7. Ottoman or Osmanli.—The Turks of the Turkish Empire.
8. Nogays.—The Turks of the parts between the Black Sea and the Caspian, north of Caucasus.
9. Turks of the Russian Empire.—Bashkirs(?), Teptyars, Baraba, &c. With all these, although the language is Turk, there is good reason to believe that the original substratum is Finn. With the Bashkirs this is generally considered to be the case.
10. The isolated Yakuts of the Lena.
Such is the great Turk area, the extent of which is, in itself, an ethnological study; equally remarkable for its positive and its negative peculiarities.
Laying aside the Yakuts as isolated, and the Turks of Asia-Minor and Thrace as recent settlers, we have in Turkish Asia an enormous steppe, mountains of all but first-rate magnitude, the head-waters of many rivers, but the embouchures of none, a salt-water lake but no communication with the ocean. Yet, given the central point of a large continent, this is what we expect à priori. If any influence that shall affect the fate of the world at large is to be developed in such an area, it must, surely, be an influence strongly and typically contrasted with the influence which such relations of land and water as the Mediterranean supplies to Greece, and in a less degree to every country that abuts on it, are calculated to develop. The dispersion of the Turkish race is essentially the dispersion of a race over a continent. I do not know who first used the illustration, but the manner in which Othman's all-conquering host was arrested by the Hellespont, has been well compared to the check that a running brook puts to the Scotch witches and wizards. What Leander and Lord Byron swam across, the conqueror of Asia was checked by.
The relations to the pole on one side and the equator on the other, are remarkably parallel between the two great conquering nations of the world—the Turks of Asia, and the Goths of Europe. The latitudes 47—55 enclose, the nations who, on the one side, displaced the aborigines of Asia Minor and Thrace, on the other, those of Keltic Britain and of North America.
One condition necessary for a race that thus spread themselves abroad, occurs in a remarkable degree with the Turk. In the Yakut country we find the most intense cold known in Asia; in Pamer, the greatest elevation above the sea-level; in the south of Ægypt, an intertropical degree of heat. Yet, in all these countries we find the Turk. In their physiognomy the Turks have in many instances departed from the Mongol type; and, hence, the agreement between the two cognate families is less manifest in their physical conformation than in their languages. The nature and extent of this deviation is well worth more investigation than it has met with; and next in importance to the fact itself, is the reason that may be assigned for it.
Whether it may be from the Osmanli Turk of Constantinople, with his un-Mongolian length of beard, his regularly formed eye, and his other European points of physiognomy, being the standard by which we measure the other divisions of the family, or whether we have unnecessarily restricted the term Mongol to the inhabitants of Mongolia, it is certain that a great majority of travellers are in the habit of describing a Mongol cast of countenance when found in a Turk, as an exceptional phenomenon; just as if the Turk had one character and the Mongol another, and as if a deviation either way was an anomaly.
Now, the notice of all differences, however small, between the tribes of the Turk, and those of any other division of the human kind, is so far from being exceptionable, that it is particularly desirable.