Perhaps, however, the power of this element of race is illustrated still more strikingly in the case of the wandering and dispersed families, who, having ceased to be a nation, continue in their dispersions to manifest the permanent type of their original and ineffaceable organization. Wherever the Jew goes, he remains a Jew. In all climates, under all governments, speaking all languages, his physical and mental features continue the same. This amazing fact has been held by many theologians to be a standing miracle of Divine Providence. But Providence works by law, and through second causes, and uses in this instance the laws of a specially stubborn organization and the force of a tenacious and persistent blood to accomplish its ends. The same kind of blood in the kindred Semitic family of Arabs produces a like result, though to a less striking degree. The Bedouins wander for thousands of miles away from their peninsula, but always continue Arabs in appearance and character. The light, sinewy body and brilliant dark eye, the abstemious habit and roaming tendency, mark the Arab in Hindostan or Barbary. It is a thousand years since these nomad tribes left their native home, but they continue the same people on the Persian Gulf or amid the deserts of Sahara. The case of the Gypsies, however, may be still more striking, because these seem, in their wanderings over the earth, to have gradually divested themselves of every other common attribute except that of race. Unlike the Jews and Arabs, they not only adopt the language, but also the religion, of the country where they happen to be. Yet they always remain unfused and unassimilated. The Gypsies first appeared in Europe in 1417, in Moldavia, and thence spread into Transylvania and Hungary.[32] They afterward passed into all the countries of Europe, where their number, at the present time, is supposed to reach 700,000 or 800,000. Everywhere they adopt the common form of worship, but are without any real faith. Partially civilized in some countries, they always retain their own language beside that of the people among whom they live. This language, being evidently derived from the Sanskrit, settles the question of their origin. It is common to all their branches through the world; as are also the sweet voice of their maidens, and their habits of horse-dealing, fortune-telling, and petty larceny. Without the bond of religion, history, government, literature, or mutual knowledge and intercourse, they still remain one and the same people in all their dispersions. What gives this unity and permanence, if not race? Yet race, to Mr. Buckle, means nothing.