mountains to the south, about the head waters of the Yenisei—probably indicating the region whence the Samoyed tribes were driven, or wandered, northward, following the river-courses, and spreading out upon the shores of the northern ocean. What is known of them and their speech is mainly the fruit of the devoted labours of the intrepid traveller Castrén. The Samoyed dialects are destitute of literary cultivation and of records, and the wild people who speak them are without interest or consequence, in the present or the past, save simply as human beings. No other branch of the family has so little to recommend it to our notice.
The third branch includes the languages spoken by the Turkish tribes, a race which has played a part in modern history not altogether insignificant. Their earliest wanderings and conquests are doubtfully read in the annals of the Chinese empire, and their long struggles with the Iranian peoples in their border-lands are conspicuous themes of Persian heroic tradition. It was in the ninth and tenth centuries that they finally broke forth from their dreary abodes on the great plateau of central Asia; falling upon the eastern provinces of the already decaying Mohammedan caliphate, they hastened its downfall and divided its inheritance; and their victorious arms were carried steadily westward, until, in the middle of the fifteenth century, they were masters of Constantinople and of all that was left of the Greek empire; nor was their progress toward the heart of Europe checked but by the most heroic and long-continued efforts on the part of Magyars, Germans, and Slavonians. Their modern history, and their present precarious position upon the border of Europe, are too well known to call for more than an allusion. The subdivisions of the branch are numerous, and they cover a territory of very wide extent, reaching from the eastern edge of the Austrian dominions, through Asia Minor, Tatary, and Chinese Tatary, to beyond the centre of the Asiatic continent, while their outliers are found even along the Lena, to its mouth, in northernmost Siberia. They are classed together in three principal groups: first, the northern, of which the Kirghiz, Bashkir, and Yakut are the most important members; they occupy (with the
