while retaining communication with the sea, and thereby with the mother country.  The small boats in use till the introduction of steam navigation fixed this line far inland and gave the coastal zone a greater breadth than it has at present, and a more regular contour.  In colonial America this inner edge coincided with the “fall-line” of the Atlantic rivers, which was indicated by a series of seaport towns; or with the inland limit of the tides, which on the St. Lawrence fell above Quebec, and on the Hudson just below Albany.

[Sidenote:  Shifting of the inner edge.]

With the recent increase in the size of vessels, two contrary effects are noticed.  In the vast majority of cases, the inner edge, as marked by ports, moves seaward into deeper water, and the zone narrows.  The days when almost every tobacco plantation in tidewater Virginia had its own wharf are long since past, and the leaf is now exported by way of Norfolk and Baltimore.  Seville has lost practically all its sea trade to Cadiz, Rouen to Havre, and Dordrecht to Rotterdam.  In other cases the zone preserves its original width by the creation of secondary ports on or near the outer edge, reserved only for the largest vessels, while the inner harbor, by dredging its channel, improves its communication with the sea.  Thus arises the phenomenon of twin ports like Bremen and Bremerhaven, Dantzig and Neufahrwasser, Stettin and Swinemuende, Bordeaux and Pauillac, London and Tilbury.  Or the original harbor seeks to preserve its advantage by canalizing the shallow approach by river, lagoon, or bay, as St. Petersburg by the Pantiloff canal through the shallow reaches of Kronstadt Bay; or Koenigsberg by its ship canal, carried for 25 miles across the Frisches Haff to the Baltic;[417] or Nantes by the Loire ship canal, which in 1892 was built to regain for the old town the West Indian trade recently intercepted by the rising outer port of St. Nazaire, at the mouth of the Loire estuary.[418] In northern latitudes, however, the outer ports on enclosed sea basins like the Baltic become dominant in the winter, when the inner ports are ice-bound.  Otherwise the outer port sinks with every improvement in the channel between the inner port and the sea.  Hamburg has so constantly deepened the Elbe passage that its outport of Cuxhaven has had little chance to rise, and serves only as an emergency harbor; while on the Weser, maritime leadership has oscillated between Bremen and Bremerhaven.[419] So the whole German coast and the Russian Baltic have seen a more or less irregular shifting backward and forward of maritime importance between the inner and the outer edges.

[Sidenote:  Artificial extension of inner edge.]