_Rumelia_, the province which first comes into notice is, the true and proper area of the Turks, Ottomans, or Osmanlis; a family which, considered in respect to _European_ ethnology, is as unimportant from its numerical magnitude, as it is recent in respect to its introduction. Yet this is a fact which we are slow to perceive at first; since the Turkish empire is so great, that, unless we separate its ethnological from its political elements, we fail to realize the extent to which the Osmanlis are not only intrusive, but inconsiderable. It is only in one of its provinces that the number of the Osmanli conquerors so nearly approaches that of the original Europeans, to give them the appearance of the natural occupants of the country; this being the province in question, coinciding, as nearly as possible, with the Valley of the ancient Hebrus, or the modern Maritza. It is a wide and fruitful plain, that Nature, perhaps, meant for tillage, but which the pastoral habits of its possessors have kept a grazing country. It is a plain, with the exception of the small mountain ridges on each side--the Despoto-Dagh and the Stanches-Dagh--a point worth remembering, because its physical conditions determine the probable permanence of its earlier populations--populations which, in all impracticable countries, are likely to have held their own in the mountains, and to have retreated before an invader in the plains. As A.D. 1458 is the date of the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II. it may also pass for the date of the commencement of the Osmanli sway in Europe, and the Osmanli preponderance in the particular occupation of the province of Rumelia; for the time, in short, when ancient Thrace became Turkish. But the preliminaries had been going on for some time before, and it was as early as A.D. 1360 that the Hellespont was crossed by Amurath I. Till then, the Osmanli belonged to Asia Minor, Anatolia, or Roum, as it was called from the declining power of the degenerate Romans of Constantinople. But they were not indigenous even there; since Roum or Anatolia was a conquered country, even as Rumelia was--conquered, too, from the same degenerate and fictitious Romans. Hence the stream of Ottoman blood that passed from Asia to Europe was by no means pure. The occupancy of Asia Minor was not the work of a day; on the contrary, the process of appropriation was upwards of four centuries in duration; since the conquest of the race of Seljuk began in A.D. 1074. And this again was an extension of frontier from Persia; and Persia was never truly Turk. The stream that spread and wasted itself in Europe is not discovered at its fountain-head until we have traced it from Rumelia to Anatolia, from Anatolia to Persia, and from Persia to either Turkistan or further. Then, indeed, we find amongst the most southern members of the great Turk stock, amongst those whose blood has been most mixed, and amongst those who are farthest from the country of