BOOKS.
THE RHINE.*
Ma. MAC/UNDER has prepared a beautiful picture-book about the greatest of European rivers, but he has prepared it in .a very different style from the ordinary topographical album. In these collections of colour-plates the text is usually of little importance; but this monograph is worthy of serious study. The author is primarily a geographer, intent upon explaining the subtleties of the physical configuration. In the second place, he is an historian of the most philosophic type. Only after these aspects are done with does he say anything about natural beauty or romance, so that the pictures, which are on the whole very good, seem scarcely in keeping. Illustrations are rather for the casual carnets de voyage; maps and plans are more suitable for Mr. Mackinder. Let us hastily add, however, that he contrives to make the geography uncommonly interesting. Moreover, the Rhine has been so praised by aesthetic travellers that it is a comfort to find a man who can tell us something new and true. His management of scientific and historical detail is masterly, and the reader is given a wonderful bird's-eye view of that great valley which has seen so much of the history of Europe. By presenting landscape in bare, almost mathe- matical, lines he succeeds in forcing a novel aspect upon the reader's mind, much as in another sphere Mr. Hardy in his Dynasts presents us with the bones of history, and therefore with a fresh view of it.
If you take the Scheldt and Meuse as Rhine tributaries, then the Rhine basin forms a great quadrilateral set obliquely in the map of Europe, with the Swiss head-waters as a straggling taiL Or looking less at the basin than at the stream, one may picture it as a tree, gathering its waters from the roots of many tributaries, bearing them aloag in a noble trunk, and then dispersing them into the branches of the Delta. Though a natural boundary, the Rhine has never been in any true sense a political one. Augustus attempted to make it one, but under the Frankish dominion the Rhine basin was more a metropolitan than a frontier area. The Bourbons revived the idea, and the Directory continued it, and with the Treaty of Luneville France was made for the time coterminous with Roman Gaul. But the poet-Napoleonic settlement changed this, and the war of 1870 pushed the German frontier still further west. In the Roman days, when roads were the main highways of travel, the Rhine was of less importance; but in the Middle Ages it became the great artery of communication in Central Europe. Merchandise from the South crossed the passes of the Alps to Lake Constance and descended the Rhine to the markets of Northern Europe. It is strange that no Great Power founded itself on the river. Mr. Mac- kinder ascribes this to the Swiss at the south end and the Dutch at the north, who utilised natural advantages to found confederations which controlled the outlets and inlets of the great highway of traffic.
Mr. Mackinder divides the valley into four great basins. There is first the Swiss basin in the south; then comes the Upper German basin containing the Rhine above and below Mannheim, and the tributary valleys of the Main and the Neckar ; next we have the Middle German basin, with the valleys of the Moselle and the Upper Meuse; and last come the Netherlands, with the Rhine below Cologne, the Lower Meuse and the Scheldt, and the Delta. In that curious net- work of mountains in which is imprisoned the canton of the Grisons there is a series of valleys each of which may claim to represent the head-waters of the Rhine. By common consent the title of parent stream is generally given to the Hinter Rhine, which flows from the Adula massif just north of the Spliigen Pass through the Rheinwald to Thusis, where it receives the stream from the Davos Valley. A little further north at Reichenau it is joined by the Vorder Rhine from the snows of the Todi, and the river sweeps east and north to :Ragatz, where it receives the last of its glacier tributaries. 'The-Rhine is now full-born, and for thirty miles it flows north to the Lake of Constance. To all lovers of the Alps we commend these chapters of Mr. Mackinder's as a most illuminating study in the-history and structure of mountain valleys. Just before the • The Runs: its Valley and History. By H. J. Idlokinder. With Illustra- tions in Colour by Mrs. Jame Jardine. London ; Chatto sad Wham. [20s. net.] river reaches the lake it passes on the righta very interesting little group of mountains,--the Alps of St. Gallen and Appenzell. Christianised originally by an Irish monk, they long formed a little Church State under. an Abbot, tilt they too discovered the .Swiss passion for .freedom, and got rid of their tyrant. Appe. nzell is one of the few communities which to-day eschew the principles of delegation. "The citizens have not only the right to vote in their parliament, but the duty of doing so under the penalty of a fine." The annual Assembly in April is attended by as many as ten thousand men.
From the Lake of Constance the river sweeps west through a gorge of the Jura, falling over the cataract of Schaffhausen, and receiving the tributary Aar, which drains the Bernese Oberland and brings down more water than the main stream. A river is most interesting "in its high mountain cradle," and the chapter on the Aar is perhaps the most illuminating in Mr. Mackiuder's boOk. It was the Rhenish and German side of Switzerland which was mainly responsible for the Con- federacy as we see it to-day. At Basle begins the Upper German Rhine, flowing in a "rift" valley between the Vosges and Black Forest ranges. On the left is the famous Gap of Burgundy, the great high-road of Middle Europe to the West, where the French fortress of Belfort re- mained uncaptured in the war of 1870, and where the long French domination of Alsace is marked by the canals passing through the gate from the Rhone to the Rhine. Mr. Mackinder has valuable chapters upon the side valleys, the Neckar and the Main on the right, the Moselle and the Upper Meuse on the left ; and on the chain of cities, Spires, Worms, and Mainz, which date from the days when the Rhine was the Roman frontier. We are now on the battle- ground of 1870, for the decisive strategy of the opening turned on the "opportunities offered by the ways which con- verge through the hilly country within the Rhine bend to the Moselle of Lorraine." At Bingen begins the famous Rheingau, the gorge of the Rhine, a region the natural beauty of which is a little spoiled to the ordinary traveller by its over- exploitation. Nevertheless, it is the sacred land of romance, and Mr. Mackinder gives its history in great detail,—detail which, as he truly says, is necessary for the appreciation of the historic complexity of this part of Germany. At Bonn the river leaves the hills, and for the rest of its course we are in. the lowlands close to the great coal belt and in a hive of industry. Set on or near the bank, however, there are a -number of little dead, forgotten cities, like Kaisers- werth and Wesel, which are full of interest both for the historian and the artist. We are in the richest part of Europe, and in what was of old its cockpit. The reason is that the road for armies marching into Germany or France is a comparatively narrow one. Hence a little district of the Lower Meuse basin is sown with battles,--Ramillies, Fleurus, Wavre, Waterloo, Jemappes, Malplaquet, Fontenoy, and Oudenarde. From these parts also sprang the family of Charlemagne, for Pippin was born just west of the Meuse, close to Neerwinden.
With the beginning of the Delta the Rhine ceases to have the individuality of a river. And yet, says Mr. Mackinder, "Holland is the gift of the Rhine, .just as Egypt is of the Nile. Napoleon held that Holland was rightly his because he had conquered Switzerland, and from the Swiss mountains is derived the Dutch soil." We commend this book as a unique guide to the essentials of both European geography and history. Without that great river the story of Europe would have been very different. It was the mediaeval high- way of commerce; it was highly coveted as a frontier by this Power and that; across its basin at north and south lay the great lateral routes; it is the key to the physical structure of Central Europe. Without abating one jot of his scientifiq purpose, Mr. Mackinder has succeeded in making his narra- tive as fascinating as a romance.
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