Excerpt from Turkey Old and New, Vol. 1: Historical, Geographical and Statistical

The recent war waged between Russia and Turkey is only the latest episode in a great con¿ict of races which has lasted in Europe for more than five centuries, and the origin of which has to be traced back through a good many more than a thousand years into the obscurity of primitive and barbaric life in Central Asia. A brief review of this ancient feud will help us to understand the essen tial conditions of the strife that has so long existed between the two nations, and also serve as a fitting intro duction of the following history of the Ottoman Empire. Long ages before Greece or Rome existed, ethnologists tell us, two widely different races occupied the more habitable parts of the great Asiatic Continent, and as soon as they became too numerous to follow their nomadic ways of life without coming into collision with one another, began to struggle for the mastery. One of these races, the Mongolian, spreading westward from China, helped to displace the other race, the Aryan, already breaking into rival fragments, and branching out into independent nations and clusters of nations. From the Aryan stock sprang the Hindoos to the south of the Himalayas, and the successive colonies of Kelts, Teutons, Italians, Greeks, and others, who gradually took possession of the chief portions of Europe. The Slavonic tribes, more numerous but less Open to civilizing agencies than most of the others, formed one of these families. The vol. I. B.

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