even kill them on slight provocation. The natives in turn hate
their oppressors, and when the chance comes betray them or leave
them to perish in sickness and misery. The upper Mississippi, on
the other hand, comes from a plain where agriculture is carried
on with more labor-saving devices than are found anywhere else in
the world. There States like Wisconsin and Minnesota stand in the
forefront of educational and social progress. The contrasts
between the corresponding rivers of the two Americas are typical
of the contrasts in the history of the two continents.



CHAPTER III. THE GEOGRAPHIC PROVINCES OF NORTH AMERICA

The four great physical divisions of North America--the
Laurentian highland, the Appalachian highland, the plains, and
the western cordillera--are strikingly different in form and
structure. The Laurentian highland presents a monotonous waste of
rough hills, irregular valleys, picturesque lakes, and crooked
rivers. Most of it is thinly clothed with pine trees and bushes
such as the blueberry and huckleberry. Yet everywhere the ancient
rock crops out. No one can travel there without becoming
tiresomely familiar with fine-grained, shattered schists, coarse
granites, and their curiously banded relatives, the gneisses.
This rocky highland stretches from a little north of the St.
Lawrence River to Hudson Bay, around which it laps in the form of
a V, and so is known as the Archaean V or shield.

Everywhere this oldest part of the Western Hemisphere presents
unmistakable signs of great age. The schists by their fine