Note 791 — Chapter XII · —Continents And Their Peninsulas

In contrast to these continental sections which stand in contact with the solid land-mass behind, the extremities of the peninsulas are areas of isolation and therefore generally of ethnic unity. They often represent the last stand of displaced people pressed outward into these narrow quarters by expanding races in their rear. The vast triangle of the Deccan, which forms the essentially peninsular part of India, is occupied, except in the more exposed northwest corner, by the Dravidian race which once occupied all India, and afterward was pushed southward by the influx of more energetic peoples.791 Here they have preserved their speech and nationality unmixed and live in almost primitive simplicity.792 In the peninsular parts of Great Britain, in northern Scotland. Wales and Cornwall, we find people of Celtic speech brought to bay on these remote spurs of the land, affiliating little with the varied folk which occupied the continental side of the island, and resisting conquest to the last.793 The mountainous peninsula of western Connaught in Ireland has been the rocky nucleus of the largest Celtic-speaking community in the island.794 Brittany, with a similar location, became the last refuge of Celtic speech on the mainland of Europe,795 the seat of resistance to Norman and later to English conquest, finally the stronghold of conservatism in the French Revolution.