quantities,
but like organs of one body stand in close reciprocal activity, and can
be understood only in the light of their persistent mutual relations.
The division of the area of a land by the length of its coastline yields
a quotient which to the anthropo-geographer is not a dry figure, but an
index to the possible relations between seaboard and interior. A
comparison of some of these ratios will illustrate this fact.

Germany's shoreline, traced in contour without including details,
measures 787 miles; this is just one-fifth that of Italy and two-fifths
that of France, so that it is short. But since Germany's area is nearly
twice Italy's and a little larger than that of France, it has 267 square
miles of territory for every mile of coast, while Italy has only 28
square miles, and France 106. Germany has towns that are 434 miles from
the nearest seaboard, but in Italy the most inland point is only 148
miles from the Mediterranean.[441] If we turn now to the United States
and adopt Mendenhall's estimate of its general or contour coastline as
5,705 miles, we find that our country has 530 square miles of area
dependent for its outlet upon each mile of seaboard. This means that our
coast has a heavy task imposed upon it, and that its commercial and
political importance is correspondingly enhanced; that the extension of
our Gulf of Mexico littoral by the purchase of Florida and the
annexation of Texas were measures of self-preservation, and that the
unbroken contour and mountain-walled face of our Pacific littoral is a
serious national handicap.

[Sidenote: Criticism of this formula.]

But this method is open to the legitimate and fundamental criticism
that, starting from the conception of a coast as a mere line instead of
a zone, it ignores all those features which belong to every littoral as
a strip of the earth's surface--location, geologic structure, relief,
area, accessibility to the sea in front and to the land behind, all
which vary from one part of the world's seaboard to another, and serve
to differentiate the human history of every littoral. Moreover, of all
parts of the earth's surface, the coast as the hem of the sea and land,
combining the characters of each, is most complex. It is the coast as a
human habitat that primarily concerns anthropo-geography. A careful
analysis of the multifarious influences modifying one another in this
mingled environment of land and water reveals an intricate interplay of
g