III.
GAMINS.
ANTHROPOLOGY, no doubt, is a great science, but still it is merely an infant, — a monster baby, I confess, but scarcely past the age at which Charles Lamb liked sucking-pigs and chimney-sweeps. Toddles and Poddies, as readers of Dickens will remember, used to go on buccaneering expeditions, but they were only across the kitchen-floor, and often ended in the fireplace. Anthropology, in the same way, makes only short excursions, and these even are not always marked by judgment in direction. At any rate, there can be no doubt that anthropology has not as yet paid any consideration to the great co-ordinate science of “lollipopology” of which one sub-section concerns itself with the phenomena of gamins.
This subject has perhaps been touched upon in ephemeral literature, but it was a mere flirtation, a flippant butterfly kind of settling. The intentions were not matrimonial; there was no talk of taking the house on a lease. And yet the subject of gamin distribution is worthy investigation. Why are there no gamins in India, with their street affronts and trivial triumphs? Pariah dogs are scarcely an equivalent for these unkempt morsels of barbarism, these little Ishmaels of our cities. What is the reason, then, for their absence? Can it be too hot to turn three wheels a penny? Surely
