Note 759 — Chapter XII · —Continents And Their Peninsulas

While the Atlantic thus formed a long north-and-south rift across the inhabited world at the period of the great discoveries, the Pacific, strewn with islands and land-rimmed at its northern extremity by the peninsulas of Alaska and eastern Siberia, spread a nebula of population from the dense centers of Asia across to the outskirts of America. The general Mongoloid character of the American Indians as a race, the stronger Asiatic stamp of the Western Eskimo, the unmistakeable ethnic and cultural affinities of the Northwest Coast tribes both with southern Polynesians and Asiatics,759 all point to America as the great eastern wing of the Mongoloid or Asiatic area, and therefore as the true Orient of the world.