EUROPE 



Paris, Berlin, and Vienna are 

 the great rly. junctions. Cologne, 

 Dijon, Munich, Milan, Warsaw, 

 Budapest, and Moscow are junc- 

 tions of less importance. The Alps 

 and Carpathians interfere with 

 rly. traffic, as a glance on the 

 rly. map shows, though each range 

 is traversed by passes or bored by 

 tunnels The Pyrenees are circum- 

 vented by the E. and W. routes and 

 the straits of the Danish archi- 

 pelago are crossed by train ferries. 

 The great rivers control rly. de- 

 velopment as definitely as the 

 mountains, for either the streams 

 themselves or their flood plains are 

 too wide to be crossed by many 

 bridges, so that the Rhine, Danube, 

 and Rhone have rlys. on either 

 bank and connexion from one line 

 to the other must be most often 

 made by ferry. 



The rivers of the plains are used 

 for barge and steamer traffic. Most 

 have been canalised, e g. the Rhine, 

 Seine, Elbe, Oder, Danube. Where 

 the river is unregulated traffic is 

 interfered with by the spring floods. 

 The E. rivers, Volga, Dnieper, Don, 

 are frozen for months ; the Central 

 European streams are made dan- 

 gerous by drifting ice, ice harbours 

 being necessary on the Rhine. 

 From Paris to the Vistula the 

 Great European Plain has many 

 canals connecting the fluvial water- 

 ways ; Antwerp is an outport for 

 Germany, as much merchanise un- 

 loaded at the seaport is distributed 

 by the canals radiating thence. 



These waterways link up the 

 canalised rivers, and facilitate the 

 distribution of goods from the 

 seaports at the river mouths It 

 was a German dream to improve 

 the canals so that large vessels 

 could traverse Europe from the 

 North Sea to the Black Sea, either 

 by the Rhine-Danube or the Elbe- 

 Danube routes ; this ideal was con- 

 nected with the use of the Kiel ship 

 canal to help Hamburg to dominate 

 the Baltic Sea commercially. 



SEAPORTS. Owing to the in- 

 creasing size of modern ships, the 

 tendency is to concentrate the 

 ocean traffic of each country upon 

 one or two great ports. In Britain, 

 London and Liverpool far outstrip 

 any other seaport ; Marseilles and 

 Havre, Antwerp, Rotterdam, and 

 Hamburg are pre-eminent in their 

 respective countries The chief Bal- 

 tic ports are Petrograd, Stockholm, 

 Riga, Konigsberg, Danzig, Stettin, 

 Kiel, and Copenhagen. The chief 

 Black Sea ports are Odessa, Varna, 

 Constantsa, and Galatz, on the Dan- 

 ube; Constantinople, the Piraeus, 

 (Athens), and Salonica are the great 

 ports of the S E. In the Adriatic 

 Sea, Venice, Trieste, and Fiume are 

 the main ports, while Brindisi is a 



3015 



packet station. In the W. Mediter- 

 ranean Naples, Genoa, and Barce- 

 lona are the chief ports. Cadiz, 

 Lisbon, and Bordeaux lie on the 

 Atlantic ; Dunkirk, Amsterdam, 

 and Bremen on the North Sea. 



B. C. Wallis 



Bibliography. Prehistoric Europe, 

 J. Geikie, 1881 ; Europe, G. G. Chis- 

 holm, 2 vols., 1899 and 1902 (in 

 Stanford's Compendium of Geo- 

 graphy and Travel) ; The Mediter- 

 ranean Race : A Study of the Origin 

 of European Peoples, G. Sergi, 1901 ; 

 Regions of the World, ed. H. J. 

 Mackinder, 1902-5 ; Historical Geo- 

 graphy of Europe, E. A. Freeman, 

 3rd ed. 1903 ; The Face of the 

 Earth, E. Suess, Eng. trans. H . B. C. 

 Sollars, 1904, etc. ; The Anthropolo- 

 gical History of Europe, J. Beddoe, 

 1912 ; The Expansion of Europe, R. 

 Muir, 1917 ; Present-Day Europe : 

 Its Natural State of Mind, T. L. 

 Stoddard, 1917 ; The Statesman's 

 Year Book, publ. annually. 



