Influences of Geographic Environment Part 42

Contrast their racial unity about this common center with the extremes of ethnic divergence in their remote peripheries, where Teutons, Mongols, Malays and Negroes differ widely from the Mediterranean stock and from each other. Eastern Australia represents the ethnic antipodes of western Asia, in harmony with the great dividing distance between them, but the sides of these continents facing each other across the bridge of the Sunda Islands are spa.r.s.ely strewn with a common Malay element.

[Sidenote: Africa's location.]

Africa's early development was never helped by the fact that the continent lay between Asia and South America. It was subjected to strong and persistent Asiatic Influences, but apparently to no native American ones. From that far-off trans-Atlantic sh.o.r.e came no signs of life.

Africa appears in history as an appendage of Asia, a cultural peninsula of the larger continent. This was due not only to the Suez Isthmus and the narrowness of the Red Sea rift, but to its one-sided invasion by Asiatic races and trade from the east, while the western side of the continent lay buried in sleep, unstirred by any voice from the silent sh.o.r.es of America. Semitic influences, in successive waves, spread over the Dark Continent as far as Morocco, the Senegal, Niger, Lake Chad, Nyanza, Tanganyika and Nya.s.sa, and gave it such light as it had before the 16th century. Only after the Atlantic gulf was finally crossed did influences from the American side of the ocean begin to impinge upon the West African coast, first in the form of the slave and rum trade, then in the more humane aspect of the Liberian colony. But with the full development of the Atlantic period in history, we see all kinds of Atlantic influences, though chiefly from the Atlantic states of Europe, penetrating eastward into the heart of Africa, and there meeting other commercial and political activities pressing inland from the Indian Ocean.

[Sidenote: The Atlantic abyss.]

The long Atlantic rift between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, which was such a potent factor in the primitive r.e.t.a.r.dation of Africa is, from the standpoint of anthropo-geography, the most important feature in the distribution of the land-ma.s.ses over the globe. Not till the discovery of America bridged this abyss did the known world become a girdle round the earth. Except the Norse ventures to the American continent by way of Iceland and Greenland between 1000 and 1347, no account of pre-Columbian intercourse between the two sh.o.r.es of the Atlantic has ever been substantiated. Columbus found the opposite land unfamiliar in race as in culture. He described the people as neither whites nor blacks, the two ethnic types which he knew on the eastern side of the Atlantic abyss. He and his successors found in the Americas only a Stone Age culture, a stage already outgrown by Europe and Africa.

These continents from Lapland to the Hottentot country were using iron.

Prior to the voyage of the great Genoese, Europe gave nothing to America and received nothing from it, except the Gulf Stream's scanty cargo of driftwood stranded on bleak Icelandic sh.o.r.es. The Tertiary land-bridge across the North Atlantic between Norway and Greenland may possibly have guided a pre-Caucasic migration to America and given that continent part of its aboriginal population.[756] However, no trace of any European stock remains.

[Sidenote: Atlantic islands uninhabited.]

The collapse of the bridge at the close of the Glacial Epoch left the Atlantic abyss effectually dividing the two hemispheres. Its islands, few and far between, were helpless to maintain intercourse between the opposite sh.o.r.es; this is proven by the fact that all of them from Greenland to Tristan da Cunha, excepting only the Canaries, were uninhabited at the time of their discovery. History records when the first bold voyagers came upon them in that unmarked waste of waters, and gave them their first occupants. The political upheavals of Norway in King Harf.a.gr's time (872) sent to the Faroes and Iceland their first settlers, though these islands were previously known to the Celts of Ireland. The Norse colonists who went to Greenland in the year 1000 seem to have been the first regular settlers on those inhospitable coasts.

They found no native inhabitants, but numerous abandoned dwellings, fragments of boats and stone implements,[757] which doubtless recorded the intermittent voyages thither of the Eskimo, preliminary to permanent occupation. The Scandinavians did not encounter natives on the island till the 12th century, when Greenland probably received its first Eskimo immigration.[758]

[Sidenote: Geographical character of the Pacific.]

