IN a sense Asia is the oldest of the continents, for it has been the cradle of the great civilisations, and the earliest chapters of the history of man were written within its borders. It is supposed that civilisation first sprang up on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates and that culture was carried thence to India and China. Whether this be so or not, the fact remains that the three great civilisations of the Hindus, the Chinese, and the Semites have had their origin and have grown up in Asia. Nilotic culture was an offshoot of the Babylonian, and Greece but carried on the torch laid down by the Phoenicians. Rome, France, England— these three in succession took up and improved the work of the Greeks, and this shift of the focus of civilisation towards the northwest into the hands of fresh and vigorous peoples has kept it from stagnation. On the other hand, geographical isolation sapped the energy of Chinese and Hindu culture. The study of the geography of Asia to-day centres round the clash of the young, forceful West and the old, fixed East. The impact has to-day overthrown the whole social order of India and Japan and cast China into a state of chaos and revolution. Democratic government and industrialism are foreign to the Asiatic, whose intellectual outlook transcends the material and seeks the infinite. But the East is beginning to adjust its views to those of the West and to assert its counter-influence.

Position and Size. Asia lies almost wholly within the northern hemisphere. The Equator passes ninety miles south of Cape Busu in the Malay Peninsula, while Cape Chelyuskin, the northernmost point, reaches to the 78th parallel of north latitude. The 90th degree of longitude east almost divides the continent into halves. On the northeast Asia approaches within sight of Alaska, though the breadth of the Pacific separates it from North America farther south. The archipelago of the East Indies joins, rather than severs, it from Australia. In the west Africa is actually united to it by the Isthmus of Suez, while Europe is merely a peninsula of the great continent, from which it is divided by cultural and conventional, rather than physical, frontiers.