I think that there are few points upon the whole terrestrial globe, which are of greater importance for our historical researches than the oases of Central Asia. These in the primitive times were inexhaustible floodgates for those warlike hordes, who often inundated and conquered the most beautiful spots of Asia, streaming towards the west in wild torrents, and even occasioning alarm among Europeans. No people can be so interesting for us upon the subject of Ethnography as the Turko-Tartars, who, under such various names and forms, have appeared on the scene of the events of the world, and have had such powerful influence over our own circumstances. Is it not surprising that of all nations we are the least acquainted with these? Huns, Avars, Utigurs, Kutrigurs, Khazars, and so many others, float before our sight only in the mist of fable. The clash of arms which sounded through them from the Yaxartes to the heart of Gaul and Rome has long since ceased. In vain should we inquire even into their origin, did we not find in the scanty dates of the Western chronicles of that period some points of reliance. These dates show us that between the Tartar tribes of that age and the present inhabitants of Central Asia there did exist an analogy of an unmistakeable character. We detect this in descriptions of them--in the accounts of their manner of living--all evincing much resemblance to the customs and physical condition of the present inhabitants of Turkestan. A similar life to what Priscus describes in the Court of the King of the Huns is met with to-day in the tent of a nomadic chief. Attila is more original than Djingis or Taimur, but as historical personages they resemble each other. Energy and good fortune could now almost produce upon the borders of the Oxus and Yaxartes one of those heroes, whose soldiers, like an avalanche, carrying everything before them, would increase to hundreds of thousands, and would appear as a new example of God's scourge, if the powerful barriers of our civilisation, which has a great influence in the East, did not stop the way. The people of Central Asia, particularly the nomadic tribes, are, in the internal relations of their existence, the same as they were two thousand years ago. In these physiognomical signs we find already changes from a mixture of Iranian and Semitic blood (chiefly after the Arabian occupation). The features of the Mongolian-Kalmuck type here and there approach the Caucasian race. The Tartar in Central Asia is no longer what we see him represented by the Greek-Gothic writers, for even in the times of Djingis he was no longer the same. It is, therefore, of great interest to mark how this change in physiognomical type continually decreases from the east to the west--how this Deturkism, if I may so express myself, is perceptible among the various races of Central Asia, and in what degree their various gradations through social circumstances came, more or less, in contact with foreign elements.