[313] Railways in Asia Minor, Littell’s Living Age, Vol. 225, p. 196.

[314] J. Ellis Barker, Modern Germany, pp. 38-66.  London, 1907.

[315] The Polish Danger in Prussia, Westminster Review, Vol. 155, p. 375.

[316] Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol.  I, pp. 223-224.  Leipzig, 1897.

[317] Plato, Critias, 112.  Aristotle, Politics, Book II, chap.  VII; Book IV, chap.  IV; Book VII, chap.  IV.

[318] Plato, De Legibus, Book V, chaps. 8, 9, 10, 11.

[319] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses, pp. 180-187.  Stuttgart, 1899.

[320] Blanqui, History of Political Economy, pp. 150-152.  New York, 1880.

[321] Carl Ritter, Comparative Geography, p. 63.  New York, 1865.

[322] E. C. Semple, American History and its Geographic Conditions, pp. 42-43, 109, 110.  Boston, 1903.

[323] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 405-6.  New York, 1897.

[324] P. L. Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol.  VIII.  Letter to John Bacon, April 30, 1803; and Confidential Message to Congress on the Expedition to the Pacific, January 18, 1803.

[325] Emerson, The Young American, in Nature Addresses and Lectures, pp. 369-371.  Centenary Edition, Boston.

CHAPTER VII

GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES

[Sidenote:  The boundary zone in nature.]

Nature abhors fixed boundary lines and sudden transitions; all her forces combine against them.  Everywhere she keeps her borders melting, wavering, advancing, retreating.  If by some cataclysm sharp lines of demarcation are drawn, she straightway begins to blur them by creating intermediate forms, and thus establishes the boundary zone which characterizes the inanimate and animate world.  A stratum of limestone or sandstone, when brought into contact with a glowing mass of igneous rock, undergoes various changes due to the penetrating heat of the volcanic outflow, so that its surface is metamorphosed as far as that heat reaches.  The granite cliff slowly deposits at its base a rock-waste slope to soften the sudden transition from its perpendicular surface to the level plain at its feet.  The line where a land-born river meets the sea tends to become a sandbar or a delta, created by the river-borne silt and the wash of the waves, a form intermediate between land and sea, bearing the stamp of each, fluid in its outlines, ever growing by the persistent accumulation of mud, though ever subject to inundation and destruction by the waters which made it.  The alluvial coastal hems that edge all shallow seas are such border zones, reflecting in their flat, low surfaces the dead level of the ocean, in their composition the solid substance of the land; but in the miniature waves imprinted on the sands and the billows of heaped-up boulders, the master workman of the deep leaves his mark. [See map page 243.]