[Sidenote:  Peninsular extremities as areas of isolation.]

In contrast to these continental sections which stand in contact with the solid land-mass behind, the extremities of the peninsulas are areas of isolation and therefore generally of ethnic unity.  They often represent the last stand of displaced people pressed outward into these narrow quarters by expanding races in their rear.  The vast triangle of the Deccan, which forms the essentially peninsular part of India, is occupied, except in the more exposed northwest corner, by the Dravidian race which once occupied all India, and afterward was pushed southward by the influx of more energetic peoples.[791] Here they have preserved their speech and nationality unmixed and live in almost primitive simplicity.[792] In the peninsular parts of Great Britain, in northern Scotland.  Wales and Cornwall, we find people of Celtic speech brought to bay on these remote spurs of the land, affiliating little with the varied folk which occupied the continental side of the island, and resisting conquest to the last.[793] The mountainous peninsula of western Connaught in Ireland has been the rocky nucleus of the largest Celtic-speaking community in the island.[794] Brittany, with a similar location, became the last refuge of Celtic speech on the mainland of Europe,[795] the seat of resistance to Norman and later to English conquest, finally the stronghold of conservatism in the French Revolution.

[Sidenote:  Ethnic unity of peninsulas.]

The northern wall of the Apennines and the outpost barrier of the Alps have combined to protect peninsular Italy from extensive ethnic infusions from the direction of the continent.  This portion of the country shows therefore, as the anthropological maps attest, a striking uniformity of race.  It has been a melting-pot in which foreign elements, filtering through the breaches of the Apennines or along the southern coast, have been fused into the general population under the isolating and cohesive influences of a peninsular environment.[796] The population of the Iberian Peninsula is even more unified, probably the most homogeneous in Europe.  Here the long-headed Mediterranean race is found in the same purity as in island Corsica and Sardinia.[797] Spain’s short line of contact with France and its sharp separation by the unbroken wall of the Pyrenees robs the peninsula of any distinctly continental section, and consequently of any transitional area of race and culture; hence the unity of Spain as opposed to that twofold balanced diversity which we find in Italy and India.  The Balkan Peninsula, on the other hand, owing to the great predominance of its continental section and the confused relief of the country, has not protected its distinctively peninsular or Greek section from the southward migrations of Slavs, Albanians, Wallachians, and other continental peoples.[798] It has been like a big funnel with a small mouth; the pressure from above has been very great.  Hellas and even the Peloponnesus have had their peninsularity impaired and their race mixed, owing to the predominant continental section to the north.