In one of these tracts
is built Ravenna, and in the other Venice.
What circumstances directed the peculiar arrangement of this great belt
of sediment in the earliest times, it is not here the place to inquire.
It is enough for us to know that from the mouths of the Adige to those
of the Piave there stretches, at a variable distance of from three to
five miles from the actual shore, a bank of sand, divided into long
islands by narrow channels of sea. The space between this bank and the
true shore consists of the sedimentary deposits from these and other
rivers, a great plain of calcareous mud, covered, in the neighborhood of
Venice, by the sea at high water, to the depth in most places of a foot
or a foot and a half, and nearly everywhere exposed at low tide, but
divided by an intricate network of narrow and winding channels, from
which the sea never retires.
In some places, according to the run of the currents, the land has risen
into marshy islets, consolidated, some by art, and some by time, into
ground firm enough to be built upon or fruitful enough to be cultivated:
in others, on the contrary, it has not reached the sea-level; so that,
at the average low water, shallow lakelets glitter among its irregularly
exposed fields of seaweed.
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