world probably owes most of that measure of enlightenment, culture, and order which can be found in the Levant today. THE RACIAL DESCENT OF THE OTTOMAN TURKS The question as to the origin of the Ottoman Turks was raised in Western Europe as soon as the race began to appear upon the stage of history. There seemed to be something mysterious and uncanny about their rise to power. If an innumerable horde of strange barbarians, a second invasion of Attila, had overrun the Levant and settled down to rule its conquests, cause and effect would have been apparent. But this nation seemed to arise out of the earth. Organized and disciplined beyond any parallel in the West, it seemed to come from nowhere and to begin at once to take a very real part in human affairs.[2] The problem of its origin is by no means completely solved as yet, but the main elements can perhaps be outlined. A search for these carries the inquiry to the steppe lands. The great band of open country which stretches with hardly a break across the whole of Asia and far into Europe resembles the ocean both in its vastness and in its character as an intermediate region through which the travel of commerce, statesmanship, religion, learning, and curiosity can pass between more thickly-settled lands. It differs from the ocean, however, in being everywhere more or less habitable. The ethnic relations of its families, tribes, and nations are by no means clear. China, with a markedly Mongolian population, lay at the east and southeast; Indo-Europeans of the Caucasian race dwelt at the southwest and west. The tribes between seem from the earliest recorded times to have presented every intermediate stage of physical type, as they do now; and in general the shading from yellow to white appears to have proceeded regularly from east to west, a circumstance that may have been due largely to climatic influence, but was probably far more the result of admixture.[3] These peoples were given to frequent warfare, one of whose objects was the capture of men, women, and children as the most valuable booty. They seem to have had no race aversions that would hinder inter-mixture, and no race pride that would prevent captives, in the course of time, from attaining full equality in any rank to which their abilities could carry them. Accordingly, the process of admixture that can be observed in historic times has probably been followed from the remote past.