Excerpt from The Earth and Its Inhabitants, North America, Vol. 1 And within the circle of mountains now quiescent there is developed a second circle of active volcanoes, whose fiery curves are disposed in festoons connecting the Indonesian archipelagoes with the Asiatic seaboard, and at last merging in the western coast ranges of the American highland systems. Evidently the volcanoes of the New World form part of the same fiery circle as the flaming craters of the Philippines, of Japan, and the Kurile Islands, of which they form in fact the eastern section. In exceptionally clear weather the most westerly headland of North America is visible from the extreme north-east promontory of Asia across the intervening strait scarcely 60 miles wide. The Aleutian Islands also stretch from the Alaskan Peninsula' for hundreds of miles towards the Asiatic mainland, while in winter the opposite shores of the two worlds are connected by irregular masses of pack or floating ice roughly thrown together by the contending currents, counter-currents, and eddies of the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. Even in mid summer steamers at times find it difficult to force their way in the intervening strait through the drifting fragments of these glacial masses. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.