It was left to the pygmy to revenge all of the creatures of fable upon incredulous mankind. He was doubted, yet he is. Not until some fifty years ago would the learned doubters admit that Homer and Herodotus were right, and themselves wrong. Now it is in the books that half a hundred groups of pygmies are living on the earth, to say nothing of others that have become extinct. Every race has had such groups, and every continent has known their tread.

There is palliation for ancient and modern doubts as to these dwarfish nations. The pygmies of reality are not so small as the pygmies of tradition. Their name is from the Greek word for fist, or the distance between the elbow joint and the knuckles of the average man—a little more than thirteen inches. The ancient geographers, however, allowed the smallest pygmies at least double that stature. There were two species of little men—the one averaging three spans, or two feet three inches high, the other averaging five spans, or three feet nine inches. These measurements recur again and again for fifteen centuries in the writings of the east and west.

No race has a mean stature as short even as the pygmies of five spans, but among the dwarf tribes there are many women who do not greatly exceed it; and there are women, not so small according to the standards of their brothers as to be accounted deformed, who do not equal it. Stanley saw among the Akkas of the West African Rain Forest a grown girl of seventeen who was half an inch short of three feet.

Poetic license of the old time took liberties with the estimates of geographers, but these liberties were understood as such. The dwarf nation on the Upper Nile that was reputed to war with the cranes used the ax, it was said, to cut down ears of wheat. When Hercules passed through their country they set up ladders to climb to the rim of his goblet for a drink. In his slumber two armies swooped down upon his right hand and two on his left; but, awaking, the hero laughingly gathered them all in his lion skin.

The myth of their warfare with the cranes became a theme of literature and art, but cast doubt over the whole pygmy tradition. It first appears in Homer. The Iliad likens the shouts of the onrushing Trojans to the cries of cranes as they fly southward “with noise and order through the sky,” bringing “wounds and death to pygmy nations.” Megasthenes elaborates the theme. It is the three-span pygmies, he says, that war upon the cranes, as well as on the partridges, which are as large as geese. The small folk collect and destroy the eggs of the cranes, which breed in India and nowhere else. Pliny adds that every spring the little men go in a body to the seashore, astride of rams and goats, and there destroy the eggs and young of the birds; “otherwise, it would be impossible for them to withstand the increasing multitude of the cranes.” The shore booths which they occupy they build of mud mixed with feathers and egg shells.

So the story moves from Africa to India, and towards modern times. Maundeville declares that in the Land of Pygmies, which he seems to place to the west of, and tributary to, China, the inhabitants “have oftentimes war with the Birds of that Country that they take and eat.” There is even a reference to this warfare in the writing (1563) of a traveler in Greenland. There Dithmar Blefkens of Hamburg met a blind monk who said that the pygmies represented the most perfect shape of man, but were “hairy to the uttermost Joynts of the Fingers,” had no proper speech, and were “unreasonable Creatures that live in Perpetual Darkness.”

India appears to be the home of the tradition that the dwarfish peoples warred with the cranes. Just a hint of its origin is afforded by Ctesias. The “swarthy men called Pygmies,” he said, “hunt hares and foxes not with dogs, