RUSSIAN GYPSIES.

It is, I believe, seldom observed that the world is so far from having
quitted the romantic or sentimental for the purely scientific that, even
in science itself, whatever is best set forth owes half its charm to
something delicately and distantly reflected from the forbidden land of
fancy. The greatest reasoners and writers on the driest topics are still
"genial," because no man ever yet had true genius who did not feel the
inspiration of poetry, or mystery, or at least of the unusual. We are
not rid of the marvelous or curious, and, if we have not yet a science of
curiosities, it is apparently because it lies for the present distributed
about among the other sciences, just as in small museums illuminated
manuscripts are to be found in happy family union with stuffed birds or
minerals, and with watches and snuff-boxes, once the property of their
late majesties the Georges. Until such a science is formed, the new one
of ethnology may appropriately serve for it, since it of all presents
most attraction to him who is politely called the general reader, but who
should in truth be called the man who reads the most for mere amusement.
For Ethnology deals with such delightful material as primeval
kumbo-cephalic skulls, and appears to her votaries arrayed, not in silk
attire, but in strange fragments of leather from ancient Irish graves, or
in cloth from Lacustrine villages. She glitters with the quaint jewelry
of the first Italian race, whose ghosts, if they wail over the "find,"
"speak in a language man knows no more." She charms us with etchings or
scratchings of mammoths on mammoth-bone, and invites us to explore
mysterious caves, to picnic among megalithic monuments, and speculate on
pictured Scottish stones. In short, she engages man to investigate his
ancestry, a pursuit which presents charms even to the illiterate, and
asks us to find out facts concerning works of art which have interested
everybody in every age.

_Ad interim_, before the science of curiosities is segregated from that
of ethnology, I may observe that one of the marvels in the latter is
that, among all the subdivisions of the human race, there are only two
which have been, apparently from their beginning, set apart, marked and
cosmopolite, ever living among others, and yet reserved unto themselves.
These are the Jew and the gypsy. From time whereof history hath naught
to the contrary, the Jew was, as he himself holds in simpl