All of the remainder of the planet, as far as the north pole is occupied by the mass of the continents, in which, save in a few areas of relatively small extent, an orange color predominates, which sometimes reaches a dark red tint, and in others descends to yellow and white.  The variety in this coloring is in part of meteorological origin, in part it may depend on the diverse nature of the soil, but upon its real cause it is not as yet possible to frame any very well grounded hypothesis.  Nevertheless, the cause of this predominance of the red and yellow tints upon the surface of ancient Pyrois is well known.[A] Some have thought to attribute this coloring to the atmosphere of Mars, through which the surface of the planet might be seen colored, as any terrestrial object becomes red when seen through red glass.  But many facts are opposed to this idea, among others that the polar snows appear always of the purest white, although the rays of light derived from them traverse twice the atmosphere of Mars under great obliquity.  We must then conclude that the Arean continents appear red and yellow because they are so in fact.

Besides these dark and light regions, which we have described as seas and continents, and of whose nature there is at present scarcely left any room for doubt, some others exist, truly of small extent, of an amphibious nature, which sometimes appear yellowish like the continents, and are sometimes clothed in brown (even black in certain cases), and assume the appearance of seas, whilst in other cases their color is intermediate in tint, and leaves us in doubt to which class of regions they may belong.  Thus all the islands scattered through the Mare Australe and the Mare Erythræum belong to this category; so, too, the long peninsula called Deucalionis Regio and Pyrrhae Regio, and in the vicinity of the Mare Acidalium the regions designated by the names of Baltia and Nerigos.  The most natural idea, and the one to which we should be led by analogy, is to suppose these regions to represent huge swamps, in which the variation in depth of the water produces the diversity of colors.  Yellow would predominate in those parts where the depth of the liquid layer was reduced to little or nothing, and brown, more or less dark, in those places where the water was sufficiently deep to absorb more light and to render the bottom more or less invisible.  That the water of the sea, or any other deep and transparent water, seen from above, appears more dark the greater the depth of the liquid stratum, and that the land in comparison with it appears bright under the solar illumination, is known and confirmed by certain physical reasons.  The traveler in the Alps often has occasion to convince himself of it, seeing from the summits the deep lakes with which the region is strewn extending under his feet as black as ink, whilst in contrast with them even the blackest rocks illumined by the sunlight appeared brilliant.[B]