the sultans to take their wives from the Caucasian race.[20] If Orchan be set down as of pure Mongolian descent, and if it be supposed, as is certainly very near the truth, that all the mothers of succeeding sultans were not of Turkish blood, and if the mother be assumed to contribute to the child an influence equal to the father’s, the proportion of Mongolian blood in the veins of the reigning sultan, who is of the twentieth generation from Orchan, can readily be calculated,—about one part in one million.[21] Similar proportions would hold good for many of the Osmanli Turks. Probably the nation as a whole has no more of Tatar blood than the American nation has of Norman. THE SOURCES OF OTTOMAN CULTURE The question at once arises: What significance, then, has the name Turk as applied to modern Turkey? To this query a general answer only can be given here, as part of a rough statement in regard to the derivation of the main elements of Ottoman culture. Of the whole body of ideas and institutions and intangible inheritances possessed by the Ottoman Turks in the sixteenth century, no small number of the most fundamental ones were derived from the remote Tatar ancestors of a part of the nation, from whom even this part was far separated in time and space. Foremost among these inheritances is the Turkish language, which in its principles of monosyllabic stem, inflexion by postfixes alone, and assonance, and in its general system of grammar and body of words of ordinary life, has survived from the early days through all vicissitudes.[22] Old Turkish is the Anglo-Saxon of the Osmanli, as Persian is his Greek and Arabic his Latin. Somewhat more hospitable than those who use Western languages, the Turk has nearly always accepted with a foreign thing its foreign name; and the great majority of the foreign words and phrases so accepted he has not changed in any way, except to modify the pronunciation of some sounds about which the tongue does not readily curl. Among other Tatar bequests to the Osmanlis may be named the hospitable assimilative tendency to which reference has already been made; a predisposition to war and conquest, accompanied by an openness of mind as to the best methods and means of prevailing; an ability and inclination to govern, combined with great adaptability as to methods and means; and some acquaintance with systematic and bureaucratic methods of government impressed upon the nation by the Chinese. Again, the Tatars, possessed of the tenacious conservatism of a primitive people, predisposed the Ottomans to a close adherence to custom—to the doctrine that, when a thing had been done once in a certain way, it should always thereafter be done in the same way. Finally, the Tatars contributed various elements of the national character, such as a touch of the old love of nomad life, a certain stolidity of spirit and calm sobriety of temper (taught, perhaps, by the vastness of the steppe in comparison with