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Excerpt from The British Isles
The amount of land and water on the surface of the earth is by no means equal. The area of the water is about two and a half times the area Of the land, or, putting it another way, two-sevenths of the earth's sur face is land, while the sea occupies five-sevenths of the surface. The arrangement Of the land and water is peculiar. Look at a map of the Northern and the Southern Hemispheres. There is plainly far more land in the Northern Hemisphere. The Southern Hemisphere is mainly water. Careful measurements would Show that there is actually thirteen times more land in the Northern than in the Southern Hemisphere.
There is another very strange thing about the arrange ment of the land and water on the face of the earth that you would never guess at first sight. The antipodes of a piece of land is practically always a piece of water. Thus on the opposite side of the globe from North America is the Indian Ocean, Australia is the antipodes of the North Atlantic Ocean, Europe and Africa are exactly opposite the Pacific Ocean, there is an ocean at the North Pole but a continent exactly opposite at the South Pole. This curious result has not come about merely by chance, but the explanation is too difficult for young scholars.
The land surface of the earth is not smooth, but is ridged and wrinkled in certain parts, and the wrinkles are called mountain chains. The greatest mountain system in the world stretches under many different names from the west Of Europe to the east of Asia. It begins in the Pyrenees, and continues in the Alps, the Caucasus, the Persian mountains, and the Himalaya.
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