doubtable people are living in quiet and insignificance, as dependents of the Chinese empire. Their territory is bounded in the south by the Tibetan frontier, and extends thence eastward to the border of China, northward to lake Dzaisang, north-eastward to beyond lake Baikal, and to the edge of Manchuria, including the upper waters of the Lena and the Amoor. Their scattered fragments, too, are left in almost every country westward to the Volga, and a considerable colony of them are to be found upon both sides of the Volga, to some distance above its mouth. The Khalkas, Kalmucks, and Buriats are the most notable of their tribes.
The fifth and last branch is called the Tungusic. It occupies a broad tract of north-eastern Asia, from the frontier of China on the north to the Arctic Ocean, and from the neighbourhood of the Yenisei almost to Kamchatka. Its most conspicuous dialect, the Manchu, belongs to tribes which have established a claim upon the attention of the world by their conquest of China a little more than two centuries ago (A.D. 1644). In wielding the forces of that mighty empire, they long displayed a consummate ability; but their administration, attacked at once by foreign encroachment and domestic revolt, has now for some time been marked with fatal weakness; Scythian power seems at present not less decadent in the extreme East than in the West. This is not the first time that Tungusian races have built up their power upon a Chinese foundation. The powerful dynasties of Khitan and Kin, from the beginning of the tenth century to near the middle of the thirteenth, held a great part of northern China in subjection, though not to the entire subversion of the empire: like the modern Manchus, they adopted and perpetuated the Chinese institutions and culture. The realm of the Kin was one of the many which went down before the Mongolian onset. The Manchus call by the name Orochon, 'reindeer-possessors,' all Tungusian tribes excepting their own; respecting their mutual relations little is known in detail: they are dependences partly of the Chinese empire, partly of the Russian.
The brief survey of the history of the Scythian races with which we have thus accompanied our statement of their di-
