IX.] THE NORTHERN MONGOLS. 329 



repudiating the national name "Turk" still retained with pride 

 by the ruder peasant classes of Asia Minor. The latter are often 

 spoken of as "Seljuk Turks," as if there were some racial difference 

 between them and the European Osmanli, and for the distinction 

 there is some foundation. As pointed out by Arminius Vambery 1 , 

 the Osmanli have been influenced and modified by their closer 

 association with the Christian populations of the Balkan lands, 

 while in Anatolia the Seljuks have been able better to preserve 

 the national type and temperament. The true Turki spirit ("das 

 Tiirkentum ") survives especially in the provinces of Lykaonia 

 and Kappadokia, where the few surviving natives were not only 

 Islamised but ethnically fused, whereas in Europe most of them 

 (Bosnians, Albanians) were only Islamised, and here the Turki 

 element has always been slight. 



At present the original Turki type and temperament are 

 perhaps best preserved amongst the remote Yakuts 

 of the Lena, and the Kirghiz groups (Kirghiz 

 Kazaks and Kara Kirghiz] of the West Siberian steppe and the 

 Pamir uplands. The Turki connection of the Yakuts, about 

 which some unnecessary doubts had been raised, has been set 

 at rest by V. A. Sierochevsky", who, however, describes them 

 as now a very mixed people, owing to alliances with the Tunguses 

 and Russians. They are of short stature, averaging scarcely 

 5 ft. 4 in., and this observer thought their dark but not brilliant 

 black eyes, deeply sunk in narrow orbits, gave them more of a 

 Red Indian than of a Mongol cast. They are almost the only 

 progressive aboriginal people in Siberia, although numbering not 

 more than 200,000 souls, concentrated chiefly along the river 

 banks on the plateau between the Lena and the Aldan. 



In the Yakuts we have an extreme instance of the capacity of 



man to adapt himself to the milieu. They not merely exist, but 



thrive and display a considerable degree of energy and enterprise 



in the coldest region on the globe. Within the isothermal of 



-72 Fahr. Verkhoyansk, in the heart of their territory, is alone 



1 Die Stellung der Tiirk^n in Enropa, in Geogr. Zeitschrift, Leipzig, 1897. 

 Part 5, p. 250 sq. 



' 2 Ethnographic Researches, edited by Prof. N. E. Vasilofky for the 

 Imperial Geogr. Soc. i8q6, quoted in Nature. Dec. 3, 1896, p. 97. 



