The Superficial Dimensions and Articulation of the Continents.
We proceed from the more simple to the more complex forms, and begin, therefore, with Africa, which has the most uniform contour of all the continents.
Africa, the true South of the earth, is distinguished from all the other great divisions of the earth by its almost insular form and its unbroken outline. It is separated from Asia merely by the Isthmus of Suez, scarcely 70 miles wide. But it is of altogether more virgin a nature than Asia, and has been encroached upon by scarcely any foreign influence. Africa is a unit in itself; the most exclusive of continents, its periphery is almost a perfect ellipse. With the exception of the single Gulf of Guinea on the west side, the continent is a true oval. Its linear dimensions are almost equal in length and breadth. It extends about 35° on each side of the equator, and is about 70° of longitude in width. The length and breadth are both about 5000 miles.
The periphery of its coast is the most simple and unbroken in the world. A single glance at the map is sufficient to show this. Nowhere are there the deep arms of the sea and the sinuous shores of other continents. The Gulf of Guinea is all. The entire length of its coast-line is but 16,000 or 17,000 miles, not much more than the circumference of a circle whose diameter is 5000 miles. Its coast-line, proportioned to its area, being the shortest on the globe, gives Africa the least contact with the ocean of all the continents, and subjects it to the least amount of oceanic influences.
Thus all individualization of the various phases of life—vegetable, animal, and human—is denied to this continent, whose extremities, on account of the equality of its dimensions, lie equally far removed from the central point. The similar size and configuration of the two lobes north and south of the equator create no strong contrasts, and give rise merely to tropical and sub-tropical conditions. All the phenomena of this great division, the real South of the earth, in which all the culminations of the tropical world are found, are therefore more uniform than in any other part of the world. The characteristics of race remain in their primitive condition, and have made no progress with the lapse of time: this region seems to be kept as the refuge of a yet undeveloped future. Only general, never individual and special development in the world of plants, animals, nor man, appear upon this stationary soil; the palm, the camel, and their natural companions appear in equal numbers in the northern, southern, eastern, and western extremities; the negro is almost exclusively the only inhabitant of the continent. There is no striking individuality apparent in the culture, stature, organization, nor popular characteristics of its various parts. Even a common foundation language gives rise to mere dialectical differences. A mere sporadic coast-culture gives rise to mere exceptions here and there, and these are generally the result, not of inward progress, but of imported foreign conditions.
Asia, the Orient, is wholly unlike Africa. On three sides it is entirely sea-girt—the south, the east, and the north; on the west only partly, about 1400 miles. On the west, too, it is connected with Africa, but not in a way to insure any necessary relations between the two continents. But with Europe it stands in the most intimate connection, forming a single body with it, of which Europe is really but a great western peninsula. Europe, the Occident of the Old World, is therefore for less widely severed from its Orient than from its real South or Africa. The history of Asia and that of Europe are woven with a twisted strand; they form a single thread, and their populations are far more closely connected in physical and spiritual organizations than are the people of Asia and Africa.
Asia, instead of being a simple oval, approaches the trapezoidal form, and consequently enters into a new set of relations resulting from its configuration. With the deeply-penetrating gulfs and bays and seas which sink into its trunk, the prominent peninsulas are in direct correspondence, marking in an especial manner the eastern and southern coast, but not lacking on the northern and western. These peninsulas are to be regarded as the limbs of a great central continental trunk. The eastern ones are the Tchooktchee foreland, the peninsulas of Kamtchatka and Corea, and the Chinese foreland. The southern ones are the peninsula of Farther India, including Tonquin, Siam, Malacca, and Birmah; the peninsulas of Hindostan, or Deccan and Arabia. The western limb is the peninsula of Asia Minor or Australia. The northeast of Asia is less articulated; still it has a number of arms pointing southward—the Sea of Kara, the Gulf of Obi and Yenisei, for example. The whole Siberian coast even is far more serrated than that of Africa, where it is an almost unbroken line.
Still, there remains in the interior of Asia a broad and long mass of the continent, which is penetrated by no seas. It is to be regarded as the real trunk, and preponderates immensely over the area of all the confined projections. Asia is, therefore, a trunk with profuse richness of articulation. Africa is a trunk without articulation: a mere compact continental mass.