While the Atlantic thus formed a long north-and-south rift across the inhabited world at the period of the great discoveries, the Pacific, strewn with islands and land-rimmed at its northern extremity by the peninsulas of Alaska and eastern Siberia, spread a nebula of population from the dense centers of Asia across to the outskirts of America. The general Mongoloid character of the American Indians as a race, the stronger Asiatic stamp of the Western Eskimo, the unmistakeable ethnic and cultural affinities of the Northwest Coast tribes both with southern Polynesians and Asiatics,[759] all point to America as the great eastern wing of the Mongoloid or Asiatic area, and therefore as the true Orient of the world.

Geographic conditions have made this possible or even probable. The winds and currents of the North Pacific set from j.a.pan straight toward the American coast. Junks blown out to sea from China or j.a.pan have been carried by the Kuro Siwo and the prevailing westerlies across the Pacific to our continent. There is record of a hundred instances of this occurrence.[760]

[Sidenote: Pacific affinities of North American Indians.]

The broken bridge across Bering Strait formed by East Cape, Cape Prince of Wales and the Diomede Islands between, and further south the natural causeway of the Commander and Aleutian Islands leading from the peninsula of Kamchatka to that of Unalaska, have facilitated intercourse between Asia and America.[761] Justin Winsor says, "There is hardly a stronger demonstration of such connection between the two continents than the physical resemblances of the peoples now living on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean in these upper lat.i.tudes."[762] This resemblance is by no means confined to the Eskimo and Chukches, who have exchanged colonists across Bering Sea. Recent investigations have revealed a wider kinship. The population of northern Siberia speaks in general Ural-Altaic languages, but it includes a few scattered tribes whose singular speech excludes them from this linguistic group, and who have therefore been placed by ethnologists in a distinct cla.s.s called "paleasiatics" or "hyperboreans." This cla.s.s is composed of the Ostyak and Kot on the Yenisei River, the Gilyak and Ainos at the mouth of the Amur and on the Kurile, Sakhalin and Yezo islands, the Kamchadal and Koryak of Kamchatka, and the Chukches and Yukaghir of extreme northeastern Siberia. As far back as 1850, the eminent philologist Robert Latham noted a marked linguistic agreement, both in structure and verbal affinity, between our Northwest Coast tribes and the peoples of the islands and peninsulas fringing northeastern Asia. "Koriak is notably American," he said.[763] The recent Jesup Expedition to the Northwest Coast of America and the nearby coast of Asia investigated the Koryak, to determine whether in the past there had been any connection between the cultures and ethnic types of the Old and New World. These investigations have proved beyond doubt a kinship of culture, attributable either to a remote common origin or to former contact, long and close, between these isolated Siberian tribes and the American aborigines. They show that the Koryak are one of the Asiatic tribes standing nearest to the northwestern American Indian.[764] [See map page 103.]

[Sidenote: Polynesian affinities.]

W.H. Dall finds the inhabitants of the Pacific slope of North America conspicuously allied with Oceanica in cultural achievements, whose origin he therefore a.s.signs to that vast congeries of islands stretching from Asia toward South America in lat.i.tude 25 south. These islands, closely cl.u.s.tered as far as the Paumota group, straggle along with widening s.p.a.ces between, through Easter Isle, which carries the indestructible memorials of a strange civilization, through Sala-y-Gomez, San Felix, and St. Ambrose almost to the threshold of the Peruvian coast. It is to be noted that these islands lie just outside the westward-bearing Equatorial Current and trade-winds, on the margin of the South Pacific anti-cyclonic winds and a southern current which sets towards the Peruvian coast.[765] A more probable avenue for the introduction of these Polynesian or Malayan elements of culture is found in O.T. Mason's theory, that primitive mariners of the southwestern Pacific, led into migration by the eternal food quest, may have skirted the seaboard of East Asia and Northwest America, pa.s.sing along a great-circle route through the succession of marginal seas and archipelagoes to various ports of entry on the Pacific front of America.

