6.Concerning the Little Spots of Dry Land on This Planet and Why Some of Them are Called Continents While Others are not

ALL of us, without exception, live on islands. But some of these islands on our planet arc so much larger than the others that we have decided to let them belong to a class of their own and have called them“continents”.A continent therefore is an island which“contains”or“holds together”more territory than just an ordinary island like England or Madagascar or Manhattan.

But there are no hard and fast rules. America and Asia and Africa, being the biggest continuous pieces of land, are continents by right of their enormous size.Europe, which to the astronomers of the planet Mars undoubtedly looks like a peninsula of Asia(a little larger perhaps than India, but not very much)has always insisted on being a continent by itself.The Australians would undoubtedly go to war if any one dared to suggest that their beloved island was not really big enough and did not have enough inhabitants to be ranked among the continents.The Greenlanders on the other hand seem quite contented to remain plain, ordinary Eskimos, although the country of their birth is twice as large as the combined area of New Guinea and Borneo, the two biggest islands on our planet.While the penguins of the South Pole, if they were not such humble and amiable creatures, might easily claim to be living on a continent, for the Antarctic region is surely as vast as all the land between the Arctic Sea and the Mediterranean.

I don't know how all this confusion arose. But the science of geography passed through many centuries of absolute neglect.During that period, erroneous notions attached themselves to the body of our geographical information as barnacles attach themselves to the keel of a ship that lies neglected in port.In the course of time(and the dark ages of our ignorance lasted about 1400 years)some of those barnacles assumed such gigantic proportions that they were finally mistaken for parts of the ship.

But rather than add to the existing confusion, I will stick to the generally accepted divisions and I will say that there are five continents:Asia, America, Africa, Europe and Australia, and that Asia is four and a half times as large as Europe, America four times as large, Africa three times, while Australia is a few hundred thousand square miles smaller. Asia and America and Africa therefore ought to come ahead of Europe in a handbook on geography;but if we do not merely pay attention to size but also consider the role any given part of the world has played in the historical development of the entire planet, we must begin with Europe.

Let us first of all look at the map. As a matter of fact, let us look at our maps oftener than we look at the printed page.For you might as well attempt to learn music without an instrument or swimming without water as to try to learn geography without a map.And as soon as you look at a map, or better still, if you can get hold of a globe, you will notice that the European peninsula, bounded by the Arctic Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, is situated right in the heart of that part of the world which contains the greatest amount of land.Just as poor, neglected Australia happens to be situated in the exact center of that other half of our planet which contains the greatest percentage of water.That was advantage number one which Europe enjoyed, but there were others.Asia might be about five times as large as Europe but while one-quarter of all its land was too hot for comfort, another quarter was situated in such close proximity to the North Pole that no one but a reindeer or a polar bear would choose it as a permanent place of residence.

There again Europe scored, for it enjoyed certain advantages which none of the other continents did. The toe of Italy, the southernmost point, although fairly warm, is still some 800 miles removed from the tropical zone.Northern Sweden and Norway run quite a distance beyond the polar circle, but it happens that the Gulf Stream visits their shores and keeps them warm, while Labrador, in an equal latitude, is a frozen wilderness.

Furthermore, Europe has a greater proportion of peninsulas and seas that run way inland than any other continent. Just think of Spain, Italy, Greece, Denmark, Scandinavia, the Baltic, the North Sea, the Mediterranean, the Aegean Sea, the Sea of Marmora, the Gulf of Biscay, the Black Sea, and compare that situation with Africa or with South America, which has the lowest record for that sort of thing.The result of such a large body of water touching almost every part of the mainland is a very moderate climate.That means that the winters are not too cold and the summers are not too hot.Life is neither too easy nor too difficult, so that man becomes neither a loafer(as he does in Africa)nor a beast of burden(as he does in Asia)but is able to mix work and leisure in a more agreeable and useful proportion than anywhere else.

But it was not only the climate that helped the Europeans to make themselves the masters of the greater part of our planet and to maintain themselves as such until they committed suicide during the four years of their unfortunate civil war of 1914—1918. Their geological background was another point in their favor.This, of course, was a mere accident for which they deserve no personal credit.But just the same they plucked the fruit of all those colossal volcanic eruptions and those gigantic glacial invasions and those catastrophic floods which had made their continent what it was, which had placed their mountains where they could most easily be turned into national frontiers and which made their rivers flow in such a way that practically every part of the interior enjoyed direct communication with the sea, a most important point for the development of trade and commerce before the invention of the railroad and the automobile.

The Pyrenees cut the Iberian peninsula off from the rest of Europe and became the natural frontier of Spain and Portugal. The Alps performed a similar service for Italy.The great plain of western France lay hidden behind the Cévennes, the Jura and the Vosges Mountains.The Carpathians acted as a bulwark which separated Hungary from the vast plains of Russia.The Austrian Empire, which played such an important part in the history of the last eight hundred years, consisted, roughly speaking, of a circular plain, surrounded by difficult mountain-ranges which protected it against its neighbors.Without those barriers, Austria would never have existed as long as it did.Germany too was no mere political accident.It consisted of a large square of territory which sloped gently from the Alps and the mountains of Bohemia towards the Baltic Sea.And then there were islands, like England and those of the old Greek Aegean Sea, and swamps like Holland and Venice, all of them natural fortresses which Providence herself seemed to have placed there for the development of independent political units.