The immense influence which so complex a coast form has upon all physical phenomena and on all organic life is evident. Far greater results must come from the mutual influence of sea and land than from unbroken land; far more numerous influences upon the climate, and upon plants, animals, and man. Even the changing geological structure of the coast-line must have an effect, when blending with all these other influences, greater than it would have in the interior. Every part of the coast has become different from every other part, with a different hydrographic and climatic character; and the great increase of races of men, and species of plants and animals, was a natural result. While Africa remained limited in all its relations, and destitute of any richness of variety, Asia has always enjoyed an amazing fertility of resources. Instead of the three races or species of man found in Africa—Negro, Berber, and Caffre—many are met in Asia, all different, Tchooktchees, Kamtchadales, Coreans, Chinese, Malays, Bermese, Hindoos, Afghans, Persians, Arabs, and Armenians. And these belong merely to the coast-line.
But the contrast of the great central region to the broken coast is so great and complete, that the advanced culture along the sea-line has not penetrated far into the interior, nor changed the habits of the nomadic tribes which fill Central Asia, and whose representatives we have in the Mongolians, Toorkomans, Kirgheez, Bukharians, Calmucks, etc. Still less could it reach the distant north, to which, with all the splendor which we associate with everything oriental, the civilization of the southern coasts is utterly wanting. To this element of superficial size, the immense and almost insuperable obstacles which Nature has placed so thickly in Asia may be added, and also the immense variety of natural productions which climates so different as those of the different parts of the continent exhibit. Extending from the equator to the north frigid zone, Asia affords a home for the most diversified kinds of plants and animals, and shows, too, hardly less variety in its eastern and western extremes than in its northern and southern. The characteristics of the Chinese flora and fauna are very widely different from those of Hither Asia. In the east, we have the sago-tree and the tiger; in the west, the date-palm and the lion. The north gives us moss, the coniferæ, and the reindeer, in contrast with the bread-fruit tree, the sugar-cane, the broad-leaved banana, the elephant, rhinoceros, tapir, and monkey of the south.
The inexhaustibleness of the Asiatic continent is not more visible in all this wealth of productivity than in the abundance as well as the variety of human life. Though Asia has been the mother of the world, and has sent out so many and so eminent races, it has not been to the depletion of the parent country. In race, figure, color, manner of life, nationality, religion, political and social bonds of union, forms of government, culture, language, it is so richly diversified, that no continent, viewed historically, can be compared to it. Asia seems to have been created to send forth its fruitful scions of life to all the other great divisions of the earth.
Europe, the Occident. The smallest of the three continents of the Old World, its superficial contents are the largest in proportion to the amount of coast-line. Only on the east side has it a land frontier; and there it has its widest extent from north to south. Like Asia, it is bordered on three sides by the ocean. Asia seems like a mighty trunk, at whose western extremity the broken and serrated Occident is found, advancing in breadth from north to south, but articulating into arms of various size from east to west, till it loses itself in the peninsulas of the Atlantic coast. The nearer to Asia, the broader is Europe, and the more akin to the Asiatic character; the farther from it, the more minute become its subdivisions, and the more varied its character.
Taken in a general way, the proportion of the truly continental part of Europe to the maritime districts is much less than is the case in Asia. Its contrast with Africa is, of course, yet more striking.
Europe begins at the east, at the foot of the Ural and Caucasus, and at the steppes of West Asia. It does not take, as Asia and Africa do, (which are alike in this,) a trapezoidal or oval form, but in its linear dimensions there is a great difference between its length and breadth. By the diminution of its width, as we go westward, and by the increase of its articulation, the number of its internal relations increases toward the Atlantic. A great falling off in the oriental character which has largely encroached upon Russia, and a constant increase of an independent spirit, is the sure result of natural conditions, and is experienced in all life and in things material as well as intellectual and moral. The configuration here wins a palpable victory over mere quantity, and the exceedingly varied coast gives to all European institutions their distinctive character.
Beginning with a breadth of about 1400 miles at the east, the continent gradually diminishes in width to 1000, 500, and even to 250 miles. Its first narrowing is visible between the Gulf of Riga and the Bay of Odessa; the next is between the Baltic and the Gulf of Trieste; the next, between the Zuider-Zee and the Gulf of Genoa; the next, between the English Channel at Calais and the Gulf of Lyons; and the last, between Bayonne and Perpignan.
