122 



KNOWLEDGE. 



[June 1, 1900. 



unseen valleys; the road hurries clown into a new and 

 iinsuspected world ; forests climb the steep slopes round 

 us, and bare rock juts out, in mountainous style, among 

 the trees. The villages lose all their leisurely, un- 

 hampered, agricultural air, and become cramped in 

 along the watercoitrses. Here again, if we have left 

 regretfully the Black Forest or the Vosges, we hear with 

 pleasure the rush of streamlets, and the disciplined 

 thunder of the mills. The incident comes as a revelation, 

 only too soon to be taken from us. We may well nib 

 our eyes, when we have toiled up some winding ascent 

 again, far above the timber hou.ses and the red-tiled 

 spires, and emerge upon the vSst uniform plateau, across 

 which the approaching night has thrown a veil of purple- 

 grey and brown. Here the air is full of the scent of hay, 

 blowing from the meadows, and making sweet the 

 gathering dusk. The lights shine from scattered farms, 

 each one a beacon in this featureless expanse ; you can 

 almost picture the Little People rising from the soft 

 warm earth, whispering to one another, and wondering 

 at a world of stars. One glowing band, rai.sed slightly 

 towai-ds the sky, marks out some' clustered city, still 

 seven or eight miles away. 



It is thus, perhaps, that we enter Rothenburg, the 

 type of an old Bavarian town. The double gate, the 

 central watch-tower, the naiTow street of half-timber 

 houses, take us back to the days of the Thirty Years' War, 

 when the Swedes, like a north wind, swept the plateaux, 

 and pa.ssed into the great plain of the Danube. The 

 (own stands on the edge of the Taubcr valley, and looks 

 across it to the farms and fields. The bridge leading 

 from the west side lies far below, and is easily com- 

 manded from the wall; but on all the other sides the 

 l)Osition lies open to attack. The structure of the great 

 part of Bavaria has led t-o the formation of walled towns 

 at every market.-centre. In many cases, these are merely 

 clusters of houses, intimately connected with the farm- 

 lands that lie beyond their gates. However, in a 

 jjopulation brought together for mutual protection, 

 division of labour soon arises, and the lower floors of 

 many houses become turned into the shops of specialists. 

 Other ground-floors to this day. even in Rothenburg. 

 are used as stabling for the cattle; and at morning the 

 cows are driven out through big barn doors from be- 

 neath the houses of the burghers, and are brought in 

 again at evening within the protection of the walls. The 

 whole history of this open country is typified in the 

 story of its towns. The collective voice of what was once 

 a settlement of agriculturists became in due course re- 

 presented in the Rathhaus, where civic custom soon 

 held sway ; the craftsman, at first a necessary adjunct, 

 became the critical purchaser and controller of the pro- 

 ducts of the farms ; the great-grandsons of the men who 

 dug the moat and built the ramparts learnt to carve 

 the most exquisite panels on their house-fronts, and 

 turned their proud and self-centred city into a sort of 

 Gothic Florence. From the farrier and the maker of 

 rude weapons sprang the men whose art in metal-work 

 was destined for the table of an Emperor. Yet still, 

 at evei7 turn, the inflocking peasantry, the slow ox- 

 wagons, the shop-windows full of scythes or apple- 

 baskets, proclaim the absolute dependence of the city 

 on the open plateau round it. 



The smaller towns thi-oughout Bavaria, which are 

 often mere walled villages, are built upon so uniform 

 a plan as to suggest a common ancestry. The high 

 wall forms a rectangle, with a gateway in the centre 

 of each of the shorter sides. Above these gates rise 

 square towers, capped by conical red roofs. The houses 



are built with their backs close along the wall, so that 

 the single street is in reality the marketsquare. The 

 high road runs straight from gate to gate, but expands 

 on either side into a great area, paved with rough stone 

 setts. 



The children play here after school-hours ; the older 

 women look for their husbands from the doorways as 

 evening settles down ; and then, seven or eight together, 

 the men come through the mediaeval gates, with scythes 

 over their shoulders, or urging on the tired oxen. 

 Surely this is the stereotype of the ancient laager of the 

 plains, the old square fonned by the wagons drawn up 

 at each nightfall of the march ; and within it the 

 women and children are gathered, and tlie cattle are 

 sheltered, and the next day's work is planned. 



The old-world forest still covers a large part of the 

 plateaux, and forms a welcome shelter from the cloud- 

 less midland sky. Ponds also abound upon the Keuper 

 clays, and provide the peasantry with fish. A man will 

 thus go outside the town-gate on your an-ival, catch a 

 weighty perch, and serve it forthwith for the mid-day 

 dinner. 



After a few days among the dusty grooves that are 

 regarded as roadways in the forests, it is pleasant to drop 

 down by one of the small streams to the Danube. The 

 contrast provided by the valley-scenery is in itself re- 

 freshing. Green hill-sides set with white castles or 

 monasteries; towns holding the passage, built across the 

 roadway, and girt about with towers; a j^opulation no 

 longer scattei'cd, but gathered thickly along the one line 

 of communication — all this makes one forget the mono- 

 tonous upper plateau. At last we reach the foot of 

 the Jurassic .slope, and see the green Danube winding 

 in its own alluvium. 



Nothing could difi'er more in character (han the (wo 

 roads from Nuremberg to Kelheim, down the slope of 

 the same geological formation. They divide at Neu- 

 markt, and the one takes to the valley of the Suiza, 

 joining the finer Altmiihl river at Beilngries. Such 

 towns as Berching, and other scenes unknown to 

 Bredeker, conspire to give this route an air of high 

 romance. The other road runs across the plateau, bare 

 and uniform, until it drops into the ravine in which 

 even the Danube runs at Kelheim. 



South of the Danube, there is little material for gorge- 

 cutting. The one exception is the fine caiion of the Inn 

 upon the eastern frontier, between the water-gate of 

 Scharding and the river-mouth at Passau ; but here the 

 rapid stream has cut down into the gnei.ss of the 

 Bavarian Forest range, to join the Danube, which has 

 become similarly entangled. The gneiss, which belongs 

 structurally to the plateau of Bohemia, forms the north- 

 east border of Bavaria, and was once submerged beneath 

 the Cretaceous sea. Now, by the general Cainozoic 

 uplift, it has become bared again, and forms a steejD 

 mountain range, on which the fir-woods gather. 



As already hinted, the basin between the ancient 

 gneiss and the Franconian Jura on the one hand, and 

 the Alpine foothills on the other, has served as a gather- 

 ing ground for all manner of detritus. Marine and 

 lacustrine deposits were at one time common on it;* 

 but these older Cainozoic beds were formed before the 

 Alps began to rise, and when the basin was wider and 

 more open. They became folded into the Alpine foot- 

 hills on the south, and were soon covered in the lowlands 

 by the alluvium of the Alpine streams. In the great 



* C. W. Giimbel, " Geopno.stisclie Bescliveiliung des bayerisclien 

 Alpengebirges " (1861\ pp. 756 and 770. 



