Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/266

 had, by this time, seriously altered or upset all the old traditional territorial divisions and landmarks. Who of the nineteenth century, for instance, looking upon the geography of the twenty-fifth, would have recognized that once insulated Old England of the earlier time? At the time we have now reached, the North Sea had been filled up in all its middle and southern shallows; and these great reclaimed areas were then occupied by a countless throng of busy humanity, where the Dutch-German, the Belgo-French, and the English elements freely commingled in a career of arduous but amicable rivalry. Continuing south and west, the Channel had been largely filled up by united English and French effort; while of the old Irish Channel there survived but a wide streak of the deeper water, to diversify the bright new landscape which had been rescued from the waves upon either side. Elsewhere also, far and wide over the world, the great oceanic expanses had been vigorously invaded, and all the shallower half of their areas been already redeemed to the world's terra firma.

A vast, unprecedented population of this busy mankind now overspread the world from pole to pole. The term "vast," however, is used only comparatively. The world's population then was vast enough truly, as compared with five centuries before; although it was but small indeed, as compared with what we have attained to now, after five more centuries have passed over our busy race. The world's climate, too, had been already sensibly changed throughout, as the effect of those terra firma extension operations with which we have since, in these five subsequent