“The _Academy_ of March 27 last published an interesting letter which only came to my knowledge a few days ago. In this letter Mr. Richard Burton, F.R.G.S., claims the priority in identifying the Gipsies or Tsigans with the Jat of the banks of the Indus, whose name, he adds, is pronounced Dyat. The question has lately been treated at length (25 pages in 8vo, almost entirely consecrated to this subject) by Professor J. de Goeje, of Leyden, who attributes the first idea of this identification to Mr. Pott in 1853, as is stated in the _Academy_ of February 27, in a short article mentioning this Dutch _Contribution to the History of the Gipsies_. “Mr. Burton, who has wandered far and wide in the Valley of the Indus, and has much frequented the Jats, published in 1849 a grammar of the Játaki dialect (41 pages), which contains an interesting classification of this race, reproduced in his letter, and, in 1851, a volume upon Sindh--_Sindh and the Races that inhabit the Valley of the Indus_--in which he starts the theory of a probable relationship between the Jats and the Gipsies, as proved in the extracts which he commences by giving of this work. “Allow me to claim a still earlier priority (dating from 1849), and to begin by establishing exactly the share belonging to each. “Professor Pott, in his great work, _Die Zigeuner_, Vol. I. (1844), p. 62, had spoken of the tradition mentioned by Ferdoussy, by the _Tarikh-Guzydeh_, and ‘by another ...’ that is to say, by the _Modjmel-al-Tevarykh_, according to which Bahram-Gur, King of Persia, had caused ten or twelve thousand musicians, designated in two at least of these three texts under the name of _Luri_,[99] to come from India. One or two other names, of which it is not necessary to speak, are added to this one. (See pp. 41, 42 of my memoir, published in 1849, and mentioned by-and-by.) “Five years later, Professor Pott, coming back to the subject in his article ‘Ueber die Zigeuner,’ published, as a second supplement to his great work, in the _Zeitschrift der Deut. Morgenl. Gesellschaft_, Vol. III., 1849, said (p. 326):