Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/334

 296 Institution and Custom Section. of our nineteenth-century " wise men'' has never been properly investigated, though Dr. Jessop touches on it in his Arcady, and Mr. Besant has drawn a good type of the class in That Son oj Vulcan. There must be scores of such knaves scattered up and down the kingdom ; and they have no more credulous dupes than the gypsies, whom I have known to make journeys of a hundred miles to consult them, and pay them large fees for their counsel. The practices and beliefs derived from them by the gypsies will have passed into gypsy folk-lore, and by the gypsies again been retailed to non-gypsy seekers after knowledge. So that I hold it next to impossible to fix upon such and such a superstition, and say, " This is of gypsy or of non-gypsy origin." On the one hand, we know too little of gypsy superstitions out- side of England. Investigators, as a rule, have confined their attention to the gypsies' language, their history, and their manner of life. Their folk-lore has been almost totally disregarded by all but two — Mr. Leland (" Hans Breitmann"), the president of the Gypsy-lore Society, and Dr. Heinrich von ^\'lislocki — the latter, I fear, more erudite than trustworthy. A third should at least be mentioned — the Russian doctor, Michael Kounavine, who is said to have wandered for five-and-thirty years among the gypsies of Germany, Austria, Southern France, Italy, England, Spain, Turkey, Northern Africa, Asia Minor, Central Asia, Hindostan, and Russia, and meanwhile to have formed "vast collections" illustrating their religion, ritual, mythology, traditions, and what not else besides. Unluckily, those collections have disappeared since his death in 1881; and I myself own freely that, Betsy Prig-like, "I don't believe that there never was no sich a person" ; he seems to be just the creation of his literary executor. Anyhow, we cannot say of an Anglo-gypsy superstition, as we can of an Anglo-gypsy word : " It is probably native, not borrowed, for we find it current also with the gypsies of Egypt, Turkey, Norway, and Brazil."

On the other hand, it seems to me just as impossible to prove that the horse-shoe superstition — the belief in the virtue of cold iron generally — may not have been introduced by gypsies to our midst. It is said to be current in India (the gypsies' original habitat) ; it is current among the gypsies of south-eastern Europe; and it is also current among our English gypsies — Fetulengro, "the horse-shoe master", is familiar to every reader of George Borrow.