are somewhat differently formed from ordinary man.
The continents, though immense, are, even in their aggregate mass, small in comparison with the hugeness of the Sun-Ocean. The nearest is at an immeasurable distance from the mountains ”

“ Let us suppose that the continent which is to succeed our land is at present beginning to appear above the water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; it must be evident that the materials of this great body, which is formed and ready to be brought forth, must have been collected from the destruction of an earth which does not now appear. ”

“ The Continent of America, North and South, is represented as running northwesterly to the center of the map, and as extending from 70° north latitude to 40° south latitude, the shape of the continent as then understood being evidently derived from a chart, not then published, which, from an inscription upon it, is supposed either to have been drawn by Columbus, or under his direction. ”

“ And thus, by these adventures, vast millions of that continent have been brought into contact with civilized men; with the fabrics of civilized nations; with the quickening ideas of superior men; and the whole continent itself, save a slight belt on either side of the Equator, has been opened to the scrutiny of travellers ”

“ It was all water, and the continents were lifted into their places, much as you model a continent in making a relief map; they were sketched out and then filled in. North America, for example. First of all up came that mass in the northeast in what is now Canada; the Laurentian Highlands, as they are called in your geography. They rose very, very slowly, you understand, only a few feet in a thousand years; for Nature has all the time there is and never hurries. ”

“ Whether the Continent of America stretches any farther north than these straights, and joins to the eastern parts of Asia, agreeable to what has been asserted by some of the writers I have quoted, or whether the lands that have been discovered in the intermediate parts are only an archipelago of islands verging towards the opposite continent, is not yet ascertained. ”

“ Here, however, the teacher will need to exercise care and judgment lest he waste time on unessential details.
Third in order comes the geography of the new continent. The study of the physiography of the North American continent, if properly handled, will prove to the students a fascinating, an almost inexhaustible subject. If properly led, boys and girls will study their maps with even greater interest than they do their text-books. ”

“ To hear of a nation, separated by an ocean, we may, indeed, say two, and a vast continent, from the civilized portions of Asia, Europe, and Africa, located in a mountainous tract, where soil and water were scanty, and locomotion was rendered difficult from the configuration of the land ”

“ It shows the continent of North America in two great slopes, one long one sloping to the east, and a short one sloping to the west, from the line of meeting of their upper edges, or what has been termed the Continental Axis.
Fig. 62 represents the continent as sketched after a study of it as simple land masses—a primary land mass, and a secondary land mass, with the line of depression at the meeting of the two opposing slopes. ”

“ And when we have discovered a continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or another plain upon the further side. ”

“ In estimating the value of resemblances observed in this part of our continent, we should remember that we have sufficient evidence to believe that for many generations some slight intercourse has been going on between the adjacent mainlands and islands of the two continents in the regions of their nearest proximity. ”

“ These are coral islands, slowly raised, but continuous, created by the daily work of polypi. Then this new island will be joined later on to the neighboring groups, and a fifth continent will stretch from New Zealand and New Caledonia, and from thence to the Marquesas.
One day, when I was suggesting this theory to Captain Nemo, he replied coldly:
"The earth does not want new continents, but new men." ”

“ Although this varied structure of the continent of North America makes it more fit for the uses of man than the continents of Africa, South America, and Australia, there are certain considerable disadvantages in its physical conditions. To show the relation of these evil and fortunate features, it will be necessary for us to consider the general geography of the continent somewhat in detail. ”

“ The larger the continent, the easier the communication through all the different parts of it, both by land and by water, the less would any one particular part of it ever he exposed to either of these calamities, the scarcity of any one country being more likely to be relieved by the plenty of some other. ”