Such a route, favored by the prevailing marine currents and winds from the southwest, and used repeatedly during long periods of time, might have introduced trans-Pacific elements of race and culture into the western side of America.[766]

[Sidenote: The real Orient of the World.]

Moreover, primitive America resembled Oceanica and northern Asia in its ignorance of iron, in its Stone Age civilization, and its r.e.t.a.r.ded social and political development. Such affinities as it shows were predominantly Pacific or trans-Pacific.[767] On its Atlantic side, it stood out in striking contrast to the contemporaneous civilizations and races in Europe and Africa; this was its unneighbored sh.o.r.e, lying on the eastern margin of that broad zone of habitation which stretched hence westward on and on around the world, to the outermost capes of Europe and Africa. The Atlantic abyss formed the single gap in this encircling belt of population, to which Columbus at last affixed the clasp. The Atlantic face of the Americas formed therefore the drowsy unstirred Orient of the inhabited world, which westward developed growing activity--dreaming a civilization in Mexico and Peru, roused to artistic and maritime achievement in Oceanica and the Malay Archipelago, to permanent state-making and real cultural development in Asia, and attaining the highest civilization at last in western Europe. There was the sunset margin of the inhabited world, the area of achievement, the adult Occident, facing across the dividing ocean that infant Orient beyond. Here the Old World, the full-grown world, had acc.u.mulated in Columbus' time the matured forces of a hemisphere; it was searching for some outlet across the sh.o.r.eless distances of the Atlantic, waiting for some call from its voiceless beyond.

[Sidenote: The Atlantic abyss in historic movements of peoples.]

This deep, unbridged chasm of the Atlantic, closed only four hundred years ago, must be taken into account in all investigations of the geographical distribution of races, whether in prehistoric or historic times. The influences of those ages when it formed an impa.s.sable gulf are still operative in directing the movements of the peoples to-day inhabiting its sh.o.r.es, because that barrier maintained the continents of America as a vast territorial reserve, spa.r.s.ely inhabited by a Stone Age people, and affording a fresh field for the superior, acc.u.mulated energies of Europe.

[Sidenote: Races and continents.]

Australia and the double continent of America show each the coincidence of an ethnic realm with an isolated continent. In contrast, when we come to the Old World triad of Europe, Asia and Africa, we find three races, to be sure, but races whose geographical distribution ignores the boundaries of the continents. The White race belongs to all three, and from time immemorial has made the central basin of the Mediterranean the white man's sea. The Mongolian, though primarily at home in Asia, stretches along the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the Atlantic sh.o.r.es of Norway, and in historical times has penetrated up the Danube to the foot of the Alps. Nor was the Negroid stock confined to Africa, though Africa has always been its geographical core. The Indian Peninsula and Malay Archipelago, once peopled by a primitive Negroid race, but now harboring only remnants of them in the Deccan, Malacca, the Philippines and elsewhere, bridge the distance to the other great Negroid center in Melanesia and the derivative or secondary Negroid area of Australia.[768] The Negroid race belongs essentially to the long southern land pendants of the Eastern Hemisphere; and wherever it has bordered on the lighter northern stocks, it has drawn a typical boundary zone of mingled tints which never diverges far from the Equator, from the Atlantic sh.o.r.es of the Sudan to Pacific Fiji.[769] [See map page 105.]

The effort of the old ethnology, as represented by Blumenbach, to make a five-fold division of the races in agreement with the five continents was a mistake. To distinguish between the continents is one thing and to distinguish between the races is another. Neither bio-geography nor anthropo-geography can adopt the continents as geographical provinces, although floras, faunas and races the world over give evidence of partial or temporary restriction to a certain continent, whence they have overflowed to other lands. A ground-plan for the geographical cla.s.sification of races is to be found, as Tylor says, in the fact that they are not found scattered indiscriminately over the earth's surface, but that certain races belong to certain regions, in whose peculiar environment they have developed their type, and whence they have spread to other lands, undergoing modifications from race intermixture and successive changes of environment on the way.[770]

[Sidenote: Contrast of the northern and southern continents.]

