York, where we find the railroads running through the lower and
richer, and yet uncultivated, lands, while the higher lands right and
left have long been cultivated. So is it now in Pennsylvania,
Virginia, and Ohio. In South Carolina it has been made the subject of
remark, in a recent discourse, that their predecessors did not select
the rich lands, and that millions of acres of the finest meadow-land
in that State still remain untouched. The settler in the prairies
commences on the higher and drier land, leaving the wet prairie and
the _slough_--the richest soil--for his successors. The lands below
the mouth of the Ohio are among the richest in the world; yet they are
unoccupied, and will continue so to be until wealth and population
shall have greatly increased. So is it now with the low and rich lands
of Mexico. So was it in South America, the early cultivation of which
was upon the poor lands of the western slope, Peru and Chili, while
the rich lands of the Amazon and the La Plata remained, as most of
them still remain, a wilderness. In the West Indies, the small dry
islands were early occupied, while Porto Rico and Trinidad, abounding
in rich soils, remained untouched. The early occupants of England were
found on the poorer lands of the centre and south of the kingdom, as
were those of Scotland in the Highlands, or on the little rocky
islands of the Channel. Mona's Isle was celebrated while the rich soil
of the Lothians remained an almost unbroken mass of forest, and the
morasses of Lancashire were the terror of travellers long after
Hampshire had been cleared and cultivated. If the reader desire to
find the birthplace of King Arthur and the earliest seat of English
power, he must look to the vicinity of the royal castle of Tintagel,
in the high and dry Cornwall. Should he desire other evidence of the
character of the soil cultivated at the period when land abounded and
men were few in number, he may find it in the fact that in some parts
of England there is scarcely a hill top that does not bear evidence of