With the exception of the Jura, whose pastoral summit is about 3000 feet above the sea, there are no elevated table-lands in the Alps: the tabular form, so eminently characteristic of the Asiatic high lands, begins in the Balkan. The Oriental peninsula rises by degrees from the Danube to Bosnia and Upper Macedonia, which are some hundred feet above the sea; and the Balkan extends 600 miles along this elevated mass, from the Julian Alps to Cape Eminec on the Black Sea. It begins by a table-land 70 miles long, traversed by low hills, ending, towards Albania and Myritida, in precipitous limestone rocks from 6000 to 7000 feet high. Rugged mountains, all but impassable, succeed to this, in which the domes and needles of the Schandach, or ancient Scamus, are covered with perpetual snow. Another table-land follows, whose marshy surface is bounded by mural precipices at Mount Arbelus, near the town of Sophia. There the Hemus, or Balkan properly so called, begins, and runs in parallel ridges, separated by longitudinal valleys, to the Black Sea, dividing the plains between the Lower Danube and the Propontis into nearly equal parts. The central ridge is passable in few places, and where there is no lateral ridge the precipices descend at once to the plains. The Balkan is everywhere rent by terrific fissures across the chains and table-lands, so deep and narrow that daylight is almost excluded. These chasms afford the safest passes across the range; the others along the faces of the precipices are frightful. The Mediterranean is the southern boundary of the elevated zone of Eastern Europe, whose last offsets rise in rocky islands along the coasts. The crystalline mountains of Sardinia and Corsica are outlying members of the Maritime Alps, while shorter offsets end in the plains of Lombardy, forming the magnificent scenery of the Italian lakes. Even the Apennines, whose elevation has given its form to the peninsula of Italy, are but secondary on a greater scale to the broad central band, as well as the mountains and high land in the north of Sicily, which form the continuance of the Calabrian chain. The Apennines, beginning at the Maritime Alps, enclose the Gulf of Genoa, and run through the centre of Italy in parallel ranges to the middle of Calabria, where they split into two branches, one of which goes to Capo de Leuca, on the Gulf of Torento, the other to Cape Spartivento, in the Straits of Messina. The whole length is about 800 miles. None of the Apennines come within the line of perpetual snow, though it lies nine months in the year on the Gran Sasso d’ltalia, 9521 feet high, in Abruzza Ulteriore. Offsets from the Julian and Eastern Alps render Dalmatia and Albania perhaps the most rugged tract in Europe; and the Pindus, which forms the watershed of Greece, diverges from the latter chain, and, running south 200 miles, separates Albania from Macedonia and Thessaly.