he 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 classes 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 thalassic
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
shoreline, finds here its large-scale homologue 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-Japan 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,