Not in population and adornment alone has Vienna progressed.  Much has been done, or at least projected, for the comfort and health of the residents and for the increase of trade.  The entire city has been repaved with Belgian pavement, the houses renumbered after the Anglo-American fashion.  The railroads centring in the city are numerous, and the stations almost luxurious in their appointments.  But the two chief enterprises are the Semmering aqueduct and the Danube Regulation.  The former, begun in 1869 and completed in 1873, would do honor to any city.  It is about fifty miles in length, and has a much greater capacity than the Croton aqueduct.  The pure, cold Alpine water brought from two celebrated springs near the Semmering Pass, flows into the distributing reservoir on the South Hill, near the Belvedere Palace, at an elevation of one hundred and fifty feet above the city.  The pressure is great enough to throw a jet nearly one hundred feet high from the fountain in the Schwarzenberg Square.  The Danube Regulation, as its name implies, is an attempt to improve the navigation of the river.  The Danube, which in this part of its course has a general flow from north-west to south-east, approaches within a few miles of Vienna.  Here, at Nussdorf, it breaks into two or three shallow and tortuous channels, which meander directly away from the city, as if in sheer willfulness, and reunite at the Lobau, as far below the city as Nussdorf is above it.  The “regulation” consists in a new artificial channel, cut in a straight line from Nussdorf to the Lobau.  In length it is about nine miles, in breadth about twelve hundred feet:  the average depth of water will be not less than ten feet.  It was begun in 1869 and finished in April, 1875.  This new channel, which passes the Leopoldstadt suburb a short distance outside the late exhibition grounds, will render unnecessary the transshipment of goods and passengers at Nussdorf and the Lobau respectively, and will also, it is hoped, prevent the inundations by which the low region to the north of the river has been so often ravaged.

Berlin is inferior to Vienna in antiquity and in variety of incident and association.  The capital of the present German empire consisted originally of two small rival towns, or rather villages, standing almost side by side on opposite banks of the Spree.  The elder, Coeln, was incorporated as a municipality in 1232:  the other, Berlin, is mentioned for the first time in 1244.  Both names are of Vendic (Slavic) origin, and designated villages of the hunting and fishing Vends, who were dispossessed by German colonists.