AJ}^ OUTCAST RACE IX THE PYRENEES. 549 



There is not in France or Spain any particular sect or district 

 which has made itself conspicuous by the indefinite fear of these out- 

 casts. But if we consider the popular belief, which persisted to a very 

 recent period, that they had been or still were afflicted with leprosy, 

 all will be made clear. Etymological research has shown that the name 

 Cagot is associated with this disease in several of the French dialects. 

 Evidently, if the fact or the opinion that the Cagots had been afflict- 

 ed with leprosy was the provocative to the treatment which they had 

 to endure in the dark ages, most of the prejudices against them would 

 correspond with those which were formerly entertained against lepers. 

 A later French writer, M. de Rochas, who has made a thorough study 

 of the history and condition of the Cagots, in order to explore the sub- 

 ject to the bottom, made several journeys in the northern and south- 

 ern outlying provinces of the Pyrenees during the last Carlist war, 

 and visited some of the Cagots still scattered here and there among 

 the population. He found everywhere that the descendants of the 

 Cagots were quite like the rest of the population in bodily and mental 

 characteristics, that they in no way suggested a strange origin, nor 

 were they distinguished by any unusual or abnormal mark. He found, 

 also, that while marriages of the Cagots with the rest of the population 

 wei'e rare, the two classes associated together on the same footing, 

 their grown people and children attended the same churches, and that 

 they both exhibited about the same degree of mental capacity. Every 

 trace of leprosy, goiter, and cretinism has disappeared from among the 

 Cagots of to-day. Some of them, it is true, are afflicted with scrofula, 

 which, however, is not of hereditary or pestilential origin, but is trace- 

 able to poverty, insufficient food, poor, filthy houses, and physical neg- 

 lect. In a Spanish commune, among whose inhabitants were many 

 descendants of the once outcast race, M. de Rochas found those per- 

 sons vigorous, healthy, sagacious, and apt ; they were tilling small 

 plots of ground, raising swine and hens, and pursuing about the same 

 occupations as their neighbors. They were still patiently subject to a 

 few of the old hostile usages of exclusion — for instance, to the pro- 

 hibition of marriage outside of their own circle — but only because it 

 was an old custom, for which they or their neighbors could not give a 

 sufficient account. The members of the Cagot village were not physi- 

 cally or morally distinguishable from the rest of their countrymen ; 

 and it was plainly to be seen that the old prejudices against the Cagots 

 had died out. 



The Fi-ench government and laws before the Revolution did very 

 little for the protection of the Cagots. Better conditions have grown 

 up since then. As soon as science began to busy itself with the inves- 

 tigation of the phenomena of Cagotism and to expose the baselessness 

 of the prejudices against those people, the prejudices began to weaken ; 

 and they seem now to have quite disappeared. — Translated for the 

 Popular Science Monthly from Das Ausland. 



