688 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



GEOGRAPHY 



Geographical Aspects of Balkan Problems, in their Relation to the Great 

 European War. By MARION T. NEWBIGIN, D.Sc, Editor of the Scottish 

 Geographical Magazine. [Pp. x + 244, with a coloured map of South-eastern 

 Europe and sketch maps.] (London: Constable & Co., 1915. Price 

 ys. 6d. net.) 



The artificial character of modern political boundaries has made it increasingly 

 difficult to correlate States with natural regions. The problems of the Balkans, 

 however, are bound up with topography, and their geographical aspects should be 

 known to every one who seeks to understand the events of recent years. The 

 reader of Miss Newbigin's very timely book will enjoy not only an excellent piece 

 of literature, but a comprehensive view of the war-worn peninsula that will not 

 readily be forgotten. 



The absence of national life in old times among the seaward-stretching spurs 

 and scattered isles of Greece, when a colony was the lost child of the community 

 that sent it forth, is due to the subsidence of the ^Egean area and the breaking 

 up of former land. The central lowland of Sparta is the mere relic of a lost valley, 

 in which a wider range of interests might have nurtured wider aspirations. The 

 average Greek city, without a hinterland, was merely a trading port, whose true 

 country was the sea. The mountainous masses of Albania and Serbia, belonging 

 respectively to«the Dinaric crumplings and the ancient block caught in between 

 the Alpine folds, have been so greatly dissected as to show no guiding lines. Folk 

 have settled in adjacent valleys, armed with suspicion rather than knowledge of 

 their neighbours, and in many cases, such as the route from Nis to Sofia, or from 

 Skoplje to Salonica, the roads have taken to the uplands because they could not 

 find room in the ravines. 



The great valley of Serbia, on the other hand, opens broadly to the north, but 

 it has offered merely an inlet from hostile lands. The Morava flood-plain on the 

 south side of the Danube has proved an incentive to attack, and Belgrade wisely 

 set its back against the western hills. For anyone who possesses Nis, the way 

 is fairly clear over to tne Marica valley ; but even this, with its cornlands and 

 its rose-gardens, does not lead directly to Constantinople. The river on which 

 Philippopolis and Adrianople stand turns sharply southward to an indifferent 

 yEgean port. Constantinople is still a city to be visited from the sea. 



The Balkans, again, across which a railway now climbs connecting the Danube 

 and the Marica, that is, connecting Bukarest with the imperial east, divide the two 

 lowlands of Bulgaria, and they are cut off so sharply on the eastern shore that 

 it is best to take to the sea between Burgas and the northern port of Varna. 

 According to the laws laid down by geographers, the Balkan range should have 

 separated Rumania from Bulgaria. The indifference of mobile armies to natural 

 regions has arranged things in quite another fashion, and the extraordinary 

 distribution of the ethnic group known as Vlachs or Rumanians has added many 

 problems for the statesman. 



Miss Newbigin has had access to a large amount of modern literature, and 

 makes special use of Prof. Cvijic's numerous memoirs in German periodicals. 

 We note, by the by, that the printers ingeniously reproduce the accented c by 

 knocking out, with varied success, the horizontal stroke of an e. Elsewhere, the 

 author employs phonetics, which seem quite permissible in transliteration from 

 Cyrillic characters. The trouble arises when we try to expand the letters of 

 Romanised Serbo-Croatian. Can we then really discriminate between the two 



