U'RAL-ALTA'IC. The term commonly em ployed by anthropologists to designate a branch of the yellow or Asian race, which includes the following groups: Tungusic (Tunguses, Manchus, etc.), Mongolic (Mongols, Kalmucks, etc.), Ta taric (Turks, 'Tatars,' part of the Cossacks, Kirghizes, etc.), Finnic (Samoyeds, Finns, Lapps, Magyars, etc.), Arctic (Tchuktchis, Koriaks, Kamehatkans, Giliaks, Ainus), . and Japanese Korean. The civilized and more or less Aryan ized Finns and Magyars of Europe, the lat ter intruding Osmanli Turks of Asia Minor, Southwestern Europe, and Northern Africa, the civilized Turko-Tatar States, ancient and mod ern, of Turkestan and adjacent parts of Central Asia, the Mongol conquerors of China and India, the Asiatic elements of Korean-Japanese culture, etc., represent the capacities, independent and stimulated by contact with other races and peo ples, of the Ural-Altaic tribes. In matters of language these peoples possess generally what are called 'agglutinative' tongues, in contrast with the inflecting Aryan and the monosyllabic Chinese and Indo-Chinese forms of speech. But the Finnish language in Europe has been thought by some either to have Aryan traits or to have given birth to Aryan tongues. Some authorities have included the Korean-Jap anese with the Sinitic branch, seeing closer rela tionship between them and the Chinese than the facts warrant. While the location of the earliest home of the Ural-Altaic peoples is still indeter minable with exactness—it was somewhere be tween the Ural and the Altai—certain centres of dispersion of its subdivisions can he noted: Mon golia, south of the Altai, Turkestan north of the Pamir, the Uralian country, the Baikal region, the Amur Valley. etc. The careful inves tigations of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition in Northeastern Asia are thought to have shown the existence of long-continued intercommunica tion and intermigration between America and Asia in the region bounded by the Amur on the one side and the Columbia on the other. it
must be said, however, that the facts point as much to transference of peoples and culture from America to Asia as vice versa; indeed, rather more in the former direction. This would be in line with the fact that the presence of the Es kimo (q.v.) in the northeastern corner of Asia now is the only convincing proof we have of the transit of any people from one continent to the other. The variety of the response of the Ural Altaic peoples to foreign culture is seen in their religions. The uncivilized tribes are mostly devo tees of Shamanism, as of old, but the Mongols, Manchus, Buriats, Kirghiz-Kalmuck Tatars, and to some extent Koreans and Japanese are Budd hist, the Bashkirs, Turks, etc., are Mohammedans, the greater part of the Kamchatkans, Tchuvashes, part of the Yakuts and of some other Siberian tribes, are Christians of the Russian (Greek) Church, the Magyars are about three-fifths Cath olic and two-fifths Protestant, and the Finns for the most part Lutheran. Consult: Castr6n, Ethno logische Forlesungen fiber die altaischen Volker (Saint Petersburg, 1857) ; Schott, ADaische Stu dien (Berlin, 1860-72) ; Mistelli, Der altaische Sprachtypus (Basel, 1883) ; Winkler, Uralal taise-he Volker and Spmche (Berlin, 1884) ; id., Das Uralaltaische and seine Gruppen (ib., 1885) ; Grunzel, Entienri ciner vergleichenden Gramma tik der altaisohen Sprachen (Leipzig, 1895).