al European countries they
long monopolized them.

They made and sold mats, baskets, and small articles of wood.

They have shown great skill as dancers, musicians, singers, acrobats; and
it is a rule almost without exception that there is hardly a traveling
company of such performers or a theatre, in Europe or America, in which
there is not at least one person with some Romany blood.

Their hair remains black to advanced age, and they retain it longer than
do Europeans or ordinary Orientals.

They speak an Aryan tongue, which agrees in the main with that of the
Jats, but which contains words gathered from other Indian sources. This
is a consideration of the utmost importance, as by it alone can we
determine what was the agglomeration of tribes in India which formed the
Western gypsy.

Admitting these as the peculiar pursuits of the race, the next step
should be to consider what are the principal nomadic tribes of gypsies in
India and Persia, and how far their occupations agree with those of the
Romany of Europe. That the Jats probably supplied the main stock has
been admitted. This was a bold race of Northwestern India, which at one
time had such power as to obtain important victories over the caliphs.
They were broken and dispersed in the eleventh century by Mahmoud, many
thousands of them wandering to the West. They were without religion, "of
the horse, horsey," and notorious thieves. In this they agree with the
European gypsy. But they are not habitual eaters of _mullo balor_, or
"dead pork;" they do not devour everything like dogs. We cannot
ascertain that the Jat is specially a musician, a dancer, a mat and
basket maker, a rope-dancer, a bear-leader, or a peddler. We do not know
whether they are peculiar in India among the Indians for keeping their
hair unchanged to old age, as do pure-blood English gypsies. All of
these things are, however, markedly characteristic of certain different
kinds of wanderers, or gypsies, in India. From this we conclude,
hypothetically, that the Jat warriors were supplemented by other
tribes,--chief among these may have been the Dom,--and that the Jat
element has at present disappeared, and been supplanted by the lower
type.

The Doms are a race of gypsies found from Central India to the far
northern frontier, where a portion of their early ancestry appears as the
Domarr, and are supposed to be pre-Aryan. In "The People of India,"
edited by J. Forbes Watson and J. W.