CHAPTER I.
PRIMITIVE CONDITIONS AND RACES The topography of a country is to some extent a prophecy of its future.
Had there been no Mississippi coursing for three thousand miles through the North American Continent, no Ohio and Missouri bisecting it from east to west, no great inland seas indenting and watering it, no fertile prairies stretching across its vast areas, how different would have been the history of our own land.
Russia is the strange product of strange physical conditions.

Nature was not in impetuous mood when she created this greater half of Europe, nor was she generous, except in the matter of space.

She was slow, sluggish, but inexorable.

No volcanic energies threw up rocky ridges and ramparts in Titanic rage, and then repentantly clothed them with lovely verdure as in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere.

No hungry sea rushed in and tore her coast into fragments.