Note 767 — Chapter XII · —Continents And Their Peninsulas

Moreover, primitive America resembled Oceanica and northern Asia in its ignorance of iron, in its Stone Age civilization, and its retarded social and political development. Such affinities as it shows were predominantly Pacific or trans-Pacific.767 On its Atlantic side, it stood out in striking contrast to the contemporaneous civilizations and races in Europe and Africa; this was its unneighbored shore, lying on the eastern margin of that broad zone of habitation which stretched hence westward on and on around the world, to the outermost capes of Europe and Africa. The Atlantic abyss formed the single gap in this encircling belt of population, to which Columbus at last affixed the clasp. The Atlantic face of the Americas formed therefore the drowsy unstirred Orient of the inhabited world, which westward developed growing activity—dreaming a civilization in Mexico and Peru, roused to artistic and maritime achievement in Oceanica and the Malay Archipelago, to permanent state-making and real cultural development in Asia, and attaining the highest civilization at last in western Europe. There was the sunset margin of the inhabited world, the area of achievement, the adult Occident, facing across the dividing ocean that infant Orient beyond. Here the Old World, the full-grown world, had accumulated in Columbus' time the matured forces of a hemisphere; it was searching for some outlet across the shoreless distances of the Atlantic, waiting for some call from its voiceless beyond.