PKTSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 291 



of the Old World, Australia, and South America, successively 

 approach nearer toward the south pole. New Zealand, whose 

 length extends fully 12° of latitude, forms an intermediate 

 link between Australia and South America, likewise termina- 

 tinp[ in an island, New Leinster. It is also a remarkable cir- 

 cumstance that the greatest extension toward the south falls 

 in the Old Continent, under the same meridian in which the 

 extremest projection toward 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. Toward the north pole the parallel 

 of 82° 55' has been reached, but toward 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 compared 

 together the forms of the Iberian, Italian, and Hellenic penin- 

 sulas.! 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 devel- 

 opment of the form of a continent on the moral and intellect- 

 ual condition of nations was remarked by Strabo,§ who extols 



* Humboldt, Asie Centrale, t. i., p. 198-200. The southern point 

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

 the meridian of the northwestern 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., p. 92, 108, Casaub. 



} Humboldt, Asie Centrale, t. iii., p. 25. As early as the year 1817, 

 in my w^ork De distributione Geographicd Plantarum, secundum coelt 

 temperiem, ei altitudinem Montium, I directed attention to the import 

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

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

 porrecta?, angulosis littorum recessibus quasi membratim discerpta?, vel 

 spatia patentia in immensum, quorum littora nullis incisa angulis ambit 

 sine aufractu oceanus" (p. 81, 182). On the relations of the extent of 

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

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

 Annalen der Erdkunde, bd. xii., 1835, s. 490, and Physikal. Atlas, 1839 

 No. iii , s. 69. $ Strabo, lib. ii., p. 92, 198, Casaub. 



