316 MAN: PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



who in their primeval eastern seats are still mostly typical Mon- 

 gols, but have been more and more assimilated to the European 

 type in their new Anatolian, Baltic, Danubian, and Balkan homes. 



Observant travellers have often been impressed by this pro- 

 gressive conformity of the Mongolo-Turks to Europeans. During 

 his westward journey through central Asia Capt. Younghusband, 

 on passing from Mongolia to Eastern Turkestan, found that the 

 people, though tall and fine-looking, had at first more of the 

 Mongol caste of feature than he had expected. "Their faces, 

 however, though somewhat round, were slightly more elongated 

 than the Mongol, and there was considerably more intelligence 

 about them. But there was more roundness, less intelligence, 

 less sharpness in the outlines than is seen in the inhabitants of 

 Kashgar and Yarkand." Then he adds : "As I proceeded westwards 

 I noticed a gradual, scarcely perceptible, change from the round of 

 a Mongolian type to a sharper and yet more sharp type of feature. 

 ...As we get farther away from Mongolia, we notice that the 

 faces become gradually longer and narrower; and farther west still, 

 among some of the inhabitants of Afghan Turkestan, we see that 

 the Tartar or Mongol type of feature is almost entirely lost 1 ." To 

 complete the picture it need only be added that still further west, 

 in Asia Minor, the Balkan Peninsula, Hungary, and Finland, the 

 Mongol features are often entirely lost. "The Turks of the west 

 have so much Aryan and Semitic blood in them, that the last 

 vestiges of their original physical characters have been lost, and 

 their language alone indicates their previous descent 2 ." 



Before they were broken up and dispersed over half the 

 northern hemisphere by Mongol pressure from the 



Turki Cradle. , ...,..., 



east, the primitive lurki tribes dwelt, according to 

 Howorth, mainly between the Ulugh-dagh mountains and the 

 Orkhon river in Mongolia, that is, along the southern slopes and 

 spurs of the Altai-Sayan system from the headwaters of the Irtysh 

 to the valleys draining north to Lake Baikal. But the Turki cradle 

 is shifted farther east by Richthofen, who thinks that their true 

 home lay between the Amur, the Lena, and the Selenga, where 

 at one time they had their camping-grounds in close proximity 



1 The Heart of a Continent, 1896, p. 118. 



2 O. Peschel, Races of Man, p. 380. 



