into the distributing reservoir on the South Hill, near the Belvedere
Palace, at an elevation of one hundred and fifty feet above the city.
The pressure is great enough to throw a jet nearly one hundred
feet high from the fountain in the Schwarzenberg Square. The Danube
Regulation, as its name implies, is an attempt to improve the
navigation of the river. The Danube, which in this part of its course
has a general flow from north-west to south-east, approaches within
a few miles of Vienna. Here, at Nussdorf, it breaks into two or three
shallow and tortuous channels, which meander directly away from the
city, as if in sheer willfulness, and reunite at the Lobau, as far
below the city as Nussdorf is above it. The "regulation" consists in
a new artificial channel, cut in a straight line from Nussdorf to
the Lobau. In length it is about nine miles, in breadth about twelve
hundred feet: the average depth of water will be not less than ten
feet. It was begun in 1869 and finished in April, 1875. This new
channel, which passes the Leopoldstadt suburb a short distance outside
the late exhibition grounds, will render unnecessary the transshipment
of goods and passengers at Nussdorf and the Lobau respectively, and
will also, it is hoped, prevent the inundations by which the low
region to the north of the river has been so often ravaged.

Berlin is inferior to Vienna in antiquity and in variety of incident
and association. The capital of the present German empire consisted
originally of two small rival towns, or rather villages, standing
almost side by side on opposite banks of the Spree. The elder, Cöln,
was incorporated as a municipality in 1232: the other, Berlin,
is mentioned for the first time in 1244. Both names are of Vendic
(Slavic) origin, and designated villages of the hunting and fishing
Vends, who were dispossessed by German colonists.