Note 77 — Chapter XI · RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT

Just as the Scythians, a Mongolian race, had adopted an Aryan tongue, so there would be nothing surprising in the view that the Oghuzes were an Aryan race, although they spoke a Finnish dialect. This theory is curiously supported by a naïve phrase of the traveller Rubruquis, who was sent by St. Louis to the ruler of the Mongols. “I was struck,” says the good monk, “by the likeness borne by this prince to the late M. Jean de Beaumont, who was equally ruddy and fresh-looking.” Alexander von Humboldt, interested, as he well might be, by such a remark, adds with no less good sense, “This point of physiognomy is especially worth noting if we remember that the family of Tchingiz was probably Turkish, and not Mongolian.” He confirms his conclusion by adding that “the absence of Mongolian characteristics strikes us also in the portraits which we have of the descendants of Baber, the rulers of India” (Asie centrale, vol. i, p. 248 and note).