With almost three times as great a length as breadth, Europe extends for a distance of over 300 miles from the southern part of the Ural chain and from the Caucasus to the extremities of the bold coast of Spain and Portugal, Capes Finistère and St. Vincent. In this way the continent assumes very nearly the form of a right-angled triangle, the right angle lying at the Caspian, the base extending westward to Cape Finistère, the perpendicular running northward along the Ural Mountains to the Vaigats Straits, and the hypothenuse connecting the two extremities. The area embraced within this triangle would be not far from 2,200,000 square miles. Such a triangle, however, is not exact,—it is but an approximation to mathematical precision; but it is clearly enough marked to be traced upon our map, or, as a spherical triangle, upon our globes. All geographical forms have only a more or less remote approach to mathematical exactness, but enough to aid us very much in representing them and showing their relations.
Almost all the greater and really important extremities of the continent lie outside of the triangle above indicated; and this method of treatment only serves to call attention to the great central mass, which would otherwise be in danger of being overlooked, in view of the immense value and influence of the countries on the coast and beyond the triangular line of demarkation. It needs but a glance to see how the projecting shores have marred all the theoretical precision of such a line.
The coast-line shows itself directly subject to almost boundless diversity. Toward the west the independence of each peninsula increases, the more evidently and prominently according to its distance from Asia. Not articulated on two sides alone, like Asia, the east and south, but on all three of its sides exposed to the ocean, the broken coast-line is universal in Europe,—even toward the colder north, where its peninsulas and adjacent islands almost inclose two seas, the North and the Baltic. The advantage which this gives to Europe over Asia in respect to the development of its more northern regions, is very great and evident.
We will enumerate the leading peninsulas of Europe:
Kola, on the White Sea, between Lake Enara, the Varanger Fiord, and the Bay of Kandalaska, pointing westward.
Scandinavia, embracing Norway and Sweden, with an area of more than 350,000 square miles, a tenth of all Europe, connected with the main land by the isthmus of Finland, but otherwise girded in a great bow by the Atlantic, the North Sea, the Baltic, and the Gulf of Bothnia, and pointing southward.
Jutland or Denmark, beginning at the Elbe and the Trave and running north, embracing about ¹⁄₁₆₀ of Europe, between the North Sea and the Baltic, low and flat.
The subdivided peninsula of Holland, between the Rhine and the Ems, a flat plain, looking to the north.
The peninsula of Normandy and Brittany, between the Seine and the Loire, a rocky granite formation, jutting out into the Atlantic and faced by bold precipices.
Spain and Portugal, embracing about 220,000 square miles, about ¹⁄₁₆ of Europe, rhomboidal in shape, almost insular in position, turned southwesterly, its surface a series of constantly rising terraces.
Italy, embracing ¹⁄₃₅ of Europe, between the Alps and Sicily, and traversed by a mountain range.
Turkey and Greece, or summing it more strictly under one word, the Grecian peninsula, between the Danube and the Morea, a most minutely divided region of plateaus and mountain chains; in truth, the most articulated peninsula in the world, and embracing ¹⁄₁₅ of Europe.
The Crimea, a rhomboidal peninsula, turned to the south—its northern half a flat steppe, its southern a high plateau—the only peninsula of southeastern Europe projecting into the Black Sea.
Every one of these peninsulas differs from every other in shape; every one has a distinct individuality imposed upon it. Within the smallest compass on earth, relatively speaking, there is found around Europe the very largest variety in its articulations. The Grecian peninsula finds its only superior on the northwest of Europe, in the coast of insulated England.
By means of this characteristic separation of so many more or less individualized parts of the continent through the agency of arms of the sea, the coast-line of Europe has been prolonged to an extraordinary length. The areas of the three continents of the Old World are as follows in round numbers: Europe, 3,500,000 square miles; Africa, 11,800,000 square miles; and Asia, 19,300,000 square miles. Although the superficial contents of Africa are three times that of Europe, the length of the coast-line is so far from being equal, that that of Europe is much the greater, being 25,400 miles. The Asiatic coast-line is about one-third longer still, 32,900 miles; but, as the area of Asia is more than five times that of Europe, a great part of the Asiatic coast-line, that on the north, from Nova Zembla to Kamtchatka, must be considered as unimportant in relation to the development of the resources of Asia.
