Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/282

 230

NOTES AND QUERIES. [io* s. n. SEPT. 17,

Fairholt's * Diet, of Terms in Art,' s.v. 'Jew's

Pitch.' J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL.

The 1888 edition of Nares's 'Glossary' has : " Shakespeare speaks of a kind of magical prepara- tion under that name. 'And it was dy'd in mummy, which the skilful Conserv'd of maidens' hearts.' Othello,' III. iv."

H. J. B. [MK. E. H. COLEMAN also thanked for reply.]

BATHING-MACHINES (10 th S. ii. 67, 130). The only interest in fixing the date of the first introduction of bathing-machines is to show when sea-bathing became a general practice. Lecky, in his ' History of England in the Eighteenth Century,' vol. i. p. 555, deals with this subject. He states that " the passion for inland watering-places was at its height" at the beginning of the century, and then he goes on to say :

" Sea-bathing in the first half of the eighteenth century is very rarely noticed. Chesterfield, indeed, having visited Scarborough in 1733, observed that it was there commonly practised by both sexes, but its general popularity dates only from the appear- ance of the treatise by Dr. Richard Russell 'On Glandular Consumption and the Use of Sea Water in Diseases of the Glands,' which was published in Latin in 1750, and translated in 1753. The new remedy acquired an extraordinary favour, and it produced a great, permanent, and on the whole very beneficial change in the national tastes. In a few years obscure fishing-villages along the coast began to assume the dimensions of stately watering- places, and before the century had closed, Cowper described, in indignant lines, the common enthu- siasm with which all ages and classes rushed for health or pleasure to the sea."

These lines are in vol. viii. p. 299 of Cowper's 'Works,' and are quoted from ' Retirement ' :

Your prudent grandmammas, ye modern belles,

Content with Bristol, Bath, and Tonbridge Wells,

When health required it, would consent to roam,

Else more attach'd to pleasures found at home ;

But now alike, gay widow, virgin, wife,

Ingenious to diversify dull life,

In coaches, chaises, caravans, and hoys,

Fly to the coast for daily, nightly joys,

And all impatient of dry land, agree

W T ith one consent to rush into the sea.

Inner Temple.

HARRY B. POLAND.

GIPSIES : " CHIGUNNJI " (10 th S. ii. 105, 158). MR. W. W. STRICKLAND complains that "people who deal in historical and philo- sophical questions have a perverse way of always getting hold of the wrong end of the stick." It seems a little sad to think that this should be the end of all our efforts in the direction of philosophy or history, and as we advance in life the increasing difficulty of avoiding the wrong end of the stick cer-

tainly comes home to us with greater and greater force. We may consider ourselves fortunate if we are occasionally able to grasp that elusive baculus by the middle. Is it quite certain that MR. STRICKLAND himself has got much further 1 The theory which he advances with regard to the Zigeuner is not new. It is, at any rate, more than two hun- dred and fifty years old, and has had several very respectable supporters, as the following quotation from the Journal of the Gypsy-Lore Society, iii. 177, will show :

logy,' delivered at Edinburgh before the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in October last [1891], "Dr. John Beddoe, the eminent anthropologist, referred to the gypsy element in European ethnography. He recognized in the ' Sigynnje ' of Herodotus the first
 * 'In the fifth of his 'Rhind Lectures on Archaeo-

gypsies mentioned in European history, and en- orsed the belief that ' Sigynnse ' is an early form of 'Zigeuner.' Although the actual etymology of 'Zigeuner,' &c., has been fitly described by Mr. Leland as a ' philological ignis fatuue,' it is im- portant to find Dr. Beddoe supporting a belief which, as M. Bataillard (himself its advocate) points out, was held as early as 1615 by Fernandez de Cordova, and which has much to say for itself. Dr. Beddoe also emphasized as significant the fact that the country occupied by the Sigynnas, whose territories reached from the Danube ' almost to the Eneti upon the Adriatic,' is still a country famous for the density of its gypsy population. On the other hand, it may be noticed as a detail that the small horses of the Sigynnse said to be so small that they were ' not able to carry a rider,' and covered with shaggy hair ' five fingers in length' are no longer identified with any division of the gypsies, if, indeed, the breed exists anywhere in its purity."

Not many things relating to the gypsies are "as plain as a pikestaff," but if one point is clearer than another it is that the language of the R6many is a dialect of Prakrit, and that the Slav words which are found among the gypsies of the Balkans are merely a late accretion to their vocabulary. But MR. STRICKLAND probably means that his gypsies did not call themselves by a Slavonic name, but that when Herodotus made inquiries about them, he was informed by the surrounding Slavs that the tinkers and horse-dealers in their midst were "Chi- gunnji," or, as MR. JAMES PLATT spells it,

explanation can be definitely accepted, we must know for certain whether Slavonic was the language of the Danubian provinces in the time of Herodotus, and also if the gypsies had left their original homes in Northern India before that date. It seems a little remarkable, if MR. STRICKLAND'S theory is' correct, that nothing should have been heard of them in Europe between the days of
 * Chugunni," i.e., cast iron. Before this

Herodotus and comparatively modern times.