Apennine section.

[Sidenote: Historical contrast between base and extremity.]

The Balkan Peninsula tells much the same story of contrasted geographic
conditions and development in its continental and peninsular sections.
Greece proper, in ancient as in modern times, reached its northern
confines where the peninsula suddenly widens its base through Macedonia
and Thrace. In this narrow southern section to-day, especially in
isolated Peloponnesus, Attica, and the high-walled garden of Thessaly,
are found people of the pure, long-headed, Hellenic type, and here the
Greek language prevails.[787] But that broad and alien north, long
excluded from the Amphictyonic Council and a stranger to Aegean culture
in classical times, is occupied to-day by a congeries of Slavs, who form
a southwestern spur of the Slav stock covering eastern Europe. Its
political history shows how often it has been made a Danubian or
continental state, by Alexander of Macedon, by the Romans, Bulgarians,
and Ottoman Turks,[788] as it may be some day by Russia; and also how
often its large and compact form has enabled it to dominate the tapering
peninsular section to the south.

In the same way, the vast Ganges and Indus basins, which constitute the
continental portion of India, have received various Tibetan, Scythian,
Aryan, Pathan, and Mongol-Tartar ingredients from Central Asia; and by
reason of the dense populations supported by these fruitful river
plains, it has been able to dominate politically, religiously and
culturally the protruding triangle of the Deccan. [See maps pages 8 and
102.] The continental side of Arabia, the Mesopotamian valley which ties
the peninsula to the highlands of Persia and Armenia, has received into
its Semitic stock constant infiltrations of Turanian and Aryan peoples
from the core of Asia. This process has been going on from the ancient
Elamite and Persian conquests of Mesopotamia down to the Ottoman
invasion and the present periodic visits of Kurdish shepherds to the
pastures of the upper Tigris.[789] Here we have the same contrast of
geographic conditions as in Italy and India, a wide, populous alluvial
plain occupying the continental section of the peninsula, and a less
attractive highland or mountainous region in the outlying spur of land.

[Sidenote: Continental base a scene of invasion and war.]

These continental sections of peninsulas become therefore strongly
marked as areas of ethnic characterization and di