In Transylvania,

In England they are tinkers and horse-dealers. Moldavia, and Wallachia, they have their own chiefs, and enjoy a fair share of the comforts of life. In Russia there are some Gypsies that are rich and respected. But the classic land of the Gypsies is Spain. Seville, Cordova, the caves of Monte Sagro, near Grenada, and the forests of Andalusia, the cellars and attics of Madrid, swarm with them. They live in squalid huts, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of sorcery, and their only business is thieving, dancing, and fortune-telling. An English missionary, Mr. Borrow, who succeeded in overcoming their abhorrence of all Christians, who lived with them and spoke their language, has given us valuable particulars as to their habits and usages.1

It is generally believed that the Gypsies are of Hindu origin; that they may have passed through Egypt, but do not spring from it; that they were a despised caste, probably expelled from India, unless, indeed, they left it after the conquest of Tamerlane. Their true and sacred name is Romi. All the world over,' says Borrow, 'their usages are the same, and they employ the same words.' When we compare sundry terms of their idiom with the corresponding Sanscrit words (especially those denoting number), the analogy is striking.

Undoubtedly the physical and mental constitution of Gypsies is the same in all countries. It is, no doubt, somewhat difficult to decide how much is due to education, that is to say, to tradition; and how much to heredity. To the latter, however, these facts seem due.

As regards physical constitution, Borrow finds in all Gypsies hard, sharp features, jet black hair, fine, white teeth, bright eyes, and the fascinating' glance.

As regards their intellect, they appear to be as thoughtless and frivolous as children. 'Nothing makes a lasting impression on the Gypsy's mind; it is as restless as running water, and reflects all images alike. The Gypsy believes everything and nothing, or, rather, believes only in the sensation of the moment; a sensation that is past is for him only a fable. Hence he is sceptical, not only as regards moral and social ideas, but even with

1 An Account of the Gypsies of Spain. By G. Borrow.

regard to his own impressions. He abandons himself to a blind trust in fleeting emotions, just as, in the ordinary course of life, he gives himself up to all the chances of vagabondage. One impression is driven out by another. In him simple animalism is supreme. Emotions of whatever kind, gross or poetical, grovelling or exalted—are the rule, and, as it were, the motive power of his mind.' Their poetry, specimens of which Borrow gives, is prosaic, rude, vulgar, and childish rather than artless.

As their mind, so their manners: with childish ideas they have a childish morality. If children had a morality of their own, it would be a very bad morality. Hobbes was right when he said: Homo malus, puer robustus. What specially characterizes the Gypsy is his love, his inborn need, of vagabondage, and an adventurous life. He abhors civilization as slavery, and despises all sedentary and regular occupation. Marriage is but a temporary union, concluded in presence of a few members of the tribe. Gypsies usually live organized into corporations or tribes, under the authority of an elective chief—a very primitive form of polity. Hating, as they do, all civilized peoples, they have certain vices to which they cling as to an hereditary creed, and these they love and uphold as a religion. Thus, their highest ambition is to steal from the Christians; and mothers teach their children thieving as the noblest of virtues. They are, moreover, like children, less violent than tricky, incapable of lofty thoughts, and unaffected in their superstitions. Borrow having translated into Romany the Gospel according to St. Luke, the Gypsies accepted the book, and, regarding it as a talisman, carried it about their persons when they went to thieve.

This race offers a curious instance of a native incapacity, preserved and transmitted by heredity, for adaptation to civilized life. The Gypsies are in our moral and social world what the dodo and the ornithorhynchus are in our physical world, the survivors of a past age. Civilization is a very complex condition, a moral atmosphere to which man has to become acclimatized. There must be a correspondence between the moral man and his moral conditions, as between the physical man and his physical conditions. Whoever cannot adapt himself to new conditions of social life must die out-gradually, perhaps, yet surely. If he disappears

but slowly, he remains only as a curious and useless thing, picturesque to an artistic eye; but he is ill adapted to his circumstances, and certain sooner or later to vanish.

THE CAGOTS.

The various names of Cagots, Agots, Capots, Gahets, and Caqueux, are given to races which subsisted down to the present century in Guyenne, Gascony, and Béarn, on the northern side of the Pyrenees, in Navarre and Guipuzcoa, and even in Maine and Brittany. They formed a population apart, separated from the other inhabitants by the aversion with which it was regarded. Popular tradition confounded these people with lepers. It was said that they might be distinguished by their dull-gray eyes, and by the shortness of the lobe of the ear. 'They are,' says an author of the 16th century, 'comely men, industrious, skilful mechanics; but in their countenances and in their acts you always detect something that makes them worthy of all the abhorrence wherewith they are universally regarded. Furthermore, be they as comely as they may, they have all, men and women alike, a stinking breath, and when you come near one of them you experience a certain unpleasant odour emanating from their flesh, as though some curse descending from father to son had fallen upon this miserable race of men.'

