Paris Author:Hilaire Belloc Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Seine becomes but one of many similar streams (the Aube, the Yonne, etc.,) which spread out to their sources in the fields of the rolling country like the last t... more »endrils of a vine. The whole scheme of the lower river presents, therefore, something of the appearance shown in this sketch— where the shading represents the high land. As for the geological character of this valley, and of the plain of Paris at its head, I have uot sufficient knowledge of the matter to give it in any detail, nor is it of sufficient importance in such a book as this to merit a very special mention. The valley is clearly a valley .of erosion and cuts through a 'secondary formation which is cretaceous in its lower parts, and merges gradually into the harder jurassic rocks as one goes up river. These rocks are of importance in the history of the town, for the places where they crop out from the plain or have been laid bare by erosion have furnished since Roman times the quarries of hard building stone upon which the permanent beauty of the city so largely depends. The rock is peculiarly hard in the neighbourhood of and beneath Paris itself, so that, as at Rheims, the materialof the town has been largely drawn from its own foundations in the soil. Before I leave the valley as a whole to speak of the particular site of the city, there is one last aspect upon which I would touch. The military position of Paris in history is determined largely by the contour of this valley and the nature of the uplands. The valley of the Seine is a kind of road leading directly up to Paris, and serves in the strategic history of the city these two purposes: it is an avenue of attack for northern enemies, a lane of reinforcement (if it can be kept open) against enemies from the east; but its importance in either case is ...« less