The name of SHKIPERI, which the Albanians give to the country they inhabit, is supposed to mean “land of rocks,” and no designation could be more appropriate. Stony mountains occupy the whole of the country, from the frontiers of Montenegro to those of Greece. The only plain of any extent is that of Scutari (Shkodra), to the south of the Montenegrin plateau, which forms the natural frontier of Albania towards the north. The bottom of this depression is occupied by the Lake of Scutari; and the Drin, the only river of the Balkan peninsula which is navigable for a considerable distance from the sea, debouches upon it. The Drin is formed by the junction of the White and the Black Drin, and in former times it only discharged a portion of its waters temporarily into the Boyana River, which drains the Lake of Scutari. But in 1858 it opened itself a new channel opposite to the village of Miet, about twenty miles above its mouth, and since that time the greater volume of its waters flows in the direction of Scutari, frequently inundating the lower quarters of that town. The marshy tracts on the Lower Drin are dangerous to cross during the heat of summer, and the fevers of the Boyana are the most dreaded along the whole of that coast. Most of the southern ramifications of the Bosnian Alps are inhabited by Albanians, but they are separated from their kinsmen in Albania proper by the deep valley of the Drin, a kind of _cañon_ similar to those of the Rocky Mountains, enclosed between precipitous walls several thousand feet in height, and hardly ever trodden by the foot of a wanderer. The mountain systems of Bosnia and Albania are only indirectly connected by a series of ranges and plateaux stretching from the mountain of Glieb in a south-easterly direction as far as the Skhar, or Scardus of the ancients. The crest of this latter runs at right angles to most of the ranges of Western Turkey, and although its culminating point is inferior in height to those of Slav Turkey, it is the point of junction between the Balkan and the {116} mountain systems of Bosnia and Albania. The Skhar is of great importance, too, in the hydrography of Turkey; for two great rivers, the Bulgarian Morava and the Vardar, descend from its flanks, one flowing to the Danube, the other to the Gulf of Saloniki. Chamois and wild goats are still met with in the Skhar, as in the Pindus and Rhodope, and M. Wiet mentions an animal known to the Mirdits as a _lucerbal_, which appears to be a species of leopard.