With the evidence of language, the evidence of physical confirmation is said to disagree. The Yakuts are essentially Mongolian in physiognomy. The value of the fact must be determined by what has been already said upon the subject.
The locality of the Yakuts is remarkable. It is that of a weak section of the human race, pressed into an inhospitable climate by a stronger one. Yet the Turks have ever been the people to displace others, rather than to be displaced themselves. On the other hand, the traditions of the country speak expressly to a southern origin.
In respect to the social development of the Yakut, Von Middendorf's distinctions are the most suggestive as well as the most critical. The southernmost Yakuts have the horse, the middlemost the rein-deer, the northernmost the dog. The manners of the southern ones are best known; and these are essentially pastoral. Besides the breeding of herds of horses, the Russian fur-trade has developed an industrial form of the hunter-state; so that, amongst the Yakuts, property accumulates, and we have a higher civilization than will be found elsewhere in the same latitude; Finland and Norway alone being excepted.
Other circumstances make the Yakuts an ethnological study. They are not only Turks who are not Mahometan, but their Christianity is still imperfect: hence they represent the Shamanism of the Turk before he became Moslemized. The details of the Yakut creed, sufficiently numerous to form, along with those of the still pagan Ugrians and Samöeids, an elaborate picture of an old religion, which, in its essential characters, was common to all the families of High Asia and Siberia, may be best found in Ermann.[30] The simple fact of its representing an early religion, is all that can here be noticed.
THE UGRIAN BRANCH OF THE TURANIAN STOCK.
1. Present distribution—continuous.—West and East—From Norway to the Yenisey. North and South (South-East)—From the North Cape to the Russian governments of Simbirsk, Saratof, and Astrakhan. The Volga south of its confluence with the Kama.
2. Isolated portion.—Hungary.
3. Ancient distribution.—Further southwards along the whole frontier, i.e., in Scandinavia, Russia, and Siberia. The Eastward extension probably less than at present.
4. As portions of a mixed population beyond their proper area—In Sweden and Norway.
Religion.—Lutheranism, Romanism, Greek Church, Imperfect Christianity, Shamanism.