VIII.] THE NORTHERN MONGOLS. 305 



Accepting this view, we may go further, and identify the Usuns, 

 as well as the other white peoples of the early Chinese records, 

 with the already described Central Asiatic Caucasians of the 

 Stone Ages, whose osseous remains we now possess, and who 

 come to the surface in the very first Chinese documents dealing 

 with the turbulent populations beyond the Great Wall. The 

 white element, with all the correlated characters, existed beyond 

 all question, for it is continuously referred to in those documents. 

 How is its presence in East Central Asia, including Manchuria 

 and Korea, to be explained? Only on two assumptions proto- 

 historic migrations from the Far West, barred by the proto-historic 

 migrations from the Far East, as largely determined by the 

 erection of the Great Wall ; or pre-historic (neolithic) migrations, 

 also from the Far West, but barred by no serious obstacle, because 

 antecedent to the arrival of the proto-Mongolic tribes from the 

 Tibetan plateau. The true solution of the endless ethnical 

 complications in the extreme East, as in the Oceanic world, will 

 still be found in the now-demonstrated presence of a Caucasic 

 element antecedent to the Mongol in those regions. 



When the Hiung-nu 1 power was weakened by their westerly 

 migrations to Zungaria and South-west Siberia (Upper Irtish and 

 Lake Balkash depression), and broken into two sections during 

 their wars with the two Han dynasties (201 B.C. 220 A.D.), the 

 Korean Sien-pi became the dominant nation north of the Great 

 Wall. After destroying the last vestiges of the unstable Hiung-nu 

 empire, and driving the Mongolo-Turki hordes still westwards, 

 the Yuan-yuans, most powerful of all the Sien-pi tribes, remained 



I have not thought it desirable to touch on the interminable controversy 

 respecting the ethnical relations of the Hiung-nu, regarding them, not as a 

 distinct ethnical group, but like the Huns, their later western representatives, 

 as a heterogeneous collection of Mongol, Tungus, Turki, and perhaps even 

 Finnish hordes under a Mongol military caste. At the same time I have little 

 doubt that Mongolo-Tungus elements greatly predominated in the eastern 

 regions (Mongolia proper, Manchuria) both amongst the Hiung-nu and 

 their Yuan-Yuan (Sien-pi) successors, and that all the founders of the first great 

 empires prior to that of the Turki Assena in the Altai region (6th century A.D.) 

 were full-blood Mongols, as indeed recognised by Jenghiz-Khan himself. This 

 seems also the view of Sir H. H. Howorth, who returned to the subject at the 

 6th Congress of Orientalists, Leyden, 1883 (Actes, Part iv, p. 1/7-95). 

 K. 20 



