APPALACHIANS, the general appellation of the great mountain-system—called also the Alleghanies—which stretches from the interior of Maine to the borders of Alabama, its distance from the sea gradually ranging between about 100 m. in the n. and about 300 in the s. Speaking generally, tins chain may be regarded as the parent of the Atlantic rivers of the United States on the one side, and on the other of the southern tributaries of the St. Lawrence, and of the eastern feeders of the Mississippi: it is not, however, the actual water-shed during its entire length, for it is crossed by the Connecticut, the Hudson, and the Delaware, just as the Himalayas are pierced by the Ganges, and the Andes by the Amazon. The chain, in fact, consists of several ranges generally parallel to each other, which, along with the intermediate valleys that occupy two thirds of the breadth, form a belt 100 in. wide—its multiform character, however, developing itself only to the w. and s. of the Hudson. To take the chief ridges by name, and to begin from the n.: the white hills of New Hampshire present some of the loftiest. elevations, Moosehilloek and Washington being respectively 4636 and 6634 ft. above the sea. Next in order, the Green mountains, which, true to the name, almost cover Ver mont, attain, in Killington Peak, a height of 3924 ft.; then come the Highlands, on the e. of the Hudson, so striking an object to the voyagers on its waters; immediately beyond that river, again, we find the Catskill mountains, which, though of inconsiderable length, contain two eminences—Round Top and High Peak—respectively of 3804 and 3718 ft.; while, on a terrace of another member of the group, Mountain House, a favor ite refuge from the heats of summer, is perched 2500 ft. above the level of the Hudson. Proceeding onwards, the Kittatinnics extend from the n. of New Jersey as far as Vir ginia;while nearer to the sea, the Blue Ridge, stretching from about the same parallel down to North Carolina, is crowned, within the limits of Virginia, by the peaks of Otter, 4000 ft. high. In North Carolina arc the Black mountains, with the highest summit of the system, Black Dome, 6760 ft. in height Lastly, there lie, more to the westward, the Allegbanies proper in Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the Cumberland mountains on the e. border of Kentucky and Tennessee.
Of all these elevations not one at all approaches the. limit of perpetual snow. Yet France, while struggling with England in North America, regarded the A. as a wall that was physically to exclude her rival from the basins of the St. Lawrence and the Missis sippi. Anglo-Saxon energy, however, has virtually leveled the supposed barrier from end to end. Through Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont runs a railway from Port land to Canada; by canal or by railway, or even by both abreast, New York has reached the waters of the St. Lawrence on at least four principal points between Montreal in the e. and Buffalo in the w. ; Pennsylvania has carried to Pittsburgh a railway of 248 m. from Harrisburgh, and a canal of 312 in. from Columbia; while, with the necessary exception of little Delaware alone, the remaining states along the coast have each its iron-way through the A.
The chain abounds in coal and iron, those gifts of nature to industrious man, which in all ages have done so much for civilization, and which, in our own age, have, with the aid of steam, more than doubled all that they had done before; and it is a curious instance of the adaptation of the two worlds to each other, that, while the Spaniard met, in the south, the gigantic counterparts of the central plateau of his own romantic land, the English man, in the north, stumbled, as it were, on those same elements of almost creative energy which, within two centuries, were to be so instrumental in placing the daughter next to the mother among the nations of the earth. As an evidence of the actual value of the coal and iron of the A., Pennsylvania—where, hitherto, they have been chiefly found— has since 1840 made more rapid strides in growth of population than any other state in the imion, till between 1860 and 1870, when Illinois increased somewhat more rapidly. Nor are iron and coal the' only valuable products of the A. To say nothing of the valleys —many of them as fertile as they are lovely—which separate the parallel ranges from each other, the mountains themselves yield limestone, marble, slate, building-stone, cop per, zinc, chrome, etc.