purposes as completely detached from the ocean as the rivers of Siberia. The same, of course, is true of the Nile above the cataracts. We may, therefore, regard the interior of Africa south of the Sahara as a second Heartland. Let us speak of it as the Southern Heartland, in contradistinction to the Northern Heartland of Asia and Europe.
Notwithstanding their very different latitudes the two Heartlands present other striking similarities. A great belt of forest, mainly of the evergreen type of the pines and firs, spreads from North Germany and the Baltic shore right across to Manchuria, connecting by a forest-ribbon, as it were, the forests of Europe with those of the Pacific Coast. South of this forest zone the Heartland lies open, with trees only along the river banks and upon the mountains. This vast, open ground is a luscious prairie along the southern border of the forest, and brilliant with bulb-flowers in the spring-time, but southward, as the aridity increases, the grass becomes coarser and more sparse. The whole grassland, rich and poor, is conveniently spoken of as the Steppes, although that name properly belongs only to the less fertile southern tracts which surround the desert patches of Turkestan and Mongolia. The
