our grown-up curiosity with its choicest satisfaction. Western influence, beginning probably not later than the Alexandrian conquests; seems to me well established ; western origin of the body of the people of that age seems to me not established, and even improbable.
The body of the people were perhaps always, as now, related in blood to the Mongol-Tartar family —well represented by their near neighbours of the mountains, the shepherd Kirghiz. Some of these would gradually form permanent settlements in the foot-hills of the great ranges, where grazing and irrigation-agriculture could be combined. Then as the knowledge of the latter method grew, its extensions would form the great oases, having permanent cities, which would become permanent marts. To the modification of type due to this change in occupation and physical surroundings would be added the blood change due to the incoming of traders from other lands. A nomadic people is of stable type—mixture of blood being almost impossible. But no city-dwelling people, having markets even measurably open to the world, can long remain of pure stock.
Returning to the Yue-che invasion, and assuming it to have been followed by a period of assimilation of victor by vanquished, the two having an underlying kinship, antedating the fixed settlements of the Tarim people, and postdating their uplift by Aryan influence, we come, in the Chinese chronicles, to a conquest by the Chinese themselves. That was the beginning of a hold upon Kashgaria which has continued, sometimes shadow, sometimes sub-
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