Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 01.djvu/369

ASIA 295 ASIA peninsulas, Korea, Kamchatka, and that of the Tchuktchis. The flat, ever frozen, uninhabitable peninsulas of the Arctic Ocean,, Taimyr and Yalmal, could play no part in the growth of civilization. Seas^ and Gulfs. — The early inhabitants of Asia had no Mediterranean Sea to serve as a highway of communication between the southern peninsulas. The gulfs which separate them, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, are wide open divisions of the Indian Ocean. The Red Sea penetrates between Africa and Arabia; and only now, since it has been brought into communication with the Mediterranean by the Suez Canal, has it become an important channel of traffic. Asia's true Mediterranean is on the E., where several archipelagoes, like so many chains of islands, mark off from the ocean the southern and eastern China Seas, whose Gulfs of Siam and Tonkin, and, especially, the Yellow Sea, with the Gulf of Pechili, penetrate into the continent. The Sea of Japan has on its W. the inhospitable coasts of northern Manchuria. ^ The Sea of Okhotsk and that of Bering, although possessing fine gulfs (Ghizhiga, Anadyr), have no im- portance for the maritime traffic of na- tions. Islands. — The islands of Asia cover an aggregate of no less than 1,023,000 square miles (nearly 6 per cent, of Asia's surface). The coasts of Asia Minor are dotted with islands, of which the Spor- ades connect it with Greece. Cyprus was from remote antiquity a center of civilization; so also Ceylon. The Lac- cadives and Maldives are mere coral atolls, rising amid the Indian Ocean and sheltering some 200,000 inhabitants. The islands of east Asia are much more im- portant, A narrow strip of islands, some large, like Sumatra (177,000 square miles) and Java, others mere reefs, ex- tend in a wide semi-circle, under the name of Andaman and Sunda Islands, from Burma to Australia, separating the In- dian Ocean from the shallow Java Sea and the Malay Archipelago. This last immense volcanic region, inhabited by the Malay race, comprises the huge Borneo, the ramified Celebes, and the numberless small islands of the Moluccas, the Philippines, etc., connected on the N. W. with the Chinese coast by the island of Formosa. This latter, as well as Hainan, may be properly considered as part of the Chinese mainland. The Loo- choo (Liu-Kiu) Islands and the Jap- anese Archipelago, the latter joining Kamchatka by the Kuriles, continue farther N. E. this chain of islands which border the coast of Asia. In the Arctic Ocean, the small Bear Islands, the archi- pelago of the Liakhof, Anjou, and De Long Islands, as also those of the Kara Sea, are lost amid icefields, and are but occasionally visited by whalers, K( llett's- or Wrangel's Land, off the peninsula of the Tchuktchis, was thoroughly explored by Lieut. R. M. Berry, United States navy. Orogmphy.—li the whole mass of the mountains and plateaus of Asia were uniformly spread over its surface, the continent would rise no less than 2,885 feet above the sea, while Africa and North America would respectively reach only 2,165 and 1,950 feet. High plateaus occupy nearly two-fifths of its area. One of them, that of western Asia, including Anatolia, Armenia, and Iran, extends in a southeasterly direction from the Black Sea to the valley of the Indus ; while the other, the high plateaus of eastern Asia, still loftier and much more extensive, stretches N. E. from the Himalayas to the northeastern extremity of Asia, re- sembling in shape a South America point- ing N. E., and meeting Bering Strait, the northwestern extremity of the high plateau of North America. Rivers. — Only four rivers, the Mis- sissippi, Amazon, Kongo, and Nile, sur- pass the largest rivers of Asia^ the Yenisei and the Yangtse-kiang, both as to length and drainage areas; but owing to the scarcity of rain over large parts of Asia, the amount of water carried down by the largest rivers is, as a rule, disproportionately small as compared with American or European rivers. The predominant feature of Asia's hydrography is the existence of very wide areas having no outlet to the sea. On the great plateau of eastern Asia, the region which has no outlet from the plateau, and whose water does not reach even Lake Aral or the Caspian, covers a surface larger than that of Spain, France,, and Germany together. It is watered only by the Tarim, which supplies some irrigation works in its upper parts, and enters the rapidly dry- ing marshes of Lob-nor. This area is steadily increasing, and since 1862 we have had to add to it the drainage area (as large as England and Wales) of the Keruleri, which empties into Dalai-nor, but no longer reaches the Arguii, a tributary of the Amur. The Ulyasutai River and the Tchagantogoi now no longer reach Lake Balkash ; and the Ur- ungu, which obviously joined the Upper Irtysh at no very remote date, empties into a lake separated from the Black Irtysh by a low isthmus not 5 miles wide. If we add to this the drainage basins of