The effects resulting from the physical features of a country on the development and intermingling of its races can nowhere be wisely overlooked. Even within the limits of the British Islands the influences of mountain and lowlands: of the fertile stretches of Kent and the valley of the Thames, the fens of Lincolnshire, the moorlands of Northumbria, and the Welsh and Scottish Highlands, have largely contributed to the perpetuation, if not in some degree to the development, of ethnical distinctions and the diversities in language.
In this respect Britain is an epitome of Europe, with its great mountain ranges and detached peninsulas, by means of which races have been isolated within well-defined areas, and their languages and other distinctive peculiarities preserved. Russia alone, of all European countries, presents analogies to Northern Asia as a region favourable to nomadic life; and in so far as its history differs from that of the continent at large, it accords with such physical conditions. Throughout the whole historic period, as doubtless in prehistoric times, the great chain of mountains reaching from the western spur of the Pyrenees to the Balkans has influenced European progress; while the chief navigable river, the Danube, traversing the continent through one uniform temperate zone, has tended still further to the perpetuation of certain distinctive ethnical characteristics in Central Europe. In all its most important geographical features, the northern continent of America presents a striking contrast to this. An isosceles triangle with its base within the Arctic circle, it tapers to a narrow isthmus towards the equator. Its great mountain chain runs from north to south, and in near proximity to the Pacific coast; and its chief navigable river, rising within the Canadian Dominion, and receiving as its tributaries rivers draining vast regions on either hand, traverses twenty degrees of latitude before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico. A lower range of highlands towards the Atlantic seaboard forms the eastern boundary of the great interior plain. But the Alleghanies or Appalachian system of mountains, though they may be said to extend from the St. Lawrence to the Mexican Gulf, rise only at a few points, as in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, to any great elevation. They form rather a long plateau, intersected by wide valleys, diversifying the landscape, without constituting strongly defined barriers or lines of demarcation. As a whole, the continent of North America, eastward from the Rocky Mountains, may be described as a level area, so slightly modified by any elevated regions throughout its whole extent, from the Arctic circle to the Gulf of Mexico, as to present no other impediment except its forests to the wanderings of nomadic tribes. It is interlaced with rivers, and diversified everywhere with lakes, alike available for navigation and for fishing; and, until the intrusion of European immigrants, its forests and prairies abounded with game far in excess of the wants of its population. Everything thus tended to perpetuate the condition of nomadic hunter tribes. This stage of native American history inevitably drew to a close under the influence of European institutions and civilisation; but it is interesting to note, that the same absence of any well-defined geographical limitations of area, which tended to perpetuate the nomadic habits of the savage, has aided in consolidating the great confederacy of the United States, and maintaining an ethnical and political conformity throughout the northern continent in striking contrast to the diversities in race and political institutions in Europe.