Little journey around the world

Come on, Felix, come on, my dear Félicie, let’s continue our journey. We will travel through Africa; from which side shall we step in? I notice that it is almost completely surrounded by water. However it is not an island. Put the chart in front of you, we must take a look at it; because without charts, studying geography is a waste of time and effort. Ah! Felix put his finger on the small path which leads from Asia to Africa. This only passage, which is pressed on one side by the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, and on the other by those of the Red Sea – or Arabian Gulf – is called the isthmus of Suez; it is only fifty (eighty kilometers) miles wide. Thus Africa is a peninsula, the largest in the world, and …Read more »

Asia is the oldest populated part of the world; it is the cradle of mankind. It is also there that science and civilization fisrt showed their good influence upon men. If you look at the chart, you will see that it is, after America, the largest of the four parts of the world. From Malacca, which is the southernmost point, to its northern end, Asia is more than thirty seven hundred miles long, and there are a little less than five thousand and eight hundred miles from the Dardanelles, in the west, to the Eastern end of Kamchatka.
Asia covering such a huge area, we can naturally expect a wide variety of climates; cold is excessive in the north, and heat unbearable in the southern regions.
It is near the equator, where heat spreads its empire, that the biggest and the most terrible quadrupeds, elephants, rhinoceroses, lions and tigers, are to be found. It is also in these regions that we find …Read more »