Note 446 — Chapter VIII · —Coast Peoples

These low hems of the land, however, often meet physical obstructions to ready communications with the interior in the silted inlets, shallow lagoons, marshes, or mangrove swamps of the littoral itself. Here the larger drainage streams give access across this amphibian belt to the solid land behind. Where they flow into a tide-swept bay like the North Sea or the English Channel, they scour out their beds and preserve the connection between sea and land;446 but debouchment into a tideless basin like the Caspian or the Gulf of Mexico, even for such mighty streams as the Volga and the Mississippi, sees the slow silting up of their mouths and the restriction of their agency in opening up the hinterland. Thus the character of the bordering sea may help to determine the accessibility of the coast from the land side.