Just as the Scythians, a Mongolian race, had adopted an Aryan tongue, so there would be nothing surprising in the view that the Oghuzes were an Aryan race, although they spoke a Finnish dialect. This theory is curiously supported by a naïve phrase of the traveller Rubruquis, who was sent by St. Louis to the ruler of the Mongols. “I was struck,” says the good monk, “by the likeness borne by this prince to the late M. Jean de Beaumont, who was equally ruddy and fresh-looking.” Alexander von Humboldt, interested, as he well might be, by such a remark, adds with no less good sense, “This point of physiognomy is especially worth noting if we remember that the family of Tchingiz was probably Turkish, and not Mongolian.” He confirms his conclusion by adding that “the absence of Mongolian characteristics strikes us also in the portraits which we have of the descendants of Baber, the rulers of India” (_Asie centrale_, vol. i, p. 248 _and note_). Footnote 78: Hammer, _op. cit._, vol. i, p. 448: “The battle against the Hungarians was hotly contested and the booty considerable. So many boys and girls were seized that the most beautiful female slave was exchanged for a jackboot, and Ashik-Pacha-Zadeh, the historian, who himself took part in the battle and the plunder, could not sell five boy-slaves at Skopi for more than 500 piastres.” Footnote 79: “Ethnology,” &c., p. 439: “The Hungarian nobility ... is proved by historical and philological evidence to have been a branch of the great Northern Asiatic stock, closely allied in blood to the stupid and feeble Ostiaks and the untamable Laplanders.” Footnote 80: _Essai historique sur l’origine des Hongrois_ (Paris, 1844). Footnote 81: The current opinions about the peoples of Central Asia will, it seems, have to be greatly modified. It can no longer be denied that the blood of the yellow races has been crossed more or less considerably by a white strain. This fact was not suspected before, but it throws a doubt on all the ancient notions on the subject, which must now be revised in the light of it. Alexander von Humboldt makes a very important observation with regard to the Kirghiz-Kasaks, who are mentioned by Menander of Byzantium and Constantine Porphyrogenetes. He rightly shows that when the former speaks of a Kirghiz (Χερχις) concubine given by the Turkish Shagan Dithubul to Zemarch, the envoy of the Emperor Justin II, in 569, he is referring to a girl of mixed blood. She corresponds exactly to the beautiful Turkish girls who are so praised by the Persians, and who were as little Mongolian in type as this Kirghiz (_Asie centrale_, vol. i, p. 237, &c.; vol. ii, pp. 130–31). Footnote 82: Schaffarik, _Slavische Altertümer_, vol. i, p. 279 _et pass._ Footnote 83: Aug. Thierry, _Histoire de la Conquête d’Angleterre_, vol. i, p. 155. Footnote 84: Lyell, “Principles of Geology,” vol. i, p. 178. Footnote 85: