The western or Atlantic side presents the greatest peninsula, that of Scandinavia, and the most important island group, that of the British Isles. The Danish peninsula is remarkable as the only one in Europe, and indeed in almost any part of the world, that points northward.
SURFACE
CHARACTERISTICS
The great lowland of Europe lies toward the east, embracing the vast continental area of Russia, and sending out arms westward round the Gulf of Bothnia and the Swedish side of the Baltic, and through North Germany and Denmark, to form the lowlands of Holland and Belgium and of Western France, along the shores of the Bay of Biscay, as far as the rise of the Pyrenees.
The vast central area of the Russian lowland has almost everywhere the same character, woods and marshes alternating with cultivated land, affording a superfluity of grain, which is sent down by the rivers to the seaports of the Baltic and the Black Sea; but along its northern border, next the icy Arctic Sea, lie the moss-covered swamps called the Tundras, the soil of which is never thawed for more than a yard’s depth; all its southern margin toward the Black Sea and the Caspian is a treeless steppe, over which at some seasons the grasses shoot up above a man’s height, concealing the pasturing herds.
REMARKABLE SURFACE OF
FINLAND
Finland is one of the most remarkable regions of the great European plain; its granite floor, elevated above the sea-level probably in a recent geological period, is worn into thousands of angular lake-basins, which form a perfect network over its surface; to the sailor on the Baltic its margin presents a girdle of steep cliffs guarded by a fringe of rocky islets or skerries. The cliffy Aland Islands are detached fragments of this remarkable formation.
LOWLANDS OF WESTERN
EUROPE
The eastern portions of the North German plain, as far as the Oder, have the same character, the same corn-yielding clay soil, as the adjoining lowlands in Russia; but farther west, round the capital city of Berlin, the plain becomes less fertile, in some parts sandy and bare. Beyond the Elbe, in Hanover, the Lüneburg heath covers a large part of the plain; next it lie the moors, marshes, and fens of Oldenburg and the borders of Holland, where cattle and horses are the wealth of the land; and beyond these the highly cultivated lowlands on each side of the Rhine delta, separated by the heaths and moors of Brabant, which run out toward the lower Scheldt like a dividing wedge between Holland and Belgium.
Passing into France, and across the broad river basins of its lowlands which open to the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay, we come upon the great wine-yielding lands, such as Champagne and the vineyards of the Gironde, with the corn country of Brie northeast of Paris, and of Touraine, on the Loire between these; and lastly, at the extremity of this branch of the European plain, to the Landes along the coast between the mouth of the Gironde and the Pyrenees, composed of sandy heaths and marshes.