Ibid., Vol. I, p. 245.
H.D. Traill, Social England, Vol. III, pp. 363-364, 540. London and New York, 1895.
J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 311. London, 1903.
Alexander P. Engelhardt, A Russian Province of the North, pp. 54-71. From the Russian. London, 1899.
Chapter XI—The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers
Rivers as intermediaries between land and sea.
To a large view, rivers appear in two aspects. They are either part of the general water envelope of the earth, extensions of seas and estuaries back into the up-hill reaches of the land, feeders of the ocean, roots which it spreads out over the surface of the continents, not only to gather its nourishment from ultimate sources in spring and glacier, but also to bring down to the coast the land-born products of the interior to feed a sea-born commerce; or rivers are one of the land forms, merely water filling valley channels, serving to drain the fields and turn the mills of men. In the first aspect their historical importance has been both akin and linked to that of the ocean, despite the freshness and smaller volume of their waters and the unvarying direction of their currents. The ocean draws them and their trade to its vast basin by the force of gravity. It unites with its own the history of every log-stream in Laurentian or Himalayan forest, as it formerly linked the beaver-dammed brooks of wintry Canada with the current of trade following the Gulf Stream to Europe.