The following is a leading article in the _Birmingham Daily Mail_, October 8th:—“Mr. George Smith, whose exertions on behalf of the canal population and the children employed in brick-yards have been accompanied with so much success, is now turning his attention to the education of the Gipsies. He read a paper on this subject at the Social Science Congress, yesterday, suggesting that the same plan of registration which had proved advantageous in the case of the canal-boatmen and their families should be adopted for the more nomadic class who roam from place to place, with no settled home and no local habitation. The Gipsies are a strange race, with a romantic history, and their vagabond life is surrounded with enough of the mysterious to give them at all times a special and curious interest. In the days of our infancy we are frightened with tales of their child-thieving propensities, and even when years and reason have asserted their influence we are apt to regard with a survival of our childish awe the wandering ‘diviners and wicked heathens’ who roam about the country, living in a mysterious aloofness from their fellow-men. Scores of theories have been propounded as to the origin of the Gipsy race, whence they sprang, and how they came to be so largely scattered over three of the four quarters of the globe. Opinion, following in the wake of the learned Rudiger, has finally settled down to the view that they came from India, but whether they are the Tshandalas referred to in the laws of Menou, or kinsmen of the Bazeegars of Calcutta, or are descended from the robbers of the Indus, or are identical with the Nuts and Djatts of Northern India, has not been ascertained with any degree of certainty. The Gyptologists are not yet agreed upon the ancestry of this ancient but obscure race, and possibly they never will be. We know, however, that the Gipsies have wandered up and down Europe since the eleventh century, if not from a still earlier period, and that they have preserved their Bohemian characteristics, their language—which is a sort of daughter of the old Sanscrit—their traditions, and the mysteries of their religion during a long career of restless movement and frequent persecution. And they have kept, too, their indolent, and not too creditable habits. Early in the twelfth century an Austrian monk described them as ‘Ishmaelites and braziers, who go peddling through the wide world, having neither house, nor home, cheating the people with their tricks, and deceiving mankind, but not openly.’ That description would hold good at the present day. The Gipsies are still a lazy, thieving set of rogues, who get their living by robbing hen-roosts, telling fortunes, and ‘snapping up unconsidered trifles’ like Autolycus of old. Pilfering, varied with a rude sort of magic, and the swindling arts of divination and chiromancy for the special behoof of credulous servant-girls, are the stock-in-trade of the modern Zingaris.