onism between
themselves and their Carian, Phoenician and Persian enemies across the
Aegean; the idea had therefore a political origin, and was formed
without knowledge of that vast stretch of plains between the Black Sea
and the Arctic Ocean, where Asia's climate and races lap over into
Europe, and where to-day we find the Muscovite Empire, in point of
geographic conditions, its underlying ethnic stock and form of
government, as much Asiatic as European. The real or western Europe,
which the Roman Empire gradually added to the narrow Europe of the
Greeks, and which is strikingly contrasted to Asia in point of size,
relief, contour, climate and races, only served to maintain the
distinction between the two continents in men's minds. But from a
geographical standpoint the distinction is an error. It has confused the
interpretation of the history of the Greeks and the development of the
Russians. It has brought disorder into the question of the European or
Asiatic origin of the Aryan linguistic family, which the
anthropo-geographer would assign to the single continent of Eurasia. The
independent development that falls to the lot of great world islands
like the Americas and Australia is impossible in a peninsular continent
like Europe, large as it is.

[Sidenote: Independence of location versus independence of size.]

The independence of a land-mass is based not alone on size: there is
also an independence of location. This, owing to the spherical form of
the earth, tends to be neutralized by the independence based upon large
area. The larger a land-mass is, the nearer it approaches to others.
Eurasia, the largest of all the continents, comes into close proximity
and therefore close relations with Africa, North America, and even
Australia; whereas Australia is at once the smallest and the most
isolated of the continents. The remote oceanic islands of the Atlantic
Ocean, measuring only a few square miles in area, have a location so
independent of other inhabited lands, that before the period of the
great discoveries they had never appeared on the horizon of man.

[Sidenote: The case of Asia.]

Asia's size and central location to the other continents were formerly
taken as an argument for its correspondingly significant position in the
creation and history of man. Its central location is reflected in the
hypothesis of the Asiatic origin of the Indo-European linguistic group
of peoples; and though the theory has been just