r Mongolian migration from continental Asia to the Japan islands, and
for the passage thither of Chinese culture, whether intellectual,
esthetic, industrial or religious.[799] It has been the one country
conspicuous in the foreign history of Japan. Conquered by the island
empire in 1592, it paid tribute for nearly three centuries and yielded
to its foreign master the southeastern port of Fusan, the Calais of
Korea.[800] Since the treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 made it subject to
Japan, it has become the avenue of Japanese expansion to the mainland
and the unwilling recipient of the modern civilization thrust upon it by
these English of the East. In like manner the Pyrenean peninsula has
always been the intermediary between Europe and northwest Africa. Its
population, as well as its flora and fauna, group with those of the
southern continent. It has served as transit land between north and
south for the Carthaginians, Vandals and Saracens; and in modern times
it has maintained its character as a link by the Portuguese occupation
of the Tangiers peninsula in the fifteenth century,[801] and the Spanish
possession of Ceuta and various other points along the Moroccan coast
from the year 709 A.D. to the present.[802]

[Sidenote: Peninsulas of intercontinental location.]

This role of intermediary is inevitably thrust upon all peninsulas
which, like Spain, Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Arabia, Farther India,
Malacca, Chukchian Siberia, and Alaska, occupy an intercontinental
location. Arabia especially in its climate, flora, races and history
shows the haul and pull now of Asia, now of Africa. From it Asiatic
influences have spread over Africa to Morocco and the Niger River on the
west, and to Zanzibar on the south, permeated Abyssinia, and penetrated
to the great Equatorial Lakes, whether in the form of that Mecca-born
worship of Allah, or the creeping caravans and slave-gangs of Arab
trader. Of all such intercontinental peninsulas, Florida alone seems to
have had no role as an intermediary. Its native ethnic affinities were
wholly with its own continent. It has given nothing to South America and
received nothing thence. The northward expansion of Arawak and Carib
tribes from Venezuela in historic times ceased at Cuba and Hayti. The
Straits drew a dividing line. Local conditions in Florida itself
probably furnish the explanation of this anomaly. Extensive swamps made
the central and southern portion of the peninsula inhospitable to