[Sidenote:  Peninsulas as intermediaries.]

Peninsulas, so far as they project from their continents, are areas of isolation; but so far as they extend also toward some land beyond, they become intermediaries.  The isolating and intermediary aspects can be traced in the anthropo-geographical effects of every peninsula, even those which, like Brittany and Cornwall, project into the long uncharted waste of the Atlantic.  In the order of historical development, a peninsula first isolates, until in its secluded environment it has molded a mature, independent people; then, as that people outgrows its narrow territory, the peninsula becomes a favorable base for maritime expansion to distant lands, or becomes a natural avenue for numerous reciprocal relations with neighboring lands beyond.  Korea was the bridge for Mongolian migration from continental Asia to the Japan islands, and for the passage thither of Chinese culture, whether intellectual, esthetic, industrial or religious.[799] It has been the one country conspicuous in the foreign history of Japan.  Conquered by the island empire in 1592, it paid tribute for nearly three centuries and yielded to its foreign master the southeastern port of Fusan, the Calais of Korea.[800] Since the treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 made it subject to Japan, it has become the avenue of Japanese expansion to the mainland and the unwilling recipient of the modern civilization thrust upon it by these English of the East.  In like manner the Pyrenean peninsula has always been the intermediary between Europe and northwest Africa.  Its population, as well as its flora and fauna, group with those of the southern continent.  It has served as transit land between north and south for the Carthaginians, Vandals and Saracens; and in modern times it has maintained its character as a link by the Portuguese occupation of the Tangiers peninsula in the fifteenth century,[801] and the Spanish possession of Ceuta and various other points along the Moroccan coast from the year 709 A.D. to the present.[802]

[Sidenote:  Peninsulas of intercontinental location.]

This role of intermediary is inevitably thrust upon all peninsulas which, like Spain, Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Arabia, Farther India, Malacca, Chukchian Siberia, and Alaska, occupy an intercontinental location.  Arabia especially in its climate, flora, races and history shows the haul and pull now of Asia, now of Africa.  From it Asiatic influences have spread over Africa to Morocco and the Niger River on the west, and to Zanzibar on the south, permeated Abyssinia, and penetrated to the great Equatorial Lakes, whether in the form of that Mecca-born worship of Allah, or the creeping caravans and slave-gangs of Arab trader.  Of all such intercontinental peninsulas, Florida alone seems to have had no role as an intermediary.  Its native ethnic affinities were wholly with its own continent.  It has given nothing to South America and received nothing thence.  The northward expansion of Arawak and Carib tribes from Venezuela in historic times ceased at Cuba and Hayti.  The Straits drew a dividing line.  Local conditions in Florida itself probably furnish the explanation of this anomaly.  Extensive swamps made the central and southern portion of the peninsula inhospitable to colonization from either direction, transformed it from a link into a barrier.