ice, or snow, under the varying exposures to which, in actual nature,
they are constantly subjected. If, then, we are so ignorant of all these
climatic phenomena in the best-known regions inhabited by man, it is
evident that we can rely little upon theoretical deductions applied to
the former more natural state of the same regions--less still to such as
are adopted with respect to distant, strange, and primitive countries.


STABILITY OF NATURE.

Nature, left undisturbed, so fashions her territory as to give it almost
unchanging permanence of form, outline, and proportion, except when
shattered by geologic convulsions; and in these comparatively rare cases
of derangement, she sets herself at once to repair the superficial
damage, and to restore, as nearly as practicable, the former aspect of
her dominion. In new countries, the natural inclination of the ground,
the self-formed slopes and levels, are generally such as best secure the
stability of the soil. They have been graded and lowered or elevated by
frost and chemical forces and gravitation and the flow of water and
vegetable deposit and the action of the winds, until, by a general
compensation of conflicting forces, a condition of equilibrium has been
readied which, without the action of main, would remain, with little
fluctuation, for countless ages. We need not go far back to reach a
period when, in all that portion of the North American continent which
has been occupied by British colonization, the geographical elements
very nearly balanced and compensated each other. At the commencement of
the seventeenth century, the soil, with insignificant exceptions, was
covered with forests; [Footnote: I do not here speak of the vast prairie
region of the Mississippi valley, which cannot properly said ever to
have been a field of British colonization; but of the original colonies,