Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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3. Possessions Of The
Anglo-Americans (United States) :
174,300 :
10,220,000.
From the statistical researches which have been made in several
countries of Europe, important results have been obtained by a
comparison of the relative population of maritime and inland
provinces. In Spain these relations are to one another as nine to
five; in the United Provinces of Venezuela, and, above all, in the
ancient Capitania-General of Caracas, they are as thirty-five to one.
How powerful soever may be the influence of commerce on the prosperity
of states, and the intellectual development of nations, it would be
wrong to attribute in America, as we do in Europe, to that cause alone
the differences just mentioned. In Spain and Italy, if we except the
fertile plains of Lombardy, the inland districts are arid and
abounding in mountains or high table-lands: the meteorological
circumstances on which the fertility of the soil depends are not the
same in the lands bordering on the sea, as they are in the central
provinces. Colonization in America has generally begun on the coast,
and advanced slowly towards the interior; such is its progress in
Brazil and in Venezuela. It is only where the coast is unhealthy, as
in Mexico and New Grenada, or sandy and exempt from rain as in Peru,
that the population is concentrated on the mountains, and the
table-lands of the interior. These local circumstances are too often
overlooked in considerations on the future fate of the Spanish
colonies; they communicate a peculiar character to some of those
countries, the physical and moral analogies of which are less striking
than is commonly supposed.
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