Sidenote: Traits common to the Southern colonies. Although of dissimilar origin, developed along somewhat different lines, and having striking individual characteristics, the Southern colonies possessed in common so many traits--climatic, geographical, social, and economic--that we may conveniently treat them as a distinct group. Sidenote: Geography. Virginia and Maryland, topographically similar, have numerous large and safe harbors, and the area of cultivation extends to the coast. In the Carolinas there are scarcely any good harbors; along the sea-shore are great sand-fields and pine-barrens, interspersed by swamps, but the country gradually slopes up to the Alleghany foot-hills, the soil improving with the rise in elevation. Throughout the Southern colonies the country is drained by broad rivers running down to the sea. Sidenote: Population. It is estimated that in 1688 there were but twenty-five thousand persons, white and black, in Maryland, sixty thousand in Virginia, and four thousand in the Carolinas. The English were dominant in all the colonies, but their supremacy was more strongly marked in Virginia and Maryland than in the Carolinas, where foreign elements (1700-1750) increased rapidly in numbers and variety. The North Carolina lumbering industry attracted many immigrants,--in the main French Huguenots, Moravians, and Germans, with some Swiss and Scotch-Irish interspersed. The Huguenots, a particularly desirable class, were stronger in South Carolina than in any other American colony. While Virginia and Maryland were chiefly settled by colonists direct from England, the Carolinas were largely peopled from the other English colonies in North America, the Bahamas, and the West Indies. Sidenote: Unimportant character of the villages.