on its ocean-coast for vessels of any considerable burden, has no trade of importance, no manufactures, and no natural products of value in the world's great markets, no grand or interesting scenery, no celebrated works of art; nothing, in short, to attract the commercial traveller, to excite the curiosity of the naturalist, or to gratify the taste of the artist and the feelings of the romantic wanderer in foreign lands. It stands on our travelling maps of the Continent a kind of terra incognita, marked with a few lines denoting small rivers, and some questionable roads, and dotted with petty towns rejoicing in names unheard of in history, and, owing to strange combinations of double vowels, looking to the English eye awfully unpronounceable. The traveller
sees nothing to induce him to visit so unpromising a land.
Yet this peninsula is no silent unsuggestive desert to the reflecting traveller; it is no blank either in the natural or the social history of Europe. It is one of the most remarkable and important physical and geographical features of the land of our Continent. This peninsula is a vast bank of sand, gravel, water-worn stones, and transported rounded blocks of granite, of all sizes, covered with a bed of clay and vegetable earth; and has been formed, or thrown up, by the ocean, and defends now from its fury a large portion of the north of Europe. The northern Mediterranean consists of two basins - the Cattegat and the Baltic-connected by a narrow channel at Copenhagen called the Sound, as the Black Sea and the southern Mediterranean are, by a remarkably similar conformation but on a greater scale, at Constantinople. But the true Sound is the entrance into the