Further let me note _en passant_ the vulgar error now obsolete which, confounding Hindi with the Urdú-Zabán or camp dialect,[141] made the former a bastard modern tongue when its literature is as old as the earliest English and French. And here we may note that, while the _Romni-chíb_ is in point of vocabulary a sister of the Hindi, the grammar of the noun with its survival of regular cases belongs to a more remote age. It is partly Prakrit and partly Sindhi, a dialect whose numerous harsh consonants make us suspect, despite Dr. Trumpp, a non-Aryan element. Besides the prehistoric occupation of the trans-Indine regions by the Indo-Scythians noticed in Alexander’s day, we find another dating from far later times. The Bactrian kingdom which became independent sixty-nine years after the great Macedonian’s death lasted one hundred and thirty years, and was destroyed about B.C. 126 by the “white Huns,” Chinese Tatars, who crossed the Jaxartes. Hence possibly the Dravidian Brahins still dwelling in the midst of Aryan populations. The apparent anomaly that the wild and vagrant Gypsies have preserved in Europe ancient forms which have died out in the old home has already been accounted for; I may also number amongst the causes of conservation the total want of a written character, which also proves the early date of the Gypsy exodus. § 4. “_Notes et Questions, etc._,” “_Sur le mot Zagaie, etc._” I treat of Nos. 4 and 5 out of order of date because they are mere _ausflugs_ illustrating Nos. 3 and 6. From the first we learn that when the French occupied Algiers in 1830 they found the city and its territory partly occupied by Gypsies, who did not mix with the Arabs or the Kabyles (Kabáil or the Tribes), with the Jews or the Europeans. They spoke their own tongue, and they were often visited by their congeners of Hungary and other parts of Europe. It is conjectured that these Romá may have passed over from Spain, and possibly that they travelled eastward from Morocco, as Blidah contains many of the race. The question becomes interesting when we find the Egyptian _Ghagar_ claiming to be emigrants from the West. According to the Librarian of Algiers, the late M. Berbruger in 1846, they were known as Guesáni, pronounced G'sáni or G'záne (Gezzání), the feminine singular being Gezzána (Gezzáneh).[142] Here of course M. Paul Bataillard finds no difficulty in detecting, through Dzâna and Tsâna, “a corruption of the true name _Tsigani_ or _Tchingani_.” The latter form, I would observe, retaining the nasal of the original Chingáneh and the Arabized Jingáneh, is far preferable to the mutilated _Tsigane_ adopted afterwards (1875) with so much pomp and such a flourish of trumpets.