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    In travelling in the United States one is very much struck with the great

amount of sameness that is met with in many things. In outward nature this is very observable. You go from New York to Charleston on what appears to be one level. Throughout these nine hundred miles you have no cuttings or embankments; at all events I do not recollect having had to go through, or to go round a single hill. Again you many go up the valley of the Mississippi on another longer level; & if you start from Chicago to cross the Prairie & Plains you cross another thousand miles of level ground. Again throughout all these long levels, adding to them the space between Charleston & New Orleans, there is in the soil a great sameness of colour. Except in the black soil of the Prairies, & occasionally in the river bottoms of which latter you see little in railway travelling, yellow, of ? slightly varying tints, is almost universal, whether the soil be sandy or clayey. And then the forest which clothes this soil of the same colour & of the same level, also everywhere itself the same. The predominant trees are everywhere the unfailing pine, & almost equally unfailing oak. Sameness, too, but not quite to the same extent characterizes the great Lake region. There are glorious exceptions to this general sameness in the Alleghanies, the Rocky Mountains, & California; but these are not the situations in which the great masses of the population have formed their homes. De Toqueville & others have observed a similar sameness in the ideas & customs of the Americans themselves; & this they attribute to the completeness with which the principles of democracy have been carried out both in their Polity & in their social arrangements. I have already notices the extraordinary sameness of their