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Asia, throughout much of Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Arabia, and also most of the Sahara of Africa, 2500 miles in length, and about 1000 miles in breadth, are flat, arid, burning deserts. Southern Africa, so far as known, is chiefly tableland; and at least twothirds of all Africa are supposed to be either tableland or plain.

These prodigious levels of the old world are almost as widely different as the loftiest hill and the lowliest valley, and even comprise most striking contrasts in their greatest characters; yet, with very small aggregate exceptions, they all agree in being wild and barren. But the great levels of the new world are, for the most part, exuberantly fertile. Vast plains constitute no less than two-thirds of all the surface of the Americas; and though ranging through every clime, from the middle of the south temperate zone to the neighbourhood of the arctic circle, they present little other differences than a diversity and rivalry of luxuriant vegetation.

The most southerly plains, called pampas, are chiefly flat, bosky, boundless expanses of tufted grass, spreading away like a slightly ruffled ocean to the utmost circumference of vision, and depastured by immense herds of wild horses and wild cattle. The plains of the Amazon, called silvas, are an undulated mass of woodland more than six times the area of France, and so densely occupied by tropical trees and shrubs and climbing plants, as to be penetrable by man only along the courses of rivers. "A death-like stillness," we are told, "prevails from sunrise to sunset; then the thousands of animals that inhabit the forests join in one loud discordant roar, not continuous, but in bursts.

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