It would perhaps be desirable to use Turkic instead of Tettarie, when speaking of tho third branch of tho northern division of the Turanian family, did not a change of terminology generally produce as much confusion as it remedies. The recollection of their non-Tataric, i.e. non-Mongolic origin, remains, it appears, among tho so-called Tatars of Kasan and Astracau. If asked whether they are Tatars, they reply no ; and they call their language Turki or Turuk, but not Tatari. Nay, they consider Tatar as a term of abuse, synonytnous with robber, evidently from a re collection that their ancestors had once been conquered and enslaved by Mongolic, that is, Tataric tribes. All this rests on the authority of Klaproth, who during his stay in Russia had great opporttinities of studying the languages spoken on the frontiers of this half Asiatic empire. Though the word is very vaguely used, the populations to whom it is applied belong to one of three great groups, stocks, or families,—the Turk, the Mongol, or the Tungus. It is necessary to insist upon this, because, whatever may be the laxity with which the term Tatar is used, it is, in Russian ethnology at least, a misnomer when applied to a Mongol. It is still worse to call a Turk a Kalinuk. This is because the populations under considera tion are the fragments of four Turkish kingdonis or khanates, tho khanates themselves being the fragments of the great Mongol empire of the Kapchak. But this great empire itself was, moro or leas, the consolidation of at least two older kingdoms compressed into one. There were the Mongols of Temudzhin or Cliengiz Khan. There were the Chaghtai Turk of Timur and his suc cessors, whose origin was in the parts beyond the Oxus, Bokhara, and Ferghana. There were the
three denominations of the Khazar, the Pesheneg, and the Cumanian, the Chaghtai being the Turk of the dynasty to which Timur belonged.
According to Mountstuart Elphinstone, the Tartar are divisible into Turk, Mongol, and Manchu. The greater part of Thnur's army was Turk ; and the Uzbak, who now possess Trans oxiana, tho Turkornan, who reside both on the Oxus and in Asia Minor, the wandering tribes of the north of Persia, and the Othmanli or Turk of Constantinople, are all Turk. The ruling tribe, and the greater part of the army of Chengiz Khan, WaS Mongol.
Tartars occupy Ladakh, except in the Dras valley. In all Tartar families there, the second son is made a lama, and tho third a tola, both being forbidden t,o marry,—in a manner obliged to renounce tho world, having no interest in their father's property at his death.
Of the black Tartars, who had come from Tartary with Timur, he had settled part in Turkey, and part in Khortusan. After his death they had dispersed. Nadir Shah had desired to reassemble them, and seven or eight thousand families had been brought together under Najif Ali Khan, the chief in whose service Itehak Khan and his father was employed.
The Tzeremish resemble the Tartars in their external appearance, and they also wear their hair short ; but their language is totally distinct, and they spring from a different origin. They are the original inhabitants of the province of Cazan and 0-se-ta-our-han. — Latham Nationalities of Europe, i. p. 349 ; Recherches sur ks Langues Tartares, pp. 1, 3 ; Kennedy on the Origin of Languages, p. 57 ; Malcolm's History of Persia, ii. p. 226 ; 1Ifulkr's Lectures, pp. 284, 285.