The Jats are still half nomads, and perhaps of old they were wholly nomadic. They are breeders of cattle and rude veterinary surgeons. They are fond of music, as are all these races; and their dances are exactly represented by those of the Egyptian Gypsies, a similarity which has yet to be insisted upon. Their iron-smelting, like that of the Mahabaleshwar tribes, is exactly like that of the Romá. Their sword play is that of the Hindu, whereas the Gypsies in Scotland use a direct thrust straight to the front,[158] certainly not learned in India. The village Jats are said to mould the babies’ heads; perhaps the idea arose by the shampooing of the younger children by the mothers. Divination seems to be the growth of the soil, and palmistry palpably derives from India. Snake-charming is also common amongst them. As their history in the Panjab proves, they are disposed to robbing and to violence. Lastly, though the history of the country universally derives them from the Land of the Five Rivers, the modern date of Muslim annals would not be proof against their being a race of remote antiquity. Believing that the Jats may fairly have sent forth the last wave of Aryan emigration, the Gypsies, a western flood which was probably preceded by many others, I attempted during my last trip through Sindh in the spring of 1856 to enlist fellow-workmen in the task of illustrating their ethnology and philology. Able linguists like Lieutenant-Colonel Dunsterville, Collector of Hydrabad, and others, were willing to assist me. But I was much disappointed by the incuriousness of a certain professor who met me at Milan before my visit to Western India and Sindh. He had never seen my Grammar and Vocabulary, of which he desired the republication; but he accepted with enthusiasm my offer to enlist collaborators in the Valley of the Indus for the purpose of proving or disproving his favourite theory that the Gypsies are Sindhis who have long dwelt in Afghanistan.[159] This professor had of course no personal experience; anything he had written on the subject was derived from theory only. Object lessons are not yet popular in Italy; it is easier to visit the camel of the Jardin des Plantes than the camel of the desert, and we can hardly expect a _littérateur_ to take interest in gathering together raw new facts. § 2. _The Jats of Belochistan._ The following interesting extract is borrowed from _The Country of Balochistan_,[160] by A. W. Hughes (London, 1877):