Sixty miles below Maysville the Licking River flows out of Kentucky, and on the opposite Ohio shore, built upon the magnificent amphitheatre of hills rising tier upon tier, and surrounded by villa-crowned heights elevated five hundred feet as a background, is Ohio's metropolis, Cincinnati, the Queen City. It spreads fourteen miles along the river, one of the most important manufacturing and commercial centres of the West, and is fronted by Covington and Newport on the Kentucky shore, the Licking River dividing them. John Cleves Symmes, a prominent American in the eighteenth century, bought from the Government after the Revolution a large tract of land in Ohio between the Great and Little Miami Rivers, known as "Symmes' Purchase." His nephew and namesake was the noted author of the "Theory of Concentric Spheres," which was called in derision "Symmes's Hole," and he afterwards died on this tract, being buried there with a monument surmounted, according to his pet theory, by a globe open at the poles. The people interested in the land purchase decided to establish a settlement opposite the mouth of the Licking, and they gave it the pedantic name of Losantiville, a word ingeniously contrived to describe its position by using the "L" signifying Licking River, "os" the mouth, "anti" opposite, and "ville" a city. General St. Clair, however, came along afterwards to establish a military post in his campaign against the Indians, and being prominently identified with the Society of the Cincinnati, he gave the place that name. It was for many years a small collection of log cabins, and had only slow growth until steamboating began on the Ohio, when it rapidly expanded, receiving an additional impetus from the opening of the Miami Canal connecting with Lake Erie in 1830 and from the great development of the western railway systems after 1840. Its earlier inhabitants came largely from the Atlantic States and Kentucky, but subsequently there was a great German influx, so that a considerable district north of the Miami Canal is their special home, and is familiarly known as "Over the Rhine." The Civil War gave the city a serious set-back by destroying its extensive Southern trade, but it has since greatly grown, and now has a population of four hundred thousand. The immediate advantage of location comes from having around it a district of a hundred miles radius which is one of the most fertile in America.