Whatever may be the answer to these questions supplied by future researches, the Chinese are one of the great historical influences, and, if we contrast the peaceful habits of an agricultural population with the unsettled condition of a nation of nomads, and the security of a large consolidated government with the slave-dealing warfares that exist between thickly congregated petty tribes, we must allow that influence to have been a beneficial one.
_Area._--From Kamskatka to Norway, and from the Arctic Ocean to the frontiers of Tibet and Persia--nearly but not wholly continuous.
_Countries included._--The northern parts of the Chinese empire, greater part of Siberia, Mongolia, Tartary, Eastern Turkestan, Asia Minor, Turkey, Hungary, Finland, Esthonia, Lapland.
1. THE MONGOLIAN BRANCH. 2. THE TUNGUSIAN BRANCH. 3. THE TURK BRANCH. 4. THE UGRIAN BRANCH.
The reader is now asked to prepare himself for the transition from languages of a monosyllabic type, to languages other than monosyllabic; and from aptotic tongues to tongues where the inflections are numerous.
He is also asked to prepare himself for a transition, in the way of physical conformation, from a structure _approaching_ the Mongol type, to one essentially and typically Mongol.
In the former case the change is greater than in the latter.
Why is this? Why do not the changes go _pari passu_, so that the two tests should coincide, and so that it should be a matter of indifference which of the two we started with?
We get at the answer to this by remembering that _physical changes and philological changes, may go on at different rates_.
A thousand years may pass over two nations undoubtedly of the same origin; and which were, at the beginning of those thousand years, of the same complexion, form, and language.
At the end of those thousand years there shall be a difference. With one the language shall have changed rapidly, the physical structure slowly.
With the other the physical conformation shall have been modified by a quick succession of external influences, whilst the language shall have stayed as it was.
_With an assumed or proved original identity on each side, the difference in the rate of action on the part of the different influences, is the key to all discrepancies between the two tests. The language may remain_ in statu quo, _whilst the hair, complexion, and bones change; or the hair, complexion, and osteology may remain_ in statu quo, _whilst the language changes_.