From the results of the previous chapter we see that to the yellow race must be attributed all those peoples of Europe and Asia which speak agglutinative languages, and therefore that for the white race are left the inflected tongues. These it will be remembered, we divided into two great families, the Semitic and the Aryan or Japhetic. We thus see that from the earliest times to which we are able to point we have living in Europe and Asia these three divisions of the human family, whom some have looked upon as the descendants of Ham, Shem, and Japhet. What relationship the other excluded races of mankind, the black and red, bear to the Hamites, Shemites, and Japhetites, has not been suggested. It seems more reasonable to consider Noah as merely the ancestor of the white races, and, therefore, so far as our linguistic knowledge goes, of the Semitic and Aryan families of speech only. But outside the pure Semites there lived a race of a less pure nationality, springing, probably, from a mixture of Semites with earlier black and yellow races. These people we may distinguish as Hamites. A division of this race were the Cushites, the stock from which the Egyptian, the Chaldæan, and many of the Canaanite nations were mainly formed. But though from the earliest times there were probably in Asia these three divisions of mankind, their relative position and importance was very different from what it is now. At the present time the Turanian races are everywhere shrinking and dwindling before the descendants of Japhet. At the moment at which I write it is the Aryan Slavs who are pushing the yellow-skinned Tartars farther and farther back in Siberia and Central Asia, and are endeavouring to push the Mongolian Turks from their last foothold in Europe.[42] The Tartar races have had their era of great conquest too, for to them belong those races--Huns, Avars, Magyars--who have spread such devastation in Europe, to them belong such conquerors as Attila, Genghis Khan, and Timûr Lenk (Tamerlane). In the first few centuries after Mohammedism was introduced among them, the Turanians of Central Asia rose into power. Several different Tartar races in succession--Seljûks, Ayyûbites, Mongols (Moghuls), etc.--rose upon the ruins of the Arab Chalifate, and invaded India, Persia, Africa, and Europe. The last of these is the race of the Osmanlîs, or, as we call them simply, the Turks. Their days of conquest are past, and therefore, great as is the space which the Turanian people now occupy over the face of the globe, there is reason to believe that in early prehistoric times they were still more widely extended. In all probability the men of the polished-stone age in Europe and Asia were of this yellow-skinned Mongolian type. We know that the human remains of this period seem to have come from a short and round-skulled people; and this roundness of the skull is one of the chief marks of the Mongolians as distinguished from the white races of mankind.