318 MAN: PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



from Finn to Slav and Teuton. Thus may be shown a series 

 of observations continuous between the most typical Mongol, 

 and those aberrant Mongolo-Caucasic groups which answer to 

 Prichard's " Allophylian races." Thus also is confirmed by a 

 study of details the above broad generalisation in which I have 

 endeavoured to determine the relation of the Finno-Turki peoples 

 to the primary Mongol and Caucasic divisions. 



Gibbon has shrewdly remarked that " the savage tribes of 

 mankind, as they approach nearer to the condition 



Origins and 



Early of animals, preserve a stronger resemblance to 



themselves and to each other. The uniform sta- 

 bility of their manners is the natural consequence of the imper- 

 fection of their faculties. Reduced to a similar situation, their 

 wants, their desires, their enjoyments, still continue the same... 

 and the banks of the Borysthenes [Dnieper], of the Volga, or of 

 the Selenga [in Mongolia], will indifferently present the same 

 uniform spectacle of similar and native manners- 1 ." To this 

 general uniformity in their social usages and institutions, com- 

 bined with an almost complete ignorance of their speech and 

 largely of their physical appearance, is unquestionably due the 

 still prevailing confusion regarding the earliest known Central 

 Asiatic populations and their first westward migrations. In the 

 popular estimation the countless hordes vaguely comprised by 

 the ancients under the general designation of Scythians 2 , are 

 regarded as rude nomads of true Mongol stock, to 



T* 1- o 



Scythians. ^ e identified with the Hiung-nu of the Chinese 

 records and the historical Huns (Attila's Huns), 

 now best represented in the Far East by the Sharra Mongols and 

 farther west by the Zungarian and Volga Kalmaks. But there 

 is good reason to believe that many, perhaps the majority of 

 those early Scythians were not Mongols at all, but Finns and 

 Turks, whose domain had already extended from the Altai uplands 

 to the confines of Europe many centuries before the new era. 



1 Decline and Fall, Ch. xxvi. 



They distinguished, to be sure, between the Scythians intra Imaum and 

 those extra Imaum. But this was merely a convenient geographical division, 

 and if the Imaus is to be identified with the Altai, no ethnical distinction is 

 drawn between the nomad tribes on either side of that range. 