From this general law of race movements it follows that certain groups of land-ma.s.ses, favored by location and large area, play a great imperial role, holding other lands as appanages. The Eastern Hemisphere, as we have seen, enjoys this advantage over the Western. Still more the Northern Hemisphere, blessed with an abundance of land and a predominant Temperate Zone location, is able to lord it over the Southern, so insular in its poverty of land. The history of the Northern Hemisphere is marked by far-reaching historical influences and wide control; that of the Southern, by detachment, aloofness and impotence, due to the small area and isolation of its land-ma.s.ses. A subordinate role is its fate. Australia will always follow in the train of Eurasia, whence alone it has derived its incentives and means of progress. Neither the southern half of Africa nor South America has ever in historical times struck out a road to advancement unaided by its northern neighbors.

Primitive South America developed the only independent civilization that ever blossomed in the Southern Hemisphere, but the Peruvian achievements in progress were inferior to those of Mexico and Central America.[771]

[Sidenote: Isolation of the southern continents.]

This subordination of the southern continents is partly due to the fact that they have only one side of contact or neighborhood with any other land, that is, on the north; yet even here the contact is not close. In Australia the medium of communication is a long bridge of islands; in America, a winding island chain and a mountainous isthmus; in Africa, a broad zone of desert dividing the Mediterranean or Eurasian from the tropical and Negroid part of the continent. Intercourse was not easy, and produced clear effects only in the case of Africa. Enlightenment filtering in here was sadly dimmed as it spread. Moreover it was delayed till the introduction from Asia of the horse and camel, which were not native to Africa, and which, as Ratzel points out, alone made possible the long journey across the Sahara. The opposite or peninsular sides, running out as great spurs from the compacter land-ma.s.ses of the north, look southward into vacant wastes of water, find no neighbors in those Antarctic seas. Owing to this unfavorable location on the edge of things, they were historically dead until four centuries ago, when oceanic navigation opened up the great sea route of the Southern Hemisphere, and for the first time included them in the world's circle of communication. But even when lifted by the ensuing Europeanizing process, they only emphasize the fundamental dependence of the Southern Hemisphere upon the superior geographical endowments of the Northern.

[Sidenote: Effect of continental structure upon historical development.]

The build of the land-ma.s.ses influences fundamentally the movements and hence the development of the races who inhabit them. A simple continental structure gives to those movements a few simple features and a wide monotonous distribution which checks differentiation. A manifold, complex build, varied in relief and ragged in contour, breaks up the moving streams of peoples, turns each branch into a different channel, lends it a distinctive character through isolation, finally brings it up in a _cul de sac_ formed by a peninsula or mountain-rimmed basin, where further movement is checked and the process of local individualization begins. Therefore great simplicity of continental build may result in historical poverty, as in the flat quadrangle of European Russia, the level plateau of Africa, and the smooth Atlantic slope of North America, with its neatly trimmed outline. Complexity, abounding in contrasted environments, tends to produce a varied wealth of historical development. Africa lies on the surface of the ocean, a huge torso of a continent, headless, memberless, inert. Here is no diversity of outward form, no contrast of zonal location, no fructifying variety of geographic conditions. Humanity has forgotten to grow in its stationary soil. Only where the Suez Isthmus formed an umbilical cord uniting ancient Egypt to the mother continent of Asia was Africa vitalized by the pulse of another life. European influences penetrated little beyond the northern coast.

Asia, on the other hand, radiating great peninsulas, festooned with islands, supporting the vast corrugations of its highlands and lowlands, its snow-capped mountains and steaming valleys, stretching from the Equator through all the zones to the ice-blocked sh.o.r.es of the Arctic, knowing drought and deluge, tundra waste and teeming jungle, has offered the manifold environment and segregated areas for individualized civilizations, which have produced such far-reaching historical results.

