Fasten now that division well home in your mind, by drawing, however rudely, the course of the two rivers, little thought of by common geographers, but of quite unspeakable importance in human history, the Vistula and the Dniester. 10. They rise within thirty miles of each other,[24] and each runs, not counting ins and outs, its clear three hundred miles,--the Vistula to the north-east, the Dniester to the south-west: the two of them together cut Europe straight across, at the broad neck of it,--and, more deeply looking at the thing, they divide Europe, properly so called--Europa's own, and Jove's,--the small educationable, civilizable, and more or less mentally rational fragment of the globe, from the great Siberian wilderness, Cis-Ural and Trans-Ural; the inconceivable chaotic space, occupied datelessly by Scythians, Tartars, Huns, Cossacks, Bears, Ermines, and Mammoths, in various thickness of hide, frost of brain, and woe of abode--or of unabiding. Nobody's history worth making out, has anything to do with them; for the force of Scandinavia never came round by Finland at all, but always sailed or paddled itself across the Baltic, or down the rocky west coast; and the Siberian and Russian ice-pressure merely drives the really memorable races into greater concentration, and kneads them up in fiercer and more necessitous exploring masses. But by those exploring masses, of true European birth, our own history was fashioned for ever; and, therefore, these two truncating and guarding rivers are to be marked on your map of Europe with supreme clearness: the Vistula, with Warsaw astride of it half way down, and embouchure in Baltic,--the Dniester, in Euxine, flowing each of them, measured arrow-straight, as far as from Edinburgh to London, with windings,[25] the Vistula six hundred miles, and the Dniester five--count them together for a thousand miles of _moat_, between Europe and the Desert, reaching from Dantzic to Odessa. [Footnote 24: Taking the 'San' branch of upper Vistula.] [Footnote 25: Note, however, generally that the strength of a river, caeteris paribus, is to be estimated by its straight course, windings being almost always caused by flats in which it can receive no tributaries.] 11. Having got your Europe moated off into this manageable and comprehensible space, you are next to fix the limits which divide the four Gothic countries, Britain, Gaul, Germany, and Dacia, from the four Classic countries, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Lydia. There is no other generally opponent term to 'Gothic' but 'Classic': and I am content to use it, for the sake of practical breadth and clearness, though its precise meaning for a little while remains unascertained. Only get the geography well into your mind, and the nomenclature will settle itself at its leisure.