Even Russia, which we so often hear described as the result of one man's terrific desire for power(the late Peter the Great of the house of Romanov)was really much more the product of certain natural and inevitable causes than we are sometimes willing to believe. The great Russian plain, situated between the Arctic Ocean, the Ural Mountains, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, the Carpathians and the Baltic, was ideally situated for the foundation of a highly centralized empire.The ease with which the United Soviet Republics survived after the downfall of the Romanov dynasty seems to be conclusive proof of this.

But the rivers, too, in Europe, as 1 have already remarked, ran in such a way that they could play a most important and practical part in the economic development of that continent. Draw a line from Madrid to Moscow and you will notice that all the rivers, without any exception, run either north or south, giving every part of the interior direct access to the sea.Since civilization has always been a product of water rather than land, this fortunate aquatic arrangement was of tremendous help in making Europe the richest and therefore the dominant center of our planet until the disastrous and suicidal war of 1914—1918 made her lose that enviable position.But let the maps bear me out.

Compare Europe with North America. On our own continent two high mountain-ranges run almost parallel with the sea;and the entire middle part, the great central plain of the Middle West, has but one direct outlet to the sea, the Mississippi River and its tributaries, which run into the Gulf of Mexico, a sort of inland sea far removed from both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans.Or compare Europe with Asia, where a helter-skelter wrinkling process of the earth's surface and the irregular slopes of all the mountain-ranges make the rivers run in any old direction, while the most important of those waterways, traversing the vast Siberian steppes, lose themselves in the Arctic Ocean and are of no earthly use to any one except a few local fishermen.Or with Australia, which has no rivers at all.Or with Africa, a vast central plateau which forces the rivers to break through the high fringe of mountains near the coast and prevents sea traffic from using the natural waterways to reach the interior.Then you will begin to understand why Europe, with its convenient mountain-ranges and its even more convenient river systems, with nine times as much coast-line as it would have if it were rounded off as neatly as Africa or Australia, with its moderate climate and its convenient location right in the heart of the land masses of this earth, was predestined to play the role of the leading continent.

But those natural advantages alone would not have been enough to allow this tiny corner of the world to lord it over all its neighbors. Man's ingenuity had to lend a hand.That was easy.For the climate of northern Europe was an ideal climate to stimulate men's brains into activity.It was neither too cold for absolute comfort nor too hot for a regular daily task, but just right to make one feel like doing something.As a result, the inhabitants of northern Europe, as soon as their respective countries had duly settled down and were able to guarantee their citizens that indispensable minimum of law and order without which no mental life is possible, began to devote themselves to those scientific pursuits which in the end were to make them the owners and exploiters of the four other continents.

Their mathematics and their astronomy and trigonometry taught them how to sail the Seven Seas with a reasonable assurance of being able to return whence they had come. Their interest in chemistry provided them with an internal combustion machine(that queer motor called a“gun”)by means of which they could kill other human beings and animals faster and more accurately than any other nation or tribe had ever been able to do.Their pursuit of medicine taught them how to make themselves comparatively immune against a variety of diseases which hitherto had kept whole regions of the earth in a state of chronic depopulation.And finally the comparative poverty of their own soil(poor when compared to the plains of the Ganges or the mountain-ranges of Java)and the everlasting necessity of living rather“carefully”had gradually developed such deep-seated habits of thrift and greed that Europeans would go to any extreme in order to acquire the wealth without which their neighbors regarded and scorned them as regrettable failures.

As soon as the introduction of that mysterious Indian instrument known as the compass had made them independent of the church-tower and the familiar coast-line and allowed them to roam at will, and as soon as the rudder of the ship had been moved from the side to the stern(an improvement which seems to have occurred during the first half of the fourteenth century and which was one of the most important inventions of all time, since it gave man such command over the course of his vessel as he had never enjoyed before)the people of Europe were able to leave their little inland seas, the Mediterranean and the North Sea and the Baltic, and to make the gigantic Atlantic the highroad for their further exploits of a commercial and military character. Then at last they were able to make the fullest possible use of the fortunate incident which had placed their continent right in the heart of the greatest amount of land on our planet.

They maintained this advantage for more than five hundred years. The steamer succeeded the sailing vessel, but since trade has always been a matter of cheap modes of communication, Europe was able to continue at the head of the procession.And those military authors have been right who maintained that the nation with the biggest navy was also the nation that could dictate its will to the rest of the world.In obedience to this law, the Norsemen had been succeeded by Venice and Genoa, and Venice and Genoa had been succeeded by Portugal, and Portugal as a world-power had been succeeded by Spain, and Spain by Holland, and Holland by England, because each country in turn had had the largest number of battle-ships.Today, however, the sea is rapidly losing its former importance.The ocean as a highroad for commerce is being succeeded by the air.And perhaps it is not so much the Great War which has reduced Europe to the rank of a second-rate continent as the invention of the heavier-than-air flying-machine.

The son of a Genoese wool-merchant changed the course of history by discovering the unlimited possibilities of the ocean.

The owners of a simple bicycle-repair-shop in the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, did the same for the air. As a result, the children of a thousand years hence may never have heard the name of Christopher Columbus, but they will be familiar with Wilbur and Orville Wright.

For it was a product of their patient and ingenious brains more than anything else which is gradually moving the center of civilization from the Old World to the New.