The same fact is true of Europe, and that in an intensified degree. Here a complex development of mountains and highlands built on diverse axes, peninsulas which comprise 27 per cent. and Islands which comprise nearly 8 per cent. of the total area,[772] vast thala.s.sic inlets cleaving the continent to the core, have provided an abundance of those naturally defined regions which serve as cradles of civilization and, reacting upon the continent as a whole, endow it with lasting historical significance.[773] Even Strabo saw this. He begins his description of the inhabited world with Europe, because, as he says, it has such a "polymorphous formation" and is the region most favorable to the mental and social enn.o.blement of man.[774]

[Sidenote: Structure of North and South America.]

In North and South America, great simplicity of continental build gave rise to a corresponding simplicity of native ethnic and cultural condition. There is only one marked contrast throughout the length of this double continent, that between its Atlantic and Pacific slopes. On the Atlantic side of the Cordilleras, a vast trough extends through both land-ma.s.ses from the Arctic Ocean to Patagonia; this has given to migration in each a longitudinal direction and therefore constantly tended to nullify the diversities arising from contrasted zonal conditions. On the Pacific side of North America, there has been an unmistakeable migration southward along the accessible coast from Alaska to the Columbia River, and down the great intermontane valleys of the western highlands from, the Great Basin to Honduras;[775] while South America shows the same meridional movement for 2,000 miles along the Pacific coast and longitudinal valleys of the Andes system. There was little encouragement to cut across the grain of the continents. The eastern range of the Cordilleras drew in general a dividing line between the eastern and western tribes.[776] Though Athapascans from the east overstepped it at a few points in North America, the Great Divide has served effectually to isolate the two groups from one another and to draw that line of linguistic cleavage which Major Powell has set down in Ms map of Indian linguistic stocks. Consequently, Americanists recognize a distinct resemblance among the members of the North Atlantic group of Indians, as among those of the South Atlantic group; but they note an equally distinct contrast between each of them and its corresponding Pacific group. Nor is this contrast superficial; it extends to physical traits, temperament and culture,[777] and appears in the use of the vigesimal system of enumeration in primitive Mexico, Central America, among the Tlingits of the Northwest coast and the Eskimo as also among the Chukches and Ainus of Asia, while in the Atlantic section of North America the decimal system, with one doubtful exception, was alone in use.[778]

[Sidenote: Cultural superiority of the Pacific slope Indians.]

To the anthropo-geographer, the significant fact is that all the higher phases of native civilization are confined to the Pacific slope group of Indians, which includes the Mexican and Isthmian tribes. From the elongated center of advanced culture stretching from the Bolivian highlands northward to the Anahuac Plateau, the same type shades off by easy transitions through northern Mexico and the Pueblo country, vanishes among the lower intrusive stocks of Oregon and California, only to reappear among the Haidas and Tlingits of British Columbia and Alaska, whose cultural achievements show affinity to those of the Mayas in Yucatan.[779] Dall found certain distinguishing customs or characteristics spread north and south along the western slope of the continent in a natural geographical line of migration. They included labretifery, tattooing the chin of adult women, certain uses of masks, a certain style of conventionalizing natural objects, the use of conventional signs as hieroglyphics, a peculiar facility in carving wood and stone, a similarity of angular designs on their pottery and basketry, and of artistic representations connected with their common religious or mythological ideas. Many singular forms of carvings and the method of superimposing figures of animals one upon another in their totem poles are found from Alaska to Panama, except in California. These distinguishing features of an incipient culture are found nowhere else in North America, even sporadically. Dall therefore concludes that "they have been impressed upon the American aboriginal world from without,"

and on the ground of affinities, attributes their origin to Oceanica.[780]

