The mental age of an average adult gypsy is thought to be about that of a child of ten. Gypsies have never accomplished anything of great significance in writing, painting, musical composition, science or social organization . . . Society has always found the gypsies an ethnic puzzle and has tried ceaselessly to fit them, by force or fraud, piety or policy, coaxing or cruelty, into some framework of its own conception, but so far without success.
—Encyclopaedia Britannica
No one has ever made an authoritative estimate of the mental age of Big Joe Uwanawich, a high-caste Serbian gypsy who lives...