AMERICA, the second in size of the iso lated land masses of the globe ; containing about three-tenths of the total land surface and per haps half the cultivable area, but less than one tenth the population. The name was originally used only for central Brazil, and was applied in honor of the Italian, Amerigo Vespucci (q.v.), who claimed that he discovered it. (See AMERICA : a brief account of the derivation and meaning of the word). It was first em ployed for the entire known Western world by Mercator in 1541, and is usually but not prop erly understood to include Greenland, which is physically a part of Europe.
The extreme points marking the limits of this vast continent are: North, the point of Boothia Felix, in the Strait of Bellot, lat. 71° 55' N., long. 94° 34' W. (in Alaska Point Bar row, lat. 71 23' 31" N., long. 156° 21' 40" W.) ; South, Cape Froward, lat. 53° 53' 45" S., long. 18' 30" W., or, if the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego is included, Cape Horn, lat. 59' S., long. 67° 16' W.; West, Cape Prince of Wales, lat. 33' N. long. 59' W.; and East, the Point de Guia, lat. 7° 26' S., long. 47' W. Its total area is not far from 16,000,000 square miles, without Greenland or the polar archipelago.
Topography.—Nominally one °continent," it is really two if not three sections, geologically independent. The northern, from the Arctic Ocean to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico on the west (where the last slopes of the Anahuac plateau of the Rocky Mountains sink to the plain, and the Guatemalan Highlands are not in sight), and Florida on the east, is con nected with the southern by two great parallel ridges. One called Central America, is con tinuous, joining South America at the west side, and dwindling to 28 miles across at the Isthmus of Panama ; the other, partly submerged, consisting of Haiti, Porto Rico and the Lesser Antilles, joining at the eastern side; the two united transversely by Cuba and Jamaica and the projection of Yucatan, and enclosing the Caribbean Sea, 1,500 miles from end to end. The continental mass, 8,700- miles from Alaska on the northwest and Boothia Felix on the northeast to the south end of Patagonia, is prolonged to a total of some 9,600, nearly four fifths the distance from pole to pole, by a vast archipelago of Arctic islands up from Hudson Bay (ending suddenly like a drift line about 125° W. long., and at Grant Land about 83° N. lat.), and by another at the south called Tierra del Fuego, on the Antarctic Ocean. But as with the eastern continent, some force has massed the land chiefly at the north : two-thirds of the continent is north of the equator; the extreme point of the continuous northern islands reaches to a few hundred miles from the pole, the last of the southern is 2,350 miles from it ; Alaska is 1,100 from the north pole, Argentina is 3,400 from the south. The same causes make it form part of a nearly solid ring on the Arctic Ocean, the northwest projection of Alaska being separated from the northeast of Kamchatka by only 40 miles of strait, and the continent being connected with Europe by a series of islands one to two hundred miles apart; while the immense though widely un equal gulfs of the Pacific west and the Atlantic east separate the habitable portions.
The axial dimensions of the continent are not very dissimilar to those of the eastern. Its
length is about the same as the breadth of the other from China to England, its greatest breadth about the depth of the other from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean ; hut its relative slenderness gives it less than half the area. It is in fact an immense peninsula slightly severed from the main mass, with the shape and the southerly direction of the majority of penin sulas. From nine to ten thousand miles long, it is little over 3,000 across its main north and south lines, from Labrador to British Colum bia, or from Peru to Brazil ; about 2,100 from Savannah to San Diego, a few hundred across Mexico, 1,725 at the Tropic of Capricorn just above Rio Janeiro, 750 from Buenos Ayres to Valparaiso, and so on southward. The Atlantic Ocean is relatively small and of regular breadth from Laborador and Brazil to England and Liberia, compared with the immense abyss of the Pacific and its sweeping arch from the Bering Sea to Australia and Chile; from Newfoundland to Ireland is but 1,900 miles, from Cape Saint Roque in Brazil to Cape Palmas in Liberia but 1,700; while from San Francisco to Yokohama is 5,500, from Quito to Singapore (almost exact antipodes) 12,500, and from Valpariso to Sydney 8,000. Strangely enough the continents fit to gether somewhat as would the blocks of a dis sected. map. The great eastern projection of North America is toward the Bay of Biscalt, that of South America toward the Gulf of Guinea, the great western projection of Africa toward the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. The same closure (about which would bring Newfoundland against Brittany and Labrador against the British Isles, would make the Kongo empty against the Brazilian coast and the West Indies surround Senegambia. In physical char acter also the northern and southern portions of each are akin: northeastern North America has the broken island-fringed peninsular coasts and the gigantic inlets and inland seas of Europe, while South America has the solid coast-wall and the absence of lakes character istic of western Africa. Not to mention the great polar archipelago or Hudson's Bay, and allowing the archipelago at the south end of Chili to set off against the Alexander Archi pelago along the south Alaskan coast, there is no parallel in South America to oceanic bodies like the Gulf of Mexico, or lesser ones like the Gulf of Saint Lawrence northeast to Puget Sound northwest, or the Gulf of California southwest ; or the mass of sheltered bays and sounds along the east ern coast to the Great Lakes; to islands like those around the mouth of the Saint Law rence or Vancouver's, or peninsulas like Nova Scotia. Florida and Lower California. It must be said, however, that there are strong physical differences between South America and Africa: the chief mountain ranges of the former being on the west, of the latter on the east; the African rivers are less copious, and mostly have cataracts above their mouths, proving recency of origin. It has been argued, not without some show of reason, that these structural re semblances are more than accidents, but scientists are far from agreeing as to the cause, and a discussion of the high-sprung theories that have been advanced to account for them would be out of place here.