HISTORY. The continent of 

 Europe with its present contours 

 emerged after the last ice age, pro- 

 bably not less than 20,000 years 

 ago. For untold ages before, the 

 greater part of ithadbeensubjected 

 to Arctic or tropical conditions of 

 varying intensity, so that geologists 

 divide the whole period into a suc- 

 cession of ice ages with non- Arctic 

 intervals between them. Man had 

 existed before the last ice age. but 

 the new Europe was repopulated, 

 not by the descendants of the 

 "drift" men, but by men who, mov- 

 ing from warmer regions, made their 

 way across it as the ice receded 

 In the course of some thousands of 

 years tribes coming either from the 

 East or out of Africa had spread 

 thinly over the habitable area 

 settling in communities, acquiring 

 to a limited degree the arts of 

 agriculture, and developing the 

 use of tools and utensils. 

 Aryan Immigrations 



Somewhere about 3000 B.C. 

 began the migration of the Aryan 

 races from a centre somewhere in 

 Asia or in Russia. The presump- 

 tion is that they were races har- 

 dened by life in northern and com- 

 paratively unproductive regions, 

 and wherever they moved they 

 went as conquerors, but rarely as 

 exterminators. The evidence of 

 their kinship is to be found in the 

 evidently common origin of their 

 languages and the common charac- 

 teristics in bone and skull struc- 

 ture, as witnessed by their burying 

 grounds. Those who spread over 

 Europe are commonly divided into 

 four main groups, Celtic, Greco- 

 Italian, Teutonic, and Slavonic 



The first made straight across 

 Europe to the W., dominating, 

 though not exterminating, the 

 earlier inhabitants of modern 

 France Spain, and the British 



EUROPE 



Isles. The second pushed S. 

 towards the Mediterranean, and 

 by 1000 B.C. were masters of the 

 Balkan and, less completely, of the 

 Italian peninsulas. The Teutons, 

 moving later than Celts and S. 

 Aryans, gradually occupied Scandi- 

 navia and modern Germany, and 

 first came into contact with the 

 Roman Empire when it was almost 

 supreme over the whole area W. of 

 the Rhine and S. of the Danube at 

 the close of the 2nd century B.C. 

 The movement of the Slavonic 

 group came still later A group of 

 Aryans, less advanced than the 

 Greeks and Italians, had long been 

 in occupation of Austro-Hungary 

 and Rumania and the mountain 

 regions E. of the Adriatic, but 

 whether they were nearer akin to 

 the Greeks and Italians or to the 

 Slavs is uncertain. 



Aegean and Greek Civilization 



Recorded European history be- 

 gins somewhere after 2000 B.C. 

 with pre-Aryan races who domi- 

 nated the islands and coasts of the 

 Aegean Sea, and developed an 

 advanced civilization to which the 

 modern excavations principally in 

 Crete and at Mycenae bear witness. 

 Between 1500-1000 B.C. the Hel- 

 lenic Aryans mastered all the S. 

 portion of the Balkan peninsula, 

 the islands of the Aegean, and the 

 W coasts though only the coasts 

 of Asia Minor Greek political 

 organization developed rapidly in 

 the form known as the city state. 

 The system was fostered by geo- 

 graphical conditions. Hellas, the 

 area under Greek occupation, did 

 not form a political unity, but was 

 broken up into a large number of 

 small communities, often hostile to 

 each other, though sharing a sense of 

 common race and tradition. 



Maritime and commercial deve- 

 lopment followed naturally, as 

 there was easy communication by 

 sea with earlier civilizations and 

 state systems of W. Asia and 

 Egypt. Between 1000-500 B.C. a 

 high political organization was at- 

 tained by many city states,together 

 with a remarkable intellectual and 

 artistic activity. The Greeks were 

 so far in advance of the rest of the 

 world that it has been said that 

 "nothing moves in the world which 

 is not Greek in origin." The state- 

 ment is not strictly true. Moving 

 forces, notably Christianity, have 

 come out of the East; Celts, Romans, 

 and Teutons have all made contri- 

 butions ; but the truth remains 

 that the most active forces of 

 progress had developed so far 

 with the Greeks before the other 

 westerns came in contact with 

 them, that their more rapid ad- 

 vance was the direct outcome of 

 the assimilation of Greek ideas 