Europe is, therefore, that continent of the Old World which has relatively, and I might almost say absolutely, received the largest coast-line of any, encompassing a distance of 25,400 miles. That is to say, the coast-line of Europe, extended in a straight line, would pass around the globe and coincide with the equator. To this admirable feature may be added its favorable relation in situation to the various oceanic and wind currents, and its magnificent supply of harbors, the result of its articulated coast, all of which have made Europe the mistress of the seas. Within modern times, the island group of Great Britain and Ireland, the richest in harbors, is to the continent what, in ancient times, the Greek peninsula was, with its wealth of inlets, which gave it the command of the Mediterranean. A rich gift this has been to the smallest of the continents of the Old World, to equalize its condition with others. The providential wisdom which “sets one thing over against another,” is clearly manifest in this. Europe, though in the center of the great continental land-mass, becomes the most maritime of all, the most approachable of all; or, in other words, its countries and its peoples are the most closely connected with the sea of all in the Old World, because they stand in the most unbroken contact with it.
Thus we discover the characteristic type which was impressed on Europe from the very first. Its relation to the world could not be understood by the ancients, as to them half of the earth lay in unbroken darkness. Only by experience, only by the advance of civilization, and by comparison with all the other continents, could this insight be gained. Doubtless many similar relations yet remain unknown and unsuspected, which will some day come to the light. The earth, as a planet, is only a grain of seed-corn sown by the Creator, enriched with powers of unfolding to infinite perfection in the unexplored future. What we now perceive are only the elementary principles—our knowledge only a motley; but even this is not without its uses, and is worthy of patient mastery.
Europe, so broken in its coast, and rifted far toward its center by arms of the sea, has been affected in all its civil and social history to a very great extent. This is the first natural condition of its progress, the true physical basis of the fact that, upon the most limited of the continents, the greatest historical diversity has sprung up. It is not absolute size, but relative, which gives the pre-eminence; not the raw material, the mere mass, but its articulation, its form, which here, as everywhere, gives mind the mastery over matter. As in the animal and vegetable world there is, amid all the diversity of forms, a constant advance from a lower to a higher plane, manifesting itself in the complexity of the organs; so, in the so-called unorganized side of nature, we see the same characteristic as soon as we have grasped the whole mutual system of adaptations. The most general study of the differences between the continents exhibits an analogous harmony and correlation. As the simple, broad-leaved, solid cactus, or bunch-trunked euphorbia, (peculiar to the dry sand steppes of America and Africa,) appear branchless and without foliage,—the lower and undeveloped forms of vegetation,—so, too, the regions to which they are indigenous are the unbroken plains of North America, or the plateaus of still less broken Africa.
The broken coast-line of Asia and Europe is analogous to that higher development which we find in the palm and in the full, round crown of the European fruit-tree, which bears blossoms and fruit as far as the very extremities of the branches. In the animal organization, the articulation of Europe is to be compared with the complex hand of man, so far superior to the prehensile organs of lower creatures, that Buffon saw in that feature alone the manifestation of man’s place among the animal kingdom.
If we look out over the earth, we see that the limbs of the continents, so to speak, the coasts, the peninsulas, and the adjacent islands, are the most favored places of all for civilization to find its true home upon. With the degree of diversity in the structure of a country, the value of its organisms advances. In this respect, Europe may be considered as the branches and foliage of a great tree, whose trunk and root are to be traced to Central Asia, Africa being a stunted side-shoot. Or, to compare the continents to a still higher class of forms, Europe may be called the Face of the Old World, out of which the soul of humanity could look more clearly into the great and promising future.
We repeat it—it is not absolute size, it is not the mass nor the weight of the material, it is the form, in its greater complexity, which determines the fate of nations and decrees the advancement of man. This gift, in its full measure, has been conferred on Europe. In its complex articulation lies still another characteristic of Europe in contradistinction to the other continents.
If in Africa the coast offers no contrast to the interior, and both remain on the same low plane of development, Asia, on the contrary, displays a perfect antagonism between its central regions and its sea-board. The territory of the Mongolians, the Tartars, and Toorkomans has always remained at the very lowest stage of civilization. The sea-board, on the other hand, has witnessed the growth of a number of isolated nations, who, without the help of mutual dependence, have arrived at a considerably high degree of culture—the Chinese, Malays, Hindoos, Persians, Arabians, Syrians, and Armenians. But their influence could not penetrate to the compact interior, to transform its nature, nor modify its nationalities. Individual progress in nations, however high it may be carried, can never contribute much toward any real penetration of the interior of so vast a region as Central Asia.
