clever horse-dealers, and in S. France and N. Spain are in request as horse-clippers and shearers of poodle-dogs. The names tinker, brazier, calderer, chaudronnier keep up the memory of an earlier repute as metal-workers; in Polish Galicia all bronze-workers are of gipsy race (P. Bataillard, Zlotars … fondeurs en bronze, Paris 1878); even to-day they are the only skilled artificers in Montenegro and bear the once proud title of 'masters' (majstori).
Primitive Habitat of the Zigeuner or Gipsies.
3. The Gipsies are in the main a settled and not (as is generally thought) a nomad people. In Thesleff's 'report on the gipsy problem' (Helsingfors 1901) their chief habitat is clearly described, and they have been there for countless centuries, Hungary, Transylvania, Rumania: in the first land only 9000 are vagrants out of 280,000, and in the second is found the 'densest gipsy populace.' They are more numerous in S.E. Europe than elsewhere, specially massed on the western shores of Black Sea and the Danubic region, once tenanted by the Sigynnæ. Sinclair (Jl. G. Lore, Jan. 1908) speaks of a dense aggregation in Macedon and reckons 500,000 in the Balkans and Danube basin. In von Sowa's Statist. Acc. of G. in Germ. Emp. (1888) he speaks of over a 1000 in 241 families living in Prussia, not sedentary all the year round, but moving about to the chief fairs, as horse-dealers, musicians and puppet-showmen. David MacRitchie (E.R.E. s.v. 460) says 'it is certainly a pregnant fact that Europe is at the present day the seat of the G. race and language.' Certainly in 1322, the Minorite friar, Simeon, visiting Egypt in 1322, calls them Danubians, so far from finding them at home in their supposed fatherland; though they are black as coals or crows and differing little from Indians in feature and complexion.[1]
- ↑ Cf. Hugh Miller's description of Cromarty tinklers in My Schools, ch. xvii.
