I have alluded to this custom of the Tartars, more particularly, to show that the Gipsies are not the only people who have sacrificed horses. The ancient Hindoos, as already stated, sacrificed horses. The Greeks did the same to Neptune; the ancient Scandinavians to their god, Assa-Thor, the representative of the sun; and the Persians, likewise, to the sun.[181] But I am inclined to believe that the Gipsy sacrifice of the horse is the remains of the great _Assummeed Jugg_ of the Hindoos, observed by tribes of greater antiquity than the modern nations of India, as appears by the Gentoo code of laws already referred to. [181] It appears that the Jews, when they lapsed into the grossest idolatry, dedicated horses to the sun. "And he (Josiah) took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun, at the entering in of the house of the Lord, by the chamber of Nathan-melech, the chamberlain, which was in the suburbs, and burnt the chariots of the sun with fire." II Kings, xxiii. 11. The sacrificing of horses is a curious as well as a leading and important fact in the history of the Gipsies, and, as far as I know, is new to the world. I shall, in establishing its existence among the Scottish Gipsies, produce my authorities with my details. In the first place, it was, and I believe it still is, a general tradition, over almost all Scotland, that, when the Tinklers parted from their wives, the act of separation took place over the carcass of a dead horse. In respect to McDonald's case, alluded to under the head of Linlithgowshire Gipsies, my informant, Mr. Alexander Ramsay, late an officer of the Excise, a very respectable man, who died in 1819, at the age of 74 years, stated to me that he saw McDonald and his wife separated over the body of a dead horse, on a moor, at Shieldhill, near Falkirk, either in the year 1758 or 1760, he was uncertain which. The horse was laying stretched out on the heath. The parties took hold of each other by the hand, and, commencing at the head of the dead animal, walked--the husband on one side, and the wife on the other--till they came to the tail, when, without speaking a word to each other, they parted, in opposite directions, as if proceeding on a journey. Mr. Ramsay said he never could forget the violent swing which McDonald gave his wife at parting. The time of the day was a little after day-break. My informant, at the time, was going, with others, to Shieldhill for coals, and happened to be passing over a piece of rising ground, when they came close upon the Gipsies, in a hollow, quite unexpectedly to both parties.