Page:The Bible of Amiens.djvu/127

Rh my young readers should learn; the fundamental one being that you cannot flatten the skin of an orange without splitting it, and must not, if you draw countries on the unsplit skin, stretch them afterwards to fill the gaps.

The British pride of wealth which does not deny itself the magnificent convenience of penny Walter Scotts and penny Shakespeares, may assuredly, in its future greatness, possess itself also of penny universes, conveniently spinnable on their axes. I shall therefore assume that my readers can look at a round globe, while I am talking of the world; and at a properly reduced drawing of its surfaces, when I am talking of a country.

8. Which, if my reader can at present do—or at least refer to a fairly drawn double-circle map of the globe with converging meridians—I will pray him next to observe, that, although the old division of the world into four quarters is now nearly effaced by emigration and Atlantic cable, yet the great historic question about the globe is not how it is divided, here and there, by ins and outs of land or sea; but how it is divided into zones all round, by irresistible laws of light and air. It is often a matter of very minor interest to know whether a man is an American or African, a European or