If we could obtain an exact estimate of them in the different countries, or if the unsettled life of these people did not render it extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to procure such information, the immense number would probably greatly exceed what we have any idea of. At a moderate calculation, without being extravagant, they might be reckoned at between 7 and 800,000. What a serious matter of consideration when we reflect, that the greatest part of these people are idlers, cheats, and thieves! What a field does this open for the contemplation of governments!—But more of this in another place. CHAPTER III. _The Properties of their Bodies_. HAD the Gipseys made but a temporary appearance, and we could only be acquainted with them from the publications of former centuries, it would be difficult to entertain any other idea than that they were a herd of monsters and beelzebubs. We find in those books frequent mention of a _savage people_, _black horrid men_. But now that they have continued to our time, and we have an opportunity of seeing, with our own eyes, how they are formed, and what appearance they make, they are so fortunate as to have authors who commend their beauty, and take great pains to set forth their advantages; though many, indeed most of the moderns, their colour and looks being the same, perfectly agree with the writers of past centuries, in their accounts of them. Both parties may be in the right, when we consider, that what appears beautiful in the eyes of one person, is possibly ugly and deformed in the eyes of another: this depends entirely upon habit and familiarity. For this reason, the dark brown, or olive coloured, skin of the Gipseys, with their white teeth appearing between their red lips, may be a disgusting sight to an European, unaccustomed to such objects. Let us only ask, As children, have we not, at some time or other, run affrighted from a Gipsey? The case will be entirely altered, if we divest ourselves of the idea that a black skin is disagreeable. Their white teeth; their long black hair, on which they pride themselves very highly, and will not suffer to be cut off; their lively black rolling eyes;—are, without dispute, properties which must be ranked among the list of beauties, even by the modern civilised European world. They are neither overgrown giants, nor diminutive dwarfs: their limbs are formed in the justest proportion. Large bellies are, among them, as uncommon as hump-backs, blindness, or other corporeal defects. When Grisellini asserts that the breasts of the Gipsey women, at the time of their nursing, increase to a larger size than the child they support, it is an assertion destitute of proof, and parallel with many other arguments he adduces to prove the Gipseys are Egyptians. Probably he may have confounded himself, by thinking of the Hottentots; the circumstance above mentioned being true of them, though not of the Gipseys. Every