Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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In The First Of These Hypotheses, The Height Of The Land
Between The Black Sea And The Baltic, And Between
The ports of
Cette and Bordeaux, determine the limit which the accumulation of
the waters may have reached before the
Junction of the Black Sea,
the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic, as well to the north of the
Dardanelles, as to the east of this strip of land which formerly
joined Europe to Mauritania, and of which, in the time of Strabo,
certain vestiges remained in the Islands of Juno and the Moon.)
which has had so powerful an influence on the first civilization of
mankind, is highly interesting. We might suppose, that Spain,
forming a promontory amidst the waves, was indebted for its
preservation to the height of its land; but in order to give weight
to these theoretic ideas, we must clear up the doubts that have
arisen respecting the rupture of so many transverse dikes; - we must
discuss the probability of the Mediterranean having been formerly
divided into several separate basins, of which Sicily and the
island of Candia appear to mark the ancient limits. We will not
here risk the solution of these problems, but will satisfy
ourselves in fixing attention on the striking contrast in the
configuration of the land in the eastern and western extremities of
Europe. Between the Baltic and the Black Sea, the ground is at
present scarcely fifty toises above the level of the ocean, while
the plain of La Mancha, if placed between the sources of the Niemen
and the Borysthenes, would figure as a group of mountains of
considerable height.
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