extinction of which we have ourselves witnessed within the past few years. The westernmost Turkish race, the conquerors of Constantinople, usually known by the distinctive name of Osmanlis, or Ottomans (both words are corruptions of the name of their leader, Othman), have a very rich and abundant literature, covering the whole period from the rise of the race to power in the fourteenth century down to our own time. It is, however, of only secondary interest, as being founded on Persian and Arabic models, and containing little that is distinctively national in style and spirit. The learned dialect, too, in which it is written, is crowded full of Persian and Arabic words, often to the nearly total exclusion of native Turkish material. In the Finno-Hungarian branch of the family, finally, there is the same paucity of literary records. In Hungary, after its conversion to Roman Christianity (about A.D. 1000), Latin was for a long time the almost exclusive medium of learned communication and composition. The Reformation, in the sixteenth century, favoured the uprising of a national literature, in a vernacular tongue; but Austrian policy checked and thwarted its development; and a renewed start, taken about the beginning of the present century, was baffled when the remains of Hungarian liberty were trampled out in 1849. Finnish written literature is still more recent, but boasts at least one work of a high order of interest, of a wholly native and original stamp: the Kalevala, composed of half-mythical, half-legendary songs, which have been handed down by tradition, apparently for many centuries, from generation to generation of the Finnish people. No other Ugrian race possesses a literature.
It is claimed of late, however, by those who are engaged in constructing linguistic, ethnological, and political history out of the just disentombed records of Assyrian culture and art, that sufficient evidence is found to compel the belief that neither Indo-Europeans nor Semites, but some third race, were the first occupants and owners of the soil, and laid the foundation of the culture which was adopted and developed there by the other races, as they later, one after another, succeeded to the supremacy; and some maintain
