eir people as completely as islands. It is
hard to say whether the Pyrenean peninsula or Sicily, Scandinavia or
Great Britain, has held itself more aloof from the political history of
remaining Europe; whether Korea is not more entitled to its name of the
Hermit Kingdom than island Japan could ever be; whether the Peloponnesus
or Euboea was more intimately associated with the radiant life of
ancient Hellas. These questions lead to another, namely, whether a high
mountain wall like the Pyrenees, or a narrow strait like that of Messina
is the more effective geographical boundary.

[Sidenote: Continental base a zone of transition.]

Peninsulas not infrequently gain in breadth as they approach the
continent; here they tend to abate their distinctive character as lobes
of the mainland, together with the ethnic and historical marks of
isolation. Here they form a doubtful boundary zone of mingled
continental and peninsular development. Such peninsulas fall naturally,
therefore, into a continental and a peninsular section, and reveal this
segmentation in the differentiated history of the two portions. That
great military geographer Napoleon distinguished the Italy of the Po
basin as _Italie continentale_, and the Apennine section as
_Presqu'ile_. Not only is the former broader, but, expanding like a tree
trunk near the ground, it sends its roots well back into the massive
interior of the continent; it is dominated more by the Alps than by the
Apennines; it contains a lowland and a river of continental proportions,
for which there is no space on the long, narrow spur of southern Italy.
If its geographical character approximates that of the mainland, so does
its ethnic and historical. The Po basin is a well defined area of race
characterization, in which influences have made for intermixture. South
of the crest of the Apennines the Italian language in its purity begins,
in contrast to the Gallo-Italian of the north. This mountain ridge has
also held apart the dark, short dolichocephalic stock of the
Mediterranean race from the fairer, taller, broad-headed Celts, who have
moved down into the Po basin from the Alps, and the Germans and
Illyrians who have entered it from the northeast.[786] Northern Italy is
therefore allied ethnically, as it has often been united politically, to
the neighboring countries abutting upon the Alps, so that it has
experienced only in a partial degree that detachment which has stamped
the history of the