EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



Hungarian, and by the Turkish. In Asia it is 

 represented by .a great number of languages, 

 spoken in the Caucasus, in Turkistan, and in. 

 Siberia. Eastward of this vast region comes the 

 Mongolian or yellow race, with which we should 

 be very careful not to confound the Tatars. 

 There has always been a great deal of confu- 

 sion of nomenclature in speaking of these races, 

 but the lines of distinction are really simple 

 enough when we have once learned them. The 

 ambiguous word which is responsible for most 

 of the confusion is the epithet Tatar, which did 

 originally belong to the Mongols, but has come 

 to be applied by preference to the Turkish 

 family. When Jinghis Khan, in the thirteenth 

 century, made the name Tatar a sign of terror 

 and humiliation to all Asia and Europe, it be- 

 came customary to apply this dreaded epithet 

 to all the hordes that were subject to the Mon- 

 golian ruler, changing the word slightly to 

 " Tartar," so as to add to it a mild flavour of 

 the bottomless pit, in allusion to the general 

 behaviour of those ugly customers. As most 

 of these hordes with which Europeans came 

 into contact were really of white or Turkish 

 race, the name Tatar became gradually appro- 

 priated to these, and thus became unfit for dis- 

 tinguishing the yellow Mongolians. All am- 

 biguity would be avoided if we were to drop 

 the name Tatar altogether, and substitute the 

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