4 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF EASTERN ASIA. 



checked operation of those natural laws which destroy mono- 

 syllableness. The latter character would no where be preserved 

 save where fixed communities had grown up in an early epoch. 

 But since that era a great succession of changes must have taken 

 place. As civilisation advanced in Mid-Asia, and the means 

 of rapid locomotion were acquired, isolation would cease, The 

 exparu'-on of strong tribes would no longer be necessarily a self 

 division and a growth of new nations. Dominant races would arise 

 in every region adjoining the great highways. There must then 

 have essued a great series of movements and displacements, tend- 

 ing not merely to disturb, but in many regions to obliterate, the 

 primary distribution of nations. But as continuous floods or 

 streams of foreign peoples have never been poured into middle 

 Asia, its revolutions, even when incited by foreign causes, have 

 Jed to no change in the fundamental ethnic character of the region. 

 Even foreign governments and foreign religions have rather taken 

 a native character than imposed their own. 



The Turanian languages, as we shall find, although sufficiently 

 distinguished from the monosyllabic group of 6. E. and the 

 inflectional family of 8, W. Asia, present very considerable 

 variations in their phonetic and ideologic character. It is evident 

 that the present Tartarian races have not been the immediate 

 progenitors of most of the more remote members of the family. 

 The races of America and N. E. Asia, although physically most 

 closely connected with the Chinese and some of the other nations 

 of E. Asia, possess a linguistic development that allies them also 

 to the races of S. W. Asia and Africa, and to the single European 

 remnant of a similar development still found in Spain. Much of 

 the advance of the Tartarian nations in all directions is historical. 

 Before their expansion began, the ethnology of middle and northern 

 Asia probably presented a linguistic development with traits more 

 akin to those of the Africo- Semitic, Euskarian and Celtic on the 

 one side and the American on the other. But although, in tracing 

 the ethnic history of the Turanian development, the Tartarian 

 nations may be found to occupy a different place in more ancient 

 times, and the connection of some of the groups to the east and 

 west be proved to be independent of them, their proximity to the 

 monosyllabic family and their greater approach to it, linguistically, 

 must always make them a most essential element in the investigation 

 of the development of the languages of the Turanian races. 



In enormous geographical extension and in amount of population, 

 the Turanian family is the greatest on the globe. If philology can 

 connect the various branches as closely as physiology has done, 

 and thus demonstrate the reality of its unity, it wilj render one of 

 the greatest services to ethnology. But the very hypothesis of so 

 wide a dispersion of one tribe necessarily implies u vast lapse of 

 time. If the Laplanders, the Tangusians, the Eastern Indians, the 

 New Zealanders, and the American aborigines, are all the Ati* 



