mind the very idea of a people of this kind,
dwelling too, and that for ages, in some of the most celebrated and
beautiful regions of the world, such as Syria and Asia Minor. With this
view I will read what Volney says of them, as he found them in Syria
towards the close of the last century. "The Turkmans," he says,[19] "are
of the number of those Tartar hordes, who, in the great revolutions of
the Empire of the Caliphs, emigrated from the eastward of the Caspian
Sea, and spread themselves over the vast plains of Armenia and Asia
Minor. Their language is the same as that of the Turks, and their mode
of life nearly resembles that of the Bedouin Arabs. Like them, they are
shepherds, and consequently obliged to travel over immense tracts of
land to procure subsistence for their numerous herds.... Their whole
occupation consists in smoking and looking after their flocks.
Perpetually on horseback, with their lances on their shoulders, their
crooked sabres by their sides, and their pistols in their belts, they
are expert horsemen and indefatigable soldiers.... A great number of
these tribes pass in the summer into Armenia and Caramania, where they
find grass in great abundance, and return to their former quarters in
the winter. The Turkmans are reputed to be Moslem ... but they trouble
themselves little about religion."

While I was collecting these passages, a notice of these tribes appeared
in the columns of the _Times_ newspaper, sent home by its Constantinople
correspondent, apropos of the present concentration of troops in that
capital in expectation of a Russian war. His Statement enables us to
carry down our specimens of the Tartar type of the Turkish race to the
present day "From the coast of the Black Sea," he writes home, "to the
Taurus chain of mountains, a great part of the population is nomad, and
besides the Turks or Osmanlis," that is, the Ottoman or Imperial Turks,
"consists of two distinct races;--the Turcomans, who possessed
themselves of the land before the advent of the Osmanlis, and who
wander with their black tents up to the shores of the Bosphorus; and the
Curds." With the Curds we are not here concerned. He proceeds: "The
Turcomans, who are spread over the whole of Asia Minor, are a most
warlike people. Clans, numbering many thousand, acknowledge the Sultan
as the representative of the Caliphs and the Sovereign Lord of Islam,
from whom all the Frank kings receive their crowns; but they are
practically