Note 772 — Chapter XII · —Continents And Their Peninsulas

Asia, on the other hand, radiating great peninsulas, festooned with islands, supporting the vast corrugations of its highlands and lowlands, its snow-capped mountains and steaming valleys, stretching from the Equator through all the zones to the ice-blocked shores of the Arctic, knowing drought and deluge, tundra waste and teeming jungle, has offered the manifold environment and segregated areas for individualized civilizations, which have produced such far-reaching historical results. The same fact is true of Europe, and that in an intensified degree. Here a complex development of mountains and highlands built on diverse axes, peninsulas which comprise 27 per cent. and Islands which comprise nearly 8 per cent. of the total area,772 vast thalassic inlets cleaving the continent to the core, have provided an abundance of those naturally defined regions which serve as cradles of civilization and, reacting upon the continent as a whole, endow it with lasting historical significance.773 Even Strabo saw this. He begins his description of the inhabited world with Europe, because, as he says, it has such a "polymorphous formation" and is the region most favorable to the mental and social ennoblement of man.774