Unable to rise above humanity in their conceptions of the deity, they worshipped all material things. Trees with them in all times were objects of veneration, and of especial worship in particular localities. The mysterious serpent was with them a god, and the bull in most Turanian countries a being to be worshipped. The sun, the moon, the stars, all filled niches in their Pantheon; in fact, whatever they saw they believed in, whatever they could not comprehend they worshipped. They cared not to inquire beyond the evidence of their senses, and were incapable of abstracting their conceptions. To the Turanians also is due that peculiar reverence for localities made celebrated by great historical events, or rendered sacred by being the scene of great religious events, and hence to them must be ascribed the origin of pilgrimages, and all their concomitant adjuncts and ceremonies. It is to this race also that we owe the existence of human sacrifices. Always fatalists, always and everywhere indifferent of life, and never fearing death, these sacrifices never were to them so terrible as they appear to more highly-organised races. Thus a child, a relative, or a friend, was the most precious, and consequently the most acceptable offering a man could bring to appease the wrath or propitiate the favour of a god who had been human, and who was supposed to have retained all the feelings of humanity for ever afterwards. It is easy to trace their Tree and Serpent worship in every corner of the old world from Anuradhapura in Ceylon, to Upsala in Sweden. Their tombs and tumuli exist everywhere. Their ancestral worship is the foundation at the present day of half the popular creeds of the world, and the planets have hardly ceased to be worshipped at the present hour. Most of the more salient peculiarities of this faith were softened down by the great Buddhist reform in the sixth century B.C., and that refinement of their rude primitive belief has been adopted by most of the Turanian people of the modern world, and is now almost exclusively the appanage of people having Turanian blood in their veins. Even, however, through the gloss of their Buddhist refinements we can still discern most of the old forms of faith, and even its most devoted votaries are yet hardly more than half converted. GOVERNMENT. The only form of government ever adopted by any people of Turanian race was that of absolute despotism,—with a tribe, a chief,—in a kingdom, a despot. In highly civilised communities, like those of Egypt and China, their despotism was tempered by bureaucratic forms, but the chief was always as absolute as a Timour or an Attila, though not always strong enough to use his power as terribly as they did. Their laws were real or traditional edicts of their kings, seldom written, and never administered according to any fixed form of procedure.