618 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



MODEKN MONGOLS. 



By F. L. OSWALD, M.D., A.M. 



THE political supremacy of the Caucasian race was supposed to have 

 been decided by the fall of Carthage, more than two thousand 

 years ago, but was thrice afterwards imperiled by an encounter with a 

 rival of long-unsuspected resources. 



The Scythians of Strabo were probably not Tartars, but Slavs ('Sar- 

 matians'), or, like their allies, the Gets, Slavs, mingled with Teutons. 

 Parthia, too, had a semi-Aryan population; but the campaign of Attila 

 gave the champions of Europe a chance to measure their strength with 

 that of a new foe, as shifty as the Semites, and of far greater staying- 

 power. His Huns were undoubtedly Mongols, and came so near over- 

 powering the inheritors of Eoman strategy that at one time the fate of 

 western civilization hung upon the issue of a single battle. The western 

 coalition triumphed, yet its victory on the plains of Chalons (October, 

 451), was due to the numerical inferiority of their enemies as much as 

 to the predominance of their own skill or valor. The very retreat of 

 the vanquished chief established his claim to the prestige of a superla- 

 tive tactician. 



Again, in 1402, only the accidental quarrel of two Mongol con- 

 querors saved Europe from the fate of its ravaged borders. Sultan 

 Bajazet had vanquished all his western foes, and the union of his forces 

 with those of Tamerlane would undoubtedly have sealed the doom of 

 the Mediterranean coast lands, if not all of Christendom. 



A hundred years later the generals of Solyman II. came very near 

 retrieving the neglected chance. They vanquished Austrian, Hun- 

 garian and Italian armies, and in 1560 defeated the combined armadas 

 of the Christian sea-power at Port Jerbeh — so completely, indeed, that 

 the allies were eager to make peace by betraying each other. 



And it would be a great mistake to ascribe these victories to a 

 mere triumph of brute strength. That same Solyman, with all his 

 fanaticism, was a patron of every secular science, and at a time when 

 western princes had to sign their names by proxy, Mohammed Baber 

 Khan, the conqueror of India, wrote essays in four different languages 

 and published memoirs abounding with shrewd comments on social and 

 ethical questions and problems of political economy. He was a poet, 

 too, and liberal enough to compose a dirge in memory of a prince 

 whom he had slain in single combat. 



Ethnologically, there is, therefore, nothing abnormal in the out- 