Though, like the population amid which they lived, they were Catholics, still they were not allowed to mix with their coreligionists. Their hovels stood at some little distance outside the villages; they could enter the parish church only through a narrow doorway exclusively reserved for them; they took the holy water from a special stoup, or received it from the point of a stick; and in the church they had a corner where they were obliged to

1 During the Reign of Terror there were yet to be found many of the Caqueux in Finistère. M. Francisque Michel states that in a commune of the canton of Accous, arrondissement of Oléron, a Cagot was, about the year 1817, nominated for maire of the commune, to the great scandal of the people of the place. Protests were sent in from all sides to the préfet, but he did not heed them. Still the complaints did not cease, they continued to be made till 1830, when the electors forced the maire to retire into his former privacy. -Histoire des Races Maudites, i. 127.

keep apart from the rest of the faithful. Down to the end of the 17th century they were required by the legislation then in force to wear a distinctive mark, called 'the goose's foot,' or 'the duck's foot' (pied d'oie, pied de canard) in the decrees of the parliaments of Navarre and of Bordeaux.

Of course these outcasts intermarried, as a general rule, and marriages between Cagot families held to be 'pure' were very rare. Hence this race remained under much the same conditions as the Jews-in a state highly favourable to hereditary transmission. It is to be observed that many of those who have spoken of these Cagots from personal observation, and particularly the physicians of the 16th and 17th century, whose remarks are given in M. Michel's work, noticed the fact of heredity. On the other hand, the same author tells us that a modern writer says, 'I distrust external signs as means of distinguishing Cagots from people of other races.' Perhaps these opinions might be reconciled, if we observe that the Cagots do not appear to have been a race strictly distinct, like the Jews and the Gypsies. While the origin of the last-named races is known, that of the Cagots is extremely obscure. All sorts of conjectures have been made, ranging from the one which would have them to be the descendants of a servant of the prophet Elijah, down to that which sees in them a remnant of the Goths.1 If, then, between the Cagots and the surrounding population there were no diversity of race, all external differences would gradually disappear under the influence of identical conditions.

Still, during their pariah period the Cagots would have been a curious object of study from the standpoint of psychological and moral heredity. But unfortunately the data are totally wanting. We only know that in Guyenne and in Gascony they were all coopers or carpenters; and that in Brittany they were all ropemakers; and were considered very expert in their trade. But this fact seems to us to be far less the result of heredity than of the caste-rule to which they were subjected. They were accused of being presumptuous, arrogant, braggart-defects which may be explained as well by the attitude of permanent hostility in which

1 Races Maudites, i. 266.

they stood with regard to all other men, as by the organic transmission of quality. There is one simple fact, insignificant enough in itself, respecting an hereditary taste and talent for music: 'Navarreins has seen the Campagnets hand down through three or four generations a highly prized violin. No holiday was happily spent where the violin or the flute of the Campagnets did not contribute to the mirth.'1

CHAPTER IX.

MORBID PSYCHOLOGICAL HEREDITY.

I.

AT the commencement of this work, in the introduction devoted to physiological heredity, we showed briefly that diseases are transmissible, like all the characteristics of the external or internal structure, and all the various modes of the organization in a normal state. The same question now arises in the psychological order. Are the modes of mental life transmissible under their morbid, as they are under their normal form? Does the study of mental diseases contribute its quota of facts in favour of heredity? The answer must be in the affirmative. The transmission of all kinds of psychological anomalies-whether of passions and crimes, of which we have already spoken, or of hallucinations and insanity, of which we are next to speak-is so frequent, and evidenced by such striking facts, that the most inattentive observers have been struck by it, and that morbid psychological heredity is admitted even by those who have no suspicion that this is only one aspect of a law which is far more general.

In considering hereafter the direct causes of mental heredity, we shall endeavour to establish this important proposition: that in man, to every psychological state whatsoever, corresponds a determinate physiological state, and vice versâ. Here this question is presented incidentally, for it has been much debated whether mental diseases have or have not an organic cause.

1 Ibid. i. 41.