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94 an Asiatic. But it is a matter of extreme and final interest to know if he be a Brazilian or a Patagonian, a Japanese or a Samoyede.

9. In the course of the last chapter, I asked the reader to hold firmly the conception of the great division of climate, which separated the wandering races of Norway and Siberia from the calmly resident nations of Britain, Gaul, Germany, and Dacia.

Fasten now that division well home in your mind, by drawing, however rudely, the course of the two rivers, little thought of by common geographers, but of quite unspeakable importance in human history, the Vistula and the Dniester.

10. They rise within thirty miles of each other, and each runs, not counting ins and outs, its clear three hundred miles,—the Vistula to the north-east, the Dniester to the south-west: the two of them together cut Europe straight across, at the broad neck of it,—and, more deeply looking at the thing, they divide Europe, properly so called—Europa's own, and Jove's,—the small educationable, civilizable, and more or less mentally rational fragment of the globe, from the great Siberian wilderness, Cis-Ural and Trans-Ural; the inconceivable chaotic space, occupied datelessly by Scythians, Tartars,