Europe shows in its construction and the relations to which it gives rise characteristics exactly opposite. Being far less massive, the proportion of its extremities to the undeveloped interior is much less great than in Asia. From this, it results that the central part does not prove a hinderance to civilization, viewed physically, hydrographically, or historically; it nowhere serves as a barrier, but rather as a mediator, and a means of communication between the extremities. This has given Europe a character exactly opposite to that of Asia: its North and its South are united, its East and its West; they are not like antagonistic poles, but extend to each other friendly hands. In Africa, the greater part of the interior lies absolutely without contact with and relations to the coast. In Asia, there is a much larger portion of the interior equally without connection with the sea-board, and remaining up to this day in its primitive barbarism.
Symmetry of form gains in Europe a clear advantage over mere mass. Europe, the smallest of the continents, was destined to gain precedence over all the rest, Asia included. As Asia, lying within all the zones, colossal in size, and most plentifully enriched with the gifts of nature, was fitted to be the nursery of supply for all other parts of the world without impoverishing itself; so Europe, limited in size and confined to the temperate zone, but most complex in its subdivision, having a great diversity in its ocean inlets, as well as in its hills, valleys, plateaus, and mountains, yet, without great extremes, has been especially fitted for the reception of stranger races, and for the development of their energies and the advance of their culture. The symmetry and harmony of Europe have constituted the true home of all varieties of national character, and have adapted it to their mutual action, and to the transfer of their distinctive character to one another.
Throughout the entire center of Europe there is an intimate connection with the sea-coast and with the extremities, with the least possible disadvantages. This is accomplished by those sinuous river-courses whose analogies are to be found nowhere in the adjacent continents. The very broadest part of Russia even is intersected with large navigable rivers; and the west and center of Europe are not less richly supplied with these lines of communication, whose starting-points lie often close together, as in the case of the Danube, the Rhine, the Po, and the Rhone. How different is this from the hydrographical system of Central Asia, where the sources of the eastern rivers lie thousands of miles removed from those of the western rivers, and where the rivers of the north are separated by almost as great distances from those of the south!
To what nature has given to Europe man has largely added, seeking by means of canals and railways to make the whole continent subject to him and auxiliary to his needs. In this way the interior districts have appropriated to themselves the advantages of the sea-coast, and the distance which it has placed between itself and Asia and Africa has only been increased. Nature first gave Europe its vantage-ground, and man has gone on from that point and doubled the gifts of nature.
Great peninsulas stretch away into both the great inland seas of Europe—that of the North and that of the South; the Danish and Scandinavian peninsulas into the complex, and yet, physically speaking, single body of water, embracing the North Sea, Baltic, and Gulf of Bothnia; Spain, Italy, and the Grecian peninsula extending southward into the Mediterranean. In the latter there is the greatest contrast between the deeply-indented northern shore and the bare, sandy coast of the African side. In just as great contrast is the uniformly unbroken sea-line of northern Siberia, compared with the articulated shore of northern Russia. How entirely different would the development of northern Asia have been, if a Siberian inland sea had penetrated to the very foot of the Altai, as the seas of northern Europe have pierced to the center of the continent! And had the shallow Syrtis cleft northern Africa as far as Lake Tchad, as the Adriatic has done on the opposite coast, Central Africa would not now be a terra incognita.
The northern as well as the southern extremities of Europe, so far as they are projected into inland seas, have received an equal size and equal natural advantages, each of its own kind, so that, conditioned by its own peculiarities, its population have helped it to attain its rightful place, and an individuality independent of continental influences. The abundant resources which each of these extremities enjoys have insured it, in a physical as well as historical view, an independence which has reacted favorably upon the whole continent. What a debt does not Europe owe to the Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Dutch, Danes, Scandinavians! How entirely different would the whole development of the shores of Europe have been, had they been bold, inaccessible rocks, an unbroken line of coast, like Uralaska, or the smaller Asiatic peninsulas of Kamtchatka and Malacca! And where would the accomplished European stand to-day, in comparison with his black neighbor on the south, were it not for the articulated coast-line of the continent which gives him his home?
And still there remains, out of the inexhaustible richness of nature, one leading feature to be taken into account. To estimate it properly, we must pay attention briefly to the islands of the three continents of the Old World.