every cooking utensil, and all that pertains to the table, high up in their waggons.  It is almost needless to point out how closely these ideas agree with those of many Hindus.  The Gipsy eats every and any thing except horseflesh.  Among themselves, while talking Rommany, they will boast of having eaten mullo baulors, or pigs that have died a natural death, and hotchewitchi, or hedgehog, as did the belle of a Gipsy party to me at Walton-on-Thames in the summer of 1872.  They can give no reason whatever for this inconsistent abstinence.  But Mr Simson in his “History of the Gipsies” has adduced a mass of curious facts, indicating a special superstitious regard for the horse among the Rommany in Scotland, and identifying it with certain customs in India.  It would be a curious matter of research could we learn whether the missionaries of the Middle Ages, who made abstinence from horse-flesh a point of salvation (when preaching in Germany and in Scandinavia), derived their superstition, in common with the Gipsies, from India.

There can be no doubt that in seeking for the Indian origin of many Gipsy words we are often bewildered, and that no field in philology presents such opportunity for pugnacious critics to either attack or defend the validity of the proofs alleged.  The very word for “doubtful” or “ambiguous,” dubeni or dub’na, is of this description.  Is it derived from the Hindu dhoobd’ha, which every Gipsy would pronounce doobna, or from the English dubious, which has been made to assume the Gipsy-Indian termination na?  Of this word I was naively told, “If a juva’s bori (girl is big), that’s dub’ni; and if she’s shuvalo (swelled up), that’s dubni:  for it may pen (say) she’s kaired a tikno (is enceinte), and it may pen she hasn’t.”  But when we find that the English Gipsy also employs the word dukkeni for “doubtful,” and compare it with the Hindustani dhokna or dukna, the true derivation becomes apparent.

Had Dr Pott or Dr Paspati had recourse to the plan which I adopted of reading a copious Hindustani dictionary entirely through, word by word, to a patient Gipsy, noting down all which he recognised, and his renderings of them, it is very possible that these learned men would in Germany and Turkey have collected a mass of overwhelming proof as to the Indian origin of Rommany.  At present the dictionary which I intend shall follow this work shows that, so far as the Rommany dialects have been published, that of England contains a far greater number of almost unchanged Hindu words than any other, a fact to which I would especially call the attention of all who are interested in this curious language.  And what is more, I am certain that the supply is far from being exhausted, and that by patient research among old Gipsies, the Anglo-Rommany vocabulary might be increased to possibly five or six thousand words.