Harbors.— The seaports stiffer from similar disadvantages. The Baltic has good river har bors (Konigsberg, Dantzig, Stettin) or fiords (Kiel), but their location on an inland sea, though recently improved through the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal, puts them at disadvantage. Those on the open North Sea have to combat with the dangers of shallow water on a sinking coast (uWatten"), and Hamburg and Bremen cwe their importance more to the energy of their merchants than to natural advantages. Wilhelmshaf en, the naval port on the Jade Bay, is an entirely artificial creation. The chain of the Frisian Islands represents the old coastline, Heligoland being the only genuine island in that region. On the Baltic Coast, Riigen is the largest and most picturesque of the German islands.
Being open to the mild westerly winds, Germany has a milder climate than would be expected from its latitude. There is little difference between the north and south, as in the latter higher elevation counterbal ances the southerly location. The mean annual of Hamburg is 48° F., of Leipzig, 47°. of Munich, 45°. A greater contrast exists between the east and west, the lowland sharing al ready the continental climate of Russia with colder winters and warmer summers. The lat ter allow the vine to reach here its most north erly location on the earth, at Gruneberg on the Oder, in lat. 52° N. The valley of the upper Rhine is the only part of Germany where low elevation and low latitude are combined; here we find, therefore, the warmest parts of the empire, where Indian corn is cultivated and chestnut forests abound.
States.— Politically, the German Empire is a union of 26 states under the leadership of an emperor. Twenty-two are monarchies: four kingdoms (Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Wurttem berg), six grand-duchies (Baden, Hesse-Darm stadt, Oldenburg, Saxe-Weimer-Eisenach, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Mecklenburg-Strelitz), five duchies (Anhalt, Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe, Meiningen, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Brunswick), seven principalities (Waldeck, two Schwartz burg, two Lippe, two Reuss), each under its own king, grand-duke, duke or prince, and with an upper and lower house (except Meck lenburg which has not yet a constitution) • be sides these there are three republics: Ham burg, Bremen and Liibedc, 'the old Hansa towns with their territories, and one •Reid's lane (imperial : Alsace-Lorraine, regained. from France in 1871, and, for lack of a hereditary prince, placed directly un der the imperial government, with a governor appointed by the emperor. Prussia alone oc
cupies about two-thirds of the whole empire, practically all of northern Germany, with ex ception of a few of the smaller states inter spersed between her provinces. Since 1871 the lung of Prussia holds the office of German Em peror, made hereditary in the Hohenzollern dynasty, and Berlin thus is the seat of both the Prussian and the federal government. The latter consists of the emperor and two houses, similar to the state governments, but the mem bers of the lower house are elected by direct and secret vote, while the modes of the state elections are quite intricate. The upper houses of the states and the empire consist of repre sentatives of the governments.
Exclusive of Berlin, Germany had, in 1915, 40 cities with over 100,000 in habitants, mostly industrial centres and state capitals. The majority of the population (60,000,000) are of Germanic origin, espe cially in the older countries west of the Saale Elbe line. East of this line lives a more colo nial race, with a large admixture of Slavic blood. Among and beyond them there are 3,000,003 Poles in the formerly Polish provinces of Prussia: in the east 140,000 Masurians, 106,000 Lithuanians, 100,000 Cassubians; on the upper Spree 90,000 Wends; 220,000 French in Alsace Lorraine; 11,000 Walloons along the Belgian, and 140,000 Danes near the Danish line. Al though no more than one-tenth of the whole population, these foreign elements are not in significant, because most of them have their mother country back of them, and the problem is still more complicated by the overlapping of the German race into foreign territory on the northeast, southeast and south.
The oldest parts of Germany, geologically, are the metamorphic rocks of the Bohemian Forest-Erzgebirge-Sudeten region, the Thuringian and Black Forests, the Vosges, etc. Of paleozoic rocks, Algonkian and Cam brian schists and quartzites occur in the south west, Erzgebirge (Vogtland), the southeast, Thuringian Forest (Frankenwald), and Eichtel gebirge. Silurian schists, limestones, and sand stones occur above them in these three ranges and the eastern Sudeten, while the Rhenish Slate Mountains (Eifel) are the classical locality of the German Devonian, and the Harz includes portions of all paleozoic formations. Igneous rocks (diabases) and mineral veins intersect them.