known by many different names: some call it the Altaic, or the Ural-Altaic, family, from the chains of mountains which are supposed to have served as centres of dispersion to its tribes; others style it, from one or other of its principal branches, the Mongolian, or the Tataric; the appellation Turanian has also won great currency within no long time, owing to its adoption by one or two very conspicuous authorities in linguistic ethnology, although recommended neither by its derivation nor its original application (we shall speak more particularly of both later); Scythian, finally, is a title which it has sometimes received, taken from the name by which the Greeks knew the wild nomad races of the extreme north-east, which were doubtless in part, at least, of this kindred—and the designation Scythian we will here employ, as, upon the whole, though far from being unexceptionable, best answering our purpose.
Five principal branches compose the family. The first of them, the Ugrian, or Finno-Hungarian, is almost wholly European in its position and known history. It includes the language of the Laplanders, the race highest in latitude, but lowest in stature and in developed capacity, of any in Europe; that of the Finns in north-western Russia, with related dialects in Esthonia and Livonia; those of several tribes, of no great numbers or consequence, stretching from the southern Ural mountains toward the interior of Russia and down the Volga—as the Permians, Siryanians, Wotiaks, Cheremisses, and Mordwins; and the tongue of the Hungarians or Magyars, far in the south, with those of their kindred, the Ostiaks and Woguls, in and beyond the central chain of the Ural—which was the region whence the rude ancestors of the brave and noble race who now people Hungary fought their way down to the Danube, within the historical period, or hardly a thousand years ago.
The second branch is the Samoyedic, nearest akin with the Ugrian, yet apparently independent of it. It occupies the territory along the northern coast of Europe and Asia, from the White Sea across the lower Yenisei, and almost to the Lena, one of the most barren and inhospitable tracts of the whole continent; while some of its dialects are spoken in the
