Even the largest islands of the world, such as Borneo, New Guinea and Madagascar, show no such independent ethnic development.  This is the distinguishing characteristic of the largest land-masses.  Europe, except on the basis of its size and peninsula form, has no title to the name of continent; certainly not on anthropo-geographical grounds.  Its classification as a continent arose in the Mediterranean among the Greeks, as a geographical expression of the antagonism between themselves and their Carian, Phoenician and Persian enemies across the Aegean; the idea had therefore a political origin, and was formed without knowledge of that vast stretch of plains between the Black Sea and the Arctic Ocean, where Asia’s climate and races lap over into Europe, and where to-day we find the Muscovite Empire, in point of geographic conditions, its underlying ethnic stock and form of government, as much Asiatic as European.  The real or western Europe, which the Roman Empire gradually added to the narrow Europe of the Greeks, and which is strikingly contrasted to Asia in point of size, relief, contour, climate and races, only served to maintain the distinction between the two continents in men’s minds.  But from a geographical standpoint the distinction is an error.  It has confused the interpretation of the history of the Greeks and the development of the Russians.  It has brought disorder into the question of the European or Asiatic origin of the Aryan linguistic family, which the anthropo-geographer would assign to the single continent of Eurasia.  The independent development that falls to the lot of great world islands like the Americas and Australia is impossible in a peninsular continent like Europe, large as it is.

[Sidenote:  Independence of location versus independence of size.]

The independence of a land-mass is based not alone on size:  there is also an independence of location.  This, owing to the spherical form of the earth, tends to be neutralized by the independence based upon large area.  The larger a land-mass is, the nearer it approaches to others.  Eurasia, the largest of all the continents, comes into close proximity and therefore close relations with Africa, North America, and even Australia; whereas Australia is at once the smallest and the most isolated of the continents.  The remote oceanic islands of the Atlantic Ocean, measuring only a few square miles in area, have a location so independent of other inhabited lands, that before the period of the great discoveries they had never appeared on the horizon of man.

[Sidenote:  The case of Asia.]