connection with the family may be found among other Asiatic tongues, as yet unclassed. Now some linguistic scholars, of no little note and authority, have ventured to give to these possibilities the value of established and unquestionable facts. They have set up an enormous family, which they have styled the "Turanian;" they have allotted to it the agglutinative structure as its distinctive characteristic, and have made it include nearly all known tongues save the Indo-European and Semitic, not in Asia alone, but through the oceanic islands and over the continent of America. Such sweeping and wholesale conglomeration (for we can hardly call it classification), at the present stage of progress of linguistic research, is wholly unscientific, and of no authority or value. It represents only a want of detailed knowledge, and a readiness to give way to loose and unscrupulous theorizing, on the part of its authors, who are, at the very best, anticipators of the result of scientific inquiry—who are even already proved in part its contradictors: for it is long since shown that many of the alleged "Turanian" dialects are hardly less fundamentally different in their structure from the typical languages of the family than is the Greek or the Hebrew. That the inventors of the name Turanian have associated it with such a baseless classification is sufficient reason why it should be strictly rejected from the terminology of linguistic science. Nor has it in virtue of its derivation any peculiar claim to our acceptance. It is borrowed from the legendary history of the Persian or Iranian race, as represented to us chiefly by the Shah-Nameh, or 'Book of Kings,' of Firdusi. There Irej and Tur are two of the three brothers from whom spring the races of mankind; and the tribes of Iran and Turan, their descendants—namely, the native Persians and their neighbours upon the north-east, probably of Turkish kindred—are represented as engaged in incessant warfare upon the frontier of their respective territory. Why we should adopt a term so local in its original application, out of a cycle of legends with which so few of us are familiar, as the name of a race which is claimed to extend from the north-western
