re.

[Illustration: GERMAN NORTH SEA COAST.]

[Sidenote: Width of coastal zones.]

As intermediary belt between land and sea, the coast becomes a peculiar
habitat which leaves its mark upon its people. We speak of coast strips,
coastal plains, "tidewater country," coast cities; of coast tribes,
coast peoples, maritime colonies; and each word brings up a picture of a
land or race or settlement permeated by the influences of the sea. The
old term of "coastline" has no application to such an intermediary belt,
for it is a zone of measurable width; and this width varies with the
relief of the land, the articulation of the coast according as it is
uniform or complex, with the successive stages of civilization and the
development of navigation among the people who inhabit it.

Along highly articulated coasts, showing the interpenetration of sea and
land in a broad band of capes and islands separated by tidal channels
and inlets, or on shores deeply incised by river estuaries, or on low
shelving beaches which screen brackish lagoons and salt marshes behind
sand reefs and dune ramparts, and which thus form an indeterminate
boundary of alternate land and water, the zone character of the coast in
a physical sense becomes conspicuous. In an anthropological sense the
zone character is clearly indicated by the different uses of its inner
and outer edge made by man in different localities and in different
periods of history.

[Sidenote: The inner edge.]

The old German maritime cities of the North Sea and the Baltic were
located on rivers from 6 to 60 miles from the open sea, always on the
inner edge of the coastal belt. Though primarily trading towns, linked
together once in the sovereign confederacy of the Hanseatic League, they
fixed their sites on the last spurs of firm ground running out into the
soft, yielding alluvium, which was constantly exposed to inundation.
Land high enough to be above the ever threatening flood of river and
storm-driven tide on this flat coast, and solid enough to be built upon,
could not be found immediately on the sea. The slight elevations of
sandy "geest" or detrital spurs were limited in area and in time
outgrown. Hence the older part of all these river towns, from Bremen to
Koenigsberg, rests upon hills, while in every case the newer and lower
part is built on piles or artificially raised ground on the alluvium.[412]
So Utrecht, the Ultrajectum of the Romans, selected for its site a long
rai