Cyrus Thomas, on the basis of the character and distribution of the archeological remains in North America, concurs in this opinion. He finds that these remains fall into two cla.s.ses, one east of the Rocky Mountain watershed and the other west. "When those of the Pacific slope as a whole are compared with those of the Atlantic slope, there is a dissimilarity which marks them as the products of different races or as the result of different race influences." He emphasizes the resemblance of the customs, arts and archeological remains of the west coast to those of the opposite sh.o.r.es and islands of the Pacific, and notes the lack of any resemblance to those of the Atlantic; and finally leans to the conclusion that the continent was peopled from two sources, one incoming stream distributing itself over the Atlantic slope, and the other over the Pacific, the two becoming gradually fused into a comparatively h.o.m.ogeneous race by long continental isolation. Yet these two sources may not necessarily include a trans-Atlantic origin for one of the contributing streams; ethnic evidence is against such a supposition, because the characteristics of the American race and of the archeological remains point exclusively to affinity with the people of the Pacific.[781] John Edward Payne also reaches the same conclusion, though on other grounds.[782]

[Sidenote: Lack of segregated districts.]

The one strong segregating feature in primitive America was the Cordilleras, which held east and west apart. In the natural pockets formed by the high intermontane valleys of the Andes and the Anahuac Plateau, and in the constricted isthmian region, the continent afforded a few secluded localities where civilization found favorable conditions of development. But in general, the paucity of large coast articulations, and the adverse polar or subpolar location of most of these, the situation of the large tropical islands along that barren Atlantic abyss, and the lack of a broken or varied relief, have prevented the Americas from developing numerous local centers of civilization, which might eventually have lifted the cultural status of the continents.[783]

[Sidenote: Coast articulations of continents.]

It is necessary to distinguish two general cla.s.ses of continental articulations; first, marginal dependences, like the fringe of European peninsulas and islands, resulting from a deeply serrated contour; and second, surface subdivisions of the interior, resulting from differences of relief or defined often by enclosing mountains or deserts, like the Tibetan Plateau, the Basin of Bohemia, the Po River trough, or the sand-rimmed valley of the Nile. The first cla.s.s is by far the more important, because of the intense historical activity which results from the vitalizing contact with the sea. But in considering coast articulations, anthropo-geography is led astray unless it discriminates between these on the basis of size and location. Without stopping to discuss the obvious results of a contrasted zonal location, such as that between Labrador and Yucatan, the Kola Peninsula and Spain, it is necessary to keep in mind always the effect of vicinal location. An outlying coastal dependency like Ireland has had its history impoverished by excessive isolation, in contrast to the richer development of England, Jutland, and Zealand in the same lat.i.tude, because these have profited from the closer neighborhood of other peripheral regions. So from ancient times, Greece has had a similar advantage over the Crimea, the Tunisian Peninsula of North Africa over Spain, the Cotentin Peninsula of France over Brittany, and Kent over Cornwall or Caithness in Great Britain.

[Sidenote: Importance of size in continental articulations.]

Articulations on a vast scale, like the southern peninsulas of Asia, produce quite different cultural and historical effects from small physical sub-divisions, like the fiord promontories and "skerries" of Norway and southern Alaska, or the finger peninsulas of the Peloponnesus. The significant difference lies in the degree of isolation which the two types yield. Large continental dependencies of the Asiatic cla.s.s resemble small continents in their power to segregate; while overgrown capes like ancient Attica and Argolis or the more bulky Peloponnesus have their exclusiveness tempered by the mediating power of the small marine inlets between them. Small articulations, by making a coast accessible, tend to counteract the excessive isolation of a large articulation. They themselves develop in their people only minor or inner differentiations, which serve to enrich the life of the island or peninsula as a whole, but do not invade its essential unity. The contrast in the history of h.e.l.las and the Peloponnesus was due largely to their separation from one another; yet neither was able to make of its people anything but Greeks. Wales and Cornwall show in English history the same contrast and the same underlying unity.

[Sidenote: Historical contrast of large and small peninsulas.]

