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.

[Sidenote: The continental base of the peninsulas.]

Peninsulas are accessible from the sea according to the configuration of
their coasts, but from their hinterland, according to the length and
nature of their connection with the same. This determines the degree of
their isolation from the land-mass. If they hang from the continent by a
frayed string, as does the Peloponnesus, Crimea, Malacca, Indian
Gutjerat, and Nova Scotia, they are segregated from the life of the
mainland almost as completely as if they were islands. The same effects
follow where the base of a peninsula is defined by a high mountain
barrier, as in all the Mediterranean peninsulas, in the two Indias, and
in Korea; or by a desert like that which scantily links Arabia to Egypt,
Syria and Mesopotamia; or by a blur of swamps and lakes such as half
detaches Scandinavia, Courland, Estland and Finland from Russia.

Held to their continents by bonds that often fail to bind, subjected by
their outward-facing peripheral location to every centrifugal force,
feeling only slightly the pull of the great central mass behind,
peninsulas are often further detached economically and historically by
their own contrasted local conditions. A sharp transition in geological
formation and therefore in soil, a difference of climate, rainfall,
drainage system, of flora or fauna, serve greatly to emphasize the lack
of community of interests with the continental interior, and therefore
produce an inevitable diversity of historical development.[785] Hence,
many peninsulas insulate th