The days of the West Mongol Empire, the dominion of the turbaned Turk, are undoubtedly numbered, but not as a result of national decrepitude. The successor of Sultan Bajazet will succumb, not as a ‘sick man’, but as a cripple; an invalid worn out in a fight against hopeless odds. Within the last hundred years the stadtholders of the Prophet had to defend their throne against Russian, Austrian, Greek, French and British attacks, and more than once against a West-European alliance, backed by African and Asiatic insurgents. Within that period 3,000,000 Mongol Mussulmans have perished on the battlefield, a million for every generation of an impoverished and not specially reproductive race. Their empire will collapse, but its defenders are still the hardiest soldiers of Europe, the most unconquerable by hardships, wounds and hunger. The burden-carriers of Constantinople are still the stoutest men of our latter-day world. We might as well impeach the degeneracy of the Circassian highlanders, who resisted the power of the Russian monarchy for sixty-five years, and in their last stronghold stood at bay with drawn hunting knives--after blunting their sabres and exhausting a stock of ammunition purchased by the sacrifice of their herds and harvests. For these heroic mountaineers, too, were Mongols, kinsmen of the martial Turkomans and chivalrous Magyars. The Turanian race--a synonym of the Pan-Mongolians--comprises as many different types as the Aryans and Semites taken together. In 1863 some twenty clans of the vanquished highlanders left the Caucasus _en masse_ to settle in the mountains of the Turkish province of Adrianople. They will share the fate of their protectors, and may soon be obliged to follow their flight across the Hellespont. But the final expulsion of the West Mongols will, after all, mean only that the Caucasians have recovered lost ground, and freed at least Europe from an intrusive tribe of their most persistent and most formidable rivals. RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE CENTRAL ESKIMO.[B] BY PROFESSOR FRANZ BOAS. [B] A description of the religious beliefs of the Central Eskimo, based upon observations made by the writer, was published in the Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. The following account embodies observations which Capt. James S. Mutch, of Peterhead, Scotland, following a suggestion of the writer, had the kindness to make. The material for this study was collected by Capt. Mutch during a long-continued stay in Cumberland Sound.