In discussing continental articulations, therefore, it makes a great difference whether we draw our deductions from small projections of the coast, like Wales, the Peloponnesus, Brittany and the Crimea, whose areas range from 7442 to 10,023 square miles (19,082 to 25,700 square kilometers); or the four Mediterranean peninsulas, which range in size from the 58,110 square miles (149,000 square kilometers) of the Apennine Peninsula to the 197,600 square miles (506,-600 square kilometers) of Asia Minor and the 227,700 square miles (584,000 square kilometers) of the Iberian; or the vast continental alcoves of southern Asia, like Farther India with its 650,000 square miles (1,667,000 square kilometers), Hither India with 814,320 square miles (2,088,000 square kilometers) and Arabia with 1,064,700 square miles (2,730,000 square kilometers).[784] The fact that the large compound peninsula of western Europe which comprises Spain, Portugal, France, Jutland, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Italy and western Germany, and has its base in the stricture between the Adriatic and the Baltic, is about the size of peninsular India, suggests how profound may be the difference in geographic effects between large and small peripheral divisions. The three huge extremities which Asia thrusts forward into the Indian Ocean are geographical ent.i.ties, which in point of size and individualization rank just below the continents; and in relation to the solid ma.s.s of Central Asia, they have exhibited in many respects an aloofness and self-sufficiency, that have resulted in an historical divergence approximating that of the several continents. India, which has more productive territory than Australia and a population not much smaller than that of Europe, becomes to the administrators of its government "the Continent of India," as it is regularly termed in the Statistical Atlas published at Calcutta. Farther India has in the long-drawn pendant of Malacca a sub-peninsula half as large again as Italy. The Deccan has in Ceylon an insular dependency the size of Tasmania. The whole scale is continental. It appears again somewhat diminished, in the largest articulations of Europe, in Scandinavia, the British Isles, the Iberian and Balkan peninsulas. This continental scale stamps also the anthropo-geography of such large individualized fields. They are big enough for each to comprise one or even several nations, and isolated enough to keep their historical processes for long periods at a time to a certain extent detached from those of their respective continents.

[Sidenote: Peninsular conditions most favorable to historical development.]

The most favorable conditions for historical development obtain where the two cla.s.ses of marginal articulation are combined, and where they occur in groups, as we find them in the Mediterranean and the North Sea-Baltic basin. Here the smaller indentations multiply contact with the sea, and provide the harbors, bays and breakwaters of capes and promontories which make the coast accessible. The larger articulations, by their close grouping, break up the sea into the minor thala.s.sic basins which encourage navigation, and thus insure the exchange of their respective cultural achievements. In other words, such conditions present the pre-eminent advantages of vicinal location around an enclosed sea.

The enormous articulations of southern Asia suffer from their paucity of small indentations, all the more because of their vast size and sub-tropical location. The Grecian type of peninsula, with its broken sh.o.r.eline, finds here its large-scale h.o.m.ologue only in Farther India, to which the Sunda Islands have played in history the part of a gigantic Cyclades. The European type of articulation is found only about the Yellow-j.a.pan Sea, where the island of Hondo and the peninsulas of Shangtung and Korea reproduce approximately the proportions of Great Britain, Jutland and Italy respectively. Arabia and India, like the angular shoulder of Africa which protrudes into the Indian Ocean, measure an imposing length of coastline, but this length shrinks in comparison with the vast area of the peninsulas. The contour of a peninsula is like the surface of the brain: in both it is convolutions that count. Southern Asia has had lobes enough but too few convolutions.

For this reason, the northern Indian Ocean, despite its exceptional location as the eastward extension of the Mediterranean route to the Orient, found its development constantly arrested till the advent of European navigators.

[Sidenote: Length of coastline.]

Although the peripheral articulations of a continent differ anthropo-geographically according to their size, their zonal and vicinal location, yet large and small, arctic and tropical, are grouped indiscriminately together in the figures that state the length of coastlines. For this reason, statistics of continental coastlines have little value. For instance, the fact that Eurasia has 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers) and North America 46,500 miles (75,000 kilometers) of contact with the ocean is not illuminating; these figures do not reveal the fact that the former has its greatest coastal length on its tropical and sub-tropical side, while the latter continent has wasted inlets and islands innumerable in the long, bleak stretch from Newfoundland poleward around to Bering Sea.