Comparative geography

by Carl Ritter

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.