At that time, and indeed until I wrote to the _Academy_ in 1875, M. Paul Bataillard evidently ignored “M. Burton”; and no blame be to him for not knowing a paper published by a colonial society a quarter of a century ago. But he also ignored far more important facts. He applies the term _petite population Djatte_ to the great scattered nation called Jat. He was of course not aware that this people preserve in the Indine Delta, the “Salt Country” of the Sindhis, the purity of its tongue, which, farther north, is corrupted by an admixture of Sindhi, Belochki, and Panjabi. Nor could he be alive to the fact that many points of similarity, anthropological and linguistic, connect the Gypsy and the Jat. There are men who are personally averse to new things, and the easy alternative is to depreciate their value. “He,” I am assured by my rival claimant, “has perceived a probable relation between these two tribes of men, and he has expressed it in half a page; but this is not sufficient.” Such an assertion, however, is more than sufficient for estimating and appreciating the Bataillard system of treating a literary question. For “half a page” read a dozen pages,[114] which might easily have been extended to many a dozen. But I had hoped that the statement of a traveller who had met the Gypsies at Oxford (Bagley Wood), in England, and on the Continent, and the knowledge of their racial characteristics, general amongst educated Englishmen, justified a conciseness imperiously demanded whilst treating in one volume the geography, history, and ethnology of a country nearly equalling England in length. Again, when M. Bataillard assures his readers that I have “not given even the smallest information respecting the type (appearance) of the Jats,” he once more makes it evident that he should have read me before pretending to write about me. I will quote my description in full,[115] so that the public may judge between him and me: “We are now in the provinces inhabited by the Jats. Your [_i.e._ Mr. John Bull’s] eye is scarcely grown critical enough in this short time to see the tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee-like difference between their personal appearance and that of their kinsmen the Scindians; nor can I expect you as yet to distinguish a Jat wandh (village) from a Scinde goth (village). You are certain to take some interest in a race which appears to be the progenitor of the old witch in a red cloak, whose hand, in return for the cunning nonsense to which her tongue gave birth, you once crossed with silver; and of the wiry young light-weight, whose game and sharp hitting you have, in happier days, more than once condescended to admire.