Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/62

52 Breslau, or, since that lies just off our map, let us say from Dresden to the city of Hanover, and thence to Cologne. Such a line roughly divides the uplands from the plains. To the north stretches away the open, flat, sandy expanse of Hanover, Oldenburg, Pomerania, Brandenburg, and Prussia. This vast extent of country is mainly below one hundred metres in elevation above the sea. South of our division line the land rises more or less abruptly to a region upward of a thousand feet in altitude. In Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Bohemia lie extensive table lands fully five hundred feet higher even than this, giving place finally to the high Alps. The transition from north to south is particularly emphasized along our artificial division line by the fringe of mountains which lie along it, including the Riesen and Erzgebirge bounding Bohemia, the heavily



wooded mountains of Thüringen, and farther west the Harz, the Waldgebirge, and the Westerwald by Cologne. On this side, the highlands across the narrow gully of the Rhine River have already been described in speaking of the Ardennes uplands in France and Belgium. Their extension in Germany is known as the Rhenish plateau.

For the sake of unity of treatment, preserving the general form of argument already adopted in the cases of France and Italy, let us consider the head form of the people first. At once we perceive a progressive broadening of the heads, that is, an increase of cephalic index, as we travel outward from the northwestern corner of the empire in the vicinity of Denmark. Thus we pass from a head form identical with that of the Scandinavians to one in the south in no wise