ores of Geneva, Maggiore, Lugano, and Garda, each
shared by two countries. Switzerland, the Austrian Tyrol, and the three
German states of Baden, Wurtemberg and Bavaria, have all managed to
secure a frontage upon Lake Constance. Lake Titicaca, lying 12,661 feet
(3854 meters) above sea level but affording a navigable course 136 miles
(220 kilometers) long, is an important waterway for Peru and Bolivia. In
the central Sudan, where aridity reduces the volume of all streams, even
the variable and indeterminate Lake Chad has been an eagerly sought
objective for expanding boundaries. Twenty years ago it was divided
among the native states of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem; today it is shared
by British Nigeria, French Sudan, and German Kamerun. The erratic
northern extension of the German boundary betrays the effort to reach
this goal.

[Sidenote: Lakes as nuclei of states.]

The uniting power of lakes manifests itself in the tendency of such
basins to become the nuclei of states. Attractive to settlement in
primitive times, because of the protected frontier they afford--a motive
finding its most emphatic expression in the pile villages of the early
lake-dwellers--later because of the fertility of their bordering soil
and the opportunity for friendly intercourse, they gradually unite their
shores in a mesh of reciprocal relations, which finds its ultimate
expression in political union. It is a significant fact that the Swiss
Confederation originated in the four forest cantons of Lucerne, Schwyz,
Uri and Unterwalden, which are linked together by the jagged basin of
Lake Lucerne or the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons, as the Swiss
significantly call it, but are otherwise divided by mountain barriers.
So we find that Lake Titicaca was the cradle of the Inca Empire, just as
Lake Tezcoco was that of the Toltecs in Mexico and an island in Lake
Chalco later that of the Aztec domain.[745] The most stable of the
short-lived native states of Africa have apparently found an element of
strength and permanence in a protected lake frontier. Such are the petty
kingdoms of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem on Lake Chad, and Uganda on
Victoria Nyanza.

Large lakes, which include in their area islands, peninsulas, tides,
currents, fiords, inlets, deltas, and dunes, and present every
geographical feature of an enclosed sea, approach the latter too in
historical importance. Some of the largest, however, have long borne the
name of seas. The Caspian, which e