PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 296 



which the extremes! projection towards the North Pole is 

 manifested. This will be perceived on comparing the Cape of 

 Good Hope and the Lagullas Bank with the North Cape of 

 Europe, and the Peninsula of Malacca with Cape Taimura in 

 Siberia.* We know not whether the poles of the earth are 

 surrounded by land or by a sea of ice. Towards the North 

 Pole the parallel of 82 55' has been reached, but jto wards 

 the South Pole only that of 78 10'. 



The pyramidal terminations of the great continents are vari- 

 ously repeated on a smaller scale, not only in the Indian Ocean, 

 and 'in the Peninsulas of Arabia, Hindostan, and Malacca, 

 but also, as was remarked by Eratosthenes and Polybius, in 

 the Mediterranean, where these writers had ingeniously com- 

 pared together the forms of the Iberian, Italian, and Hellenic 

 peninsulas.f Europe, whose area is five times smaller than 

 that of Asia, may almost be regarded as a multifariously 

 articulated western peninsula of the more compact mass of the 

 Continent of Asia, the climatic relations of the former being to 

 those of the latter as the Peninsula of Brittany is to the rest 

 of France .J The influence exercised by the articulation and 

 higher development of the form of a continent on the moral 

 and intellectual condition of nations was remarked by Strabo, 

 who extolls the varied form of our small continent as a special 



* Humboldt, Asie centrale, t. i. pp. 198-200. The southern point 

 of America, and the Archipelago which we call Terra del Fuego, lie in 

 the meridian of the north-western part of Baffin's Bay, and of the great 

 polar land, whose limits have not as yet been ascertained, and which 

 perhaps belongs to West Greenland. 



t Strabo, lib. ii. pp. 92, 108, Casaub. 



% Humboldt, Asie centrale, t. iii. p. 25. As early as the year 1817, 

 in my work, De distributione geograpMca plantarum secundum ccdi 

 temperiem et altitudinem montium, I directed attention to the impor- 

 tant influence of compact and of deeply-articulated continents on climate 

 and human civilization, " Regiones vel per sinus lunatos in longa cornua 

 porrectae, angulosis littorum recessibus quasi membratim discerptse, vel 

 spatia patentia in immensum, quorum littora nullis iiicisa angulis ambit 

 sine anfractu Oceanus" (pp. 81, 182). On the relations of the extent of 

 coast to the area of a continent (considered in some degree as a measure 

 of the accessibility of the interior), see the inquiries in Berghaus, 

 Annalen der Erdkunde, bd. xii. 1835, s. 490, and Physical. Atlas, 

 1839, No. iii. s. 69. 



Strabo, lib. ii. pp. 92, 198, Casaub. 



