Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 07.djvu/317

* EUROPE. 279 EUROPE. is not made up of connected segments. It sug- gests North Asia, from which it is projected. The western part is narrow, richly articulated, open everywhere to the influences of the sea. The char- acter of the eastern part is uniformity; that of the west am pari., diversity. Hydkogbaphy. The chief water parting of the continent may be, shown by a line drawn from the central Urals, southwest across the Carpathians, through the secondary mountains of Germany and France to the Iberian Peninsula. All the rivers northwest of this line How to the Arctic Ocean, the Baltic and North seas, the English Channel, Or the Atlantic; all rivers southeast of the line How to the Mediterranean, the Black, ami the Caspian seas. The largest rivers arc on this southeastern slope. The arrangement of the rivers of thr eastern part of Kuropc ( Kussia) is simple. The Petchora, Dvina, Diina, and Niemen flow to the northwest, and the Ural, Volga, Don, Dnieper, and Dniester to the south. The distribu- tion of rivers in the western part is more com- plicated. Each of the five chief outlying members of the continent (the three southern peninsulas, Scandinavia, and the British isles) has its own river system. In the continental mass the slopes from the mountains to the low plains north and south of them give direction to the river courses. The Vistula, the Oder, the Elbe, the Weser, the Rhine, the Seine, the Loire, and the Gironde follow the slope to the north and west; only the Rhine, of all these rivers, comes out of the Alps. Three rivers are exceptions to this rule; for the Danube, rising in the German Mittelge- birge, the Po. and the Rhone, rising in the Alps, do not flow directly away from -the mountains, like the northern riverr but along their edges or near them, the Danube and To to the east and the Rhone to the west and south. The rivers of Europe offer extraordinary ad-, vantages for commerce, although the two largest of th.ni. (he Volga and the Danube, empty into inland seas, the Volga into the Caspian, which has no outlet, and the Danube into the Black Sea ; none of the great rivers is impeded by cataracts as in Africa, and their upper courses are not situated on table-lands of enormous height, un- favorable for development, as in Asia. But the rivers are so grouped that it has been possible, with the aid of comparatively short and easily dug canals connecting them, to make continuous waterways in various directions across the conti- nental mass. Thus freight-boats ply through the land from Bordeaux to Cette; from Havre and Rotterdam to the mouth of the Rhone ; from Amsterdam to the mouth of the Danube; from Danzig and Riga to Kherson on the Dnieper and thence to the Black Sea; from Saint Petersburg and Archangel to Astrakhan on the Caspian. The longest river and canal routes of Russia are those connecting the Caspian Sea and the Arctic Ocean, the Caspian and the Baltic, and the Black Sea and the Baltic. Boats loaded on the Vistula in Russia may be sent direct, by inland routes, to all the ports cf North Germany. and the Nether- lands. Antwerp, and Havre. The importance of the Volga and the Danube, while very great locally, is diminished by the fact that they flow toward Asia and away from the great centres of com- merce. Most of the Mediterranean rivers are small, and of little commercial importance: even the large Rhone is too shallow for the highest usefulness. The rivers of the Atlantic watershed, including its tributary northern seas, are those thai have had a profound and far-reaching in- fluence upon the development of the world's ocean trade. Fresh-water lakes arc particularly numerous in three regions: on the Swiss plain between the Alps and the Jura; in t lie British [slesj and in a wide territory bordering on the Baltic in Scandinavia and northwestern Russia. The larg- est arc on i he east ami south of the Scandinavian mountains, the Ladoga and Onega of Russia being tii.- greatest of Europe's sweet-water lakes. The largest number are in Finland. These northern lakes were formed In tin- ancient glaciers, '.'. hi.-li left the marks of their passage deeply graven in the surface of the land, forming many lake basins. As the Swiss plain i- a centre of radiation for rivers, it. is one of the important lake regions. Nearly all the larger lakes are important in the inland systems of transportation. There are salt lakes in that part of Europe farthest from the sea, where the evaporation is greater than the precipitation or the river basins have no outlet to the sea. On the borders of European Russia and Asia is the Caspian Sea, the largest salt water lake in the world. Geology. Broadly speaking, Europe may be divided into three principal regions: (1) To the northeast of the Carpathians, the chief character- istic of the geological structure of Russia is the almost horizontal position of the sedimentary beds. In other words, the plications and dislo- cations of the rocks that, mark the geology of the south and west are for the most part lacking in eastern Europe. (2) The south of Europe, in- eluding the Alpine system, is a region of great plications, relatively recent (the Tertiary pe- riod), with elevated mountains. (3) The rest of Europe, from Bohemia to Spain and Scandinavia, shows ancient massifs plicated in the Archaean epoch, whose inequalities of relief have been largely modified by erosion. These primary mas- sifs are separated by large areas of Mesozoic and Tertiary beds (the low plains), that in general are not plicated. The geological structure of the mountain sys- tems is varied and complicated. The Alps are composed of a granite nucleus with stratified beds, greatly faulted and folded, upon their flanks. The Jura is composed mainly of lime- stones, greatly folded, with subsequent erosion. The Pyrenees, on the north boundary of Spain, are also of folded stratified rocks, as are many of the ranges traversing the plateau of the Ibe- rian peninsula. The Apennines, one of the most recently formed ranges of Europe, is composed largely of Tertiary beds, much folded, the folds being arranged en echelon. In the south, the Carpathians and Balkans are composed of a cen- tral nucleus of metamorphic schists, with strati- fied limestones upon their flanks. The Ural Mountains are of crystalline rocks. The moun- tains of the Scandinavian peninsula are of great age, being in large part Archaean with granites and schists, while down the slope toward the Bal- tic more recent formations successively appear, and m the southeast Triassic, Jurassic, and Cre- taceous rocks are found. The great plain of Europe is floored by Cretaceous and Tertiary beds, except in Finland, where Archaean rocks, stretching across from the Scandinavian Penin- sula, cover the land. The mountainous portions of the British Isles are chiefly composed of gran-