people at their most prosperous period. Their physical superiority to the Khitay would probably be owing to their abstention from "bang" and opium, and we need not suppose that they were the descendants of a stronger race, who had issued from the frigid north, when we have an explanation so much simpler and more natural at hand. They were found by their Khitay rulers to form excellent soldiers, policemen, and other Government servants, such as carriers, &c. In this last employment many found their way to Hamil, thence to Turfan and Urumtsi, and their numbers were increased by discharged soldiers, who remained as military settlers sooner than return to Kansuh. In the course of a few generations their numbers became much greater, until, at last, in the cities we have named, they formed the majority of the inhabitants. In Kuldja, too, they were very numerous, but south of the Tian Shan they do not seem to have advanced westward of Kucha in any great force. At Aksu the Andijan influence, supreme in Western Kashgar, presented an impassable barrier to the Tungani, who, it must be remembered, had no sympathy with Khokand. The Tungani were, therefore, Mahomedan subjects of China, originating in Kansuh, but who had also, in the course of time, spread westward into Chinese Turkestan and Jungaria. They were employed in the service of the country without restriction, nor can we find that they were subjected to any unfair usage, after the measures taken against them in the earlier days of Keen-Lung. They may not have been as highly favoured as the Sobo tribes, and they may have been subjected to some ridicule in Kansuh; but in Jungaria they were on an equality with all the other Chinese, and immeasurably better placed in the political scale than the Andijanis or Tarantchis. The Chinese had just grounds for believing that no danger to their rule in Eastern Turkestan or Jungaria would ever be caused by the Tungani, and it is not easy to explain how their reasonable anticipations were falsified. The Tungani were fervent, if not the most orthodox in form of, Mahomedans, and it would appear that they were not free from a belief in their own superiority to the Khitay. This feeling was fostered by the "mollahs," or priests, who became very active within the Chinese dominions, when these had been extended by conquest into the heart of Asia. As if in retaliation for a Khitay conquest the Mahomedan religion was undermining the outworks of its rival's power slowly, but surely. The impulse given to trade by the security and patronage that accompanied Chinese rule was, at least from a purely Chinese point of view, neutralized as an advantage by the admission into the empire of energetic and eloquent preachers of the superior merits of Mahomedanism. It required many generations before the effect of their efforts became perceptible, and it was not until the power of China fell into an extraordinary decline--a decline which many thought, with some show of reason, was to