Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/749

ASIA

1. THIS division of the earth's surface embraces the north-eastern portion of the great mass of land which constitutes what is generally known as the Old World, of which Europe forms the north-western and Africa the south-western region.

Sketch Map of Asia.

2. Geography, in common with most of the other branches of human learning which have supplied the foundation of modern science, originated in Egypt and Greece, and its nomenclature naturally carries with it the stamp of the place where it had its birth. The earliest conceptions of geographical position were necessarily formed and expressed in relation to the region in which the ancient geographers lived and wrote ; and the first steps in generalisation which recognised and distinguished the special characteristics of the countries arid people grouped round the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and suggested the three great divisions of the Old World, attest the sagacity of the founders of geography, whose landmarks their successors still respect.

3. Much doubt attaches to the origin of the words Europe, Africa, and Asia. Some of the earliest Greek geographers divided their known world into two portions only, Europe and Asia, in which last Libya (the Greek name for Africa) was included. Herodotus, who ranks Libya as one of the chief divisions of the world, separating it from Asia, re pudiates as fables the ordinary explanations assigned to the names Europe and Asia, but confesses his inability to say whence they came. It would appear probable, how ever, that the former of these words was derived from an Assyrian or Hebrew root, which signifies the west or setting sun, and the latter from a corresponding root meaning the east or rising sun, and that they were used at one time to imply the west and the east. There is ground also for supposing that they may at first have been used with a specific or restricted local application, a more extended signification having eventually been given to them. After the word Asia had acquired its larger sense, it was still specially used by the Greeks to designate the country around Ephesus. The word Africa is the Latin substitute for the Greek Libya ; its origin is obscure. It may have been a local name. It was long used with special refer ence to the country about Carthage, and this seems to have been the case even to the time of the Mahometan conquest. The idea of Asia as originally formed was necessarily in definite, and long continued to be so; and the area to which the name was finally applied, as geographical knowledge increased, was to a great extent determined by arbitrary and not very precise conceptions, rather than on the basis of natural relations and differences subsisting between it and the surrounding regions.

4. The entire surface of the earth being about 196 millions of square miles in area (of which 51 millions are land, and 145 millions water), Asia contains about 17 millions of square miles, or say one-third of the whole of the dry land and one-twelfth part of the whole surface of the globe. Europe contains about 3

5. The northern boundary of Asia is formed by the Arctic Ocean; the coast-line falls between the 70th and the 75th parallels of N. lat., and so lies within the Arctic circle, having its extreme northern point in Cape Sievero-Vostochny (i.e., north-east}, in lat. 78 N. On the south the coast line is far more irregular, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the China Sea, reaching about to the northern tropic at the mouths of the Indus, of the Ganges, and of the Canton river ; while the great peninsulas of Arabia, of Hindostan, and Cambodia, descend to about the 10th degree of N. lat., and the Malay peninsula extends within a degree and a half of the equator. On the west the extreme point of Asia is found on the shore of the Medi terranean, at Cape Baba, in long. 26 E. from Greenwich, not far from the Dardanelles. Thence the boundary passes in the one direction through the Mediterranean, and down the Keel Sea to the southern point of Arabia, at the Straits of Bab-el-mandeb, in long. 45 E. ; and in the other through the Black Sea, and along the range of Caucasus, following approximately the 40th degree of N. lat. to the Caspian, whence it turns to the north on a line not far from the GOth meridian, along the Ural Mountains, and meets the Arctic Ocean nearly opposite the island of Nova-Zembla. The most easterly point of Asia is Cape Vostochnyii (i.e., east), in long. 190 E., at the entrance of Behring s Straits. The boundary between this point and the extremity of the Malay peninsula follows the coast of the Northern Pacific and the China Sea, on a line deeply broken by the projec tion of the peninsulas of Kamchatka and Corea, and the recession of the Gulfs of Okotsk, the Yellow Sea, Tonquin, and Siam.

6. On the east and south-east of Asia are several important groups of islands, the more southern of which link this continent to Australia, and to the islands of the Pacific.

The Kurile Islands, the Japanese group, Loo-choo, For mosa, and the Philippines, may be regarded as unquestion able outliers of Asia. Between the islands of the Malay Archipelago from Sumatra to New Guinea, and the neigh bouring Asiatic continent, no definite relations appear ever to have existed, and no distinctly-marked boundary for Asia has been established by the old geographers in this quarter. Modern science, however, has indicated a line of physical separation along the channel between Borneo and tho

Celebes, called the Straits of Macassar, which follows ap-