the present Magyar nation has proceeded from a gradual, scarcely definable settlement of Ural-Altaic elements in the lowlands of Hungary. Originally as warriors and protectors of the Slavs settled in Pannonia, they became afterwards their lords and masters, something like the Franks in Gaul and the Varangians in Russia, with this difference, however, that the latter exchanged their language for that of their subjects, and became lost among the masses of the subjugated people, while the Magyars to this day have preserved their language and their national individuality intact, and in course of time were able to establish a Magyar ethnography. Looking at it from this point of view, not Asia but the middle Danube-basin becomes the birthplace of Magyarism. Its mixed ethnography, formerly known by various appellations, became through its martial proclivities a terror to the Christian West, and compelled Charlemagne to bring a strong Christian coalition against it in the field. This first crusade of the Occident, bent but did not break the power of the Ural-Altaic warriors, who ruled from the Moldau as far as the borders of Upper Austria; for the remnants retiring behind the Theis soon after received reinforcements from a tribe of Turks known as the "Madjars," _i.e._, Magyars, under the command of Árpád, whose descendants accepted Christianity and established the Hungary of the present day, both politically and ethnically. Curiously enough this ethnological discussion was not at all agreeable to my so-called paleo-Magyar compatriots. The romantic legend of the invasion of Árpád into Pannonia with his many hundred thousand warriors, sounds more beautiful in the ears of the Magyar patriots, than their prosaic derivation from a confused ethnical group; as if there were any single nation in Europe which is not patched and pieced together from the most diverse elements, and only in later times has presented itself as an undivided whole. In the Hungarians, however, this childish vanity is the more ridiculous since it is much more glorious, as a small national fragment, to play for centuries the _rôle_ of conqueror, and in the strength of its national proclivities to absorb other elements, than to conquer with the sword and then to be absorbed in the conquered element as Franks, Varangians, and others have been. Truly nations, as well as individuals, have to pass through an infant stage, and I am not surprised that this conception of mine, and my solution of the ethnological problem, did not find much favour in Hungary. Before concluding this review of my scientific-literary activity, I should mention that I also have ventured into the regions of history, a totally unknown field to me, wherein, as is the case with many hazardous expeditions, I betrayed more temerity than forethought. My book on the-- 15. _History of Bokhara_,