In discussing continental articulations, therefore, it makes a great difference whether we draw our deductions from small projections of the coast, like Wales, the Peloponnesus, Brittany and the Crimea, whose areas range from 7442 to 10,023 square miles (19,082 to 25,700 square kilometers); or the four Mediterranean peninsulas, which range in size from the 58,110 square miles (149,000 square kilometers) of the Apennine Peninsula to the 197,600 square miles (506,-600 square kilometers) of Asia Minor and the 227,700 square miles (584,000 square kilometers) of the Iberian; or the vast continental alcoves of southern Asia, like Farther India with its 650,000 square miles (1,667,000 square kilometers), Hither India with 814,320 square miles (2,088,000 square kilometers) and Arabia with 1,064,700 square miles (2,730,000 square kilometers).[784] The fact that the large compound peninsula of western Europe which comprises Spain, Portugal, France, Jutland, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Italy and western Germany, and has its base in the stricture between the Adriatic and the Baltic, is about the size of peninsular India, suggests how profound may be the difference in geographic effects between large and small peripheral divisions.  The three huge extremities which Asia thrusts forward into the Indian Ocean are geographical entities, which in point of size and individualization rank just below the continents; and in relation to the solid mass of Central Asia, they have exhibited in many respects an aloofness and self-sufficiency, that have resulted in an historical divergence approximating that of the several continents.  India, which has more productive territory than Australia and a population not much smaller than that of Europe, becomes to the administrators of its government “the Continent of India,” as it is regularly termed in the Statistical Atlas published at Calcutta.  Farther India has in the long-drawn pendant of Malacca a sub-peninsula half as large again as Italy.  The Deccan has in Ceylon an insular dependency the size of Tasmania.  The whole scale is continental.  It appears again somewhat diminished, in the largest articulations of Europe, in Scandinavia, the British Isles, the Iberian and Balkan peninsulas.  This continental scale stamps also the anthropo-geography of such large individualized fields.  They are big enough for each to comprise one or even several nations, and isolated enough to keep their historical processes for long periods at a time to a certain extent detached from those of their respective continents.

[Sidenote:  Peninsular conditions most favorable to historical development.]

The most favorable conditions for historical development obtain where the two classes of marginal articulation are combined, and where they occur in groups, as we find them in the Mediterranean and the North Sea-Baltic basin.  Here the smaller indentations multiply contact with the sea, and provide the harbors, bays and breakwaters of capes and promontories which make the coast accessible.  The larger articulations, by their close grouping, break up the sea into the minor thalassic basins which encourage navigation, and thus insure the exchange of their respective cultural achievements.  In other words, such conditions present the pre-eminent advantages of vicinal location around an enclosed sea.