CHAPTER VI. 



DNIEPER AND DNIESTER BASINS. 



(White, Little, and New Russia.) 



EARLY two-thirds of tlie uneven plain connecting Russia with 

 West Europe belong to the drainage of the Black Sea. This 

 region, formerly included in the Lithuanian state, but now occupied 

 almost exclusively by various branches of the Russian family, 

 is watered by two main streams — the Dnieper, third in Europe for 

 the volume of its waters, and the Dniester, also a considerable river. Here 

 stretch the Sarmatian lands which received a first glimmer of light from the 

 Hellenes, and which, twelve hundred years later on, witnessed the rise of the Russian 

 people, and where was long fixed the centre of gravity of Eastern Slavdom. 



So long as the Mediterranean nations held the lead in the development of human 

 culture, their powerful attraction necessarily imparted the supremacy in Russia 

 to the lands belonging to the Euxine basin. But when the Atlantic seaboard 

 acquired the ascendancy, the civilising centre of Russia was also naturally shifted 

 from the south to the Gulf of Finland. JN^evertheless the Dnieper and Dniester 

 valleys have never ceased to develop their industrial and commercial resources. 



This vast region, twice the size of France, is unbroken throughout its entire 

 extent by a single mountain, and its plains often stretch from horizou to horizon 

 with the uniformity of the sea. Elevated hills are nowhere visible except about the 

 middle course of the two main water arteries. North-east of the Carpathians 

 and of the depression where rises the Dniester, the Tarnapol and Kremenetz 

 plateau is continued by the Ovratinsk hills, here and there presenting magnificent 

 escarpments enframed in the foliage of the surrounding woodlands. Other less 

 elevated hills belonging to the same system occur north of Kamenetz-Podolskiy. 

 These uplands, source of the farthest head- streams of the Bug, have several crests 

 higher than the Yalda'i plateau — as, for instance, that crowned by the castle of 

 Kremenetz (1,310 feet), and that of Alexandrovsk, near Proskurov (1,180 feet) — 

 but they fall gradually towards the east and south-east. The line of their crystalline 

 cliffs may be traced throughout most of the region separating the Bug and Upper 



