The enormous articulations of southern Asia suffer from their paucity of small indentations, all the more because of their vast size and sub-tropical location.  The Grecian type of peninsula, with its broken shoreline, finds here its large-scale homologue only in Farther India, to which the Sunda Islands have played in history the part of a gigantic Cyclades.  The European type of articulation is found only about the Yellow-Japan Sea, where the island of Hondo and the peninsulas of Shangtung and Korea reproduce approximately the proportions of Great Britain, Jutland and Italy respectively.  Arabia and India, like the angular shoulder of Africa which protrudes into the Indian Ocean, measure an imposing length of coastline, but this length shrinks in comparison with the vast area of the peninsulas.  The contour of a peninsula is like the surface of the brain:  in both it is convolutions that count.  Southern Asia has had lobes enough but too few convolutions.  For this reason, the northern Indian Ocean, despite its exceptional location as the eastward extension of the Mediterranean route to the Orient, found its development constantly arrested till the advent of European navigators.

[Sidenote:  Length of coastline.]

Although the peripheral articulations of a continent differ anthropo-geographically according to their size, their zonal and vicinal location, yet large and small, arctic and tropical, are grouped indiscriminately together in the figures that state the length of coastlines.  For this reason, statistics of continental coastlines have little value.  For instance, the fact that Eurasia has 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers) and North America 46,500 miles (75,000 kilometers) of contact with the ocean is not illuminating; these figures do not reveal the fact that the former has its greatest coastal length on its tropical and sub-tropical side, while the latter continent has wasted inlets and islands innumerable in the long, bleak stretch from Newfoundland poleward around to Bering Sea.

[Sidenote:  The continental base of the peninsulas.]

Peninsulas are accessible from the sea according to the configuration of their coasts, but from their hinterland, according to the length and nature of their connection with the same.  This determines the degree of their isolation from the land-mass.  If they hang from the continent by a frayed string, as does the Peloponnesus, Crimea, Malacca, Indian Gutjerat, and Nova Scotia, they are segregated from the life of the mainland almost as completely as if they were islands.  The same effects follow where the base of a peninsula is defined by a high mountain barrier, as in all the Mediterranean peninsulas, in the two Indias, and in Korea; or by a desert like that which scantily links Arabia to Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia; or by a blur of swamps and lakes such as half detaches Scandinavia, Courland, Estland and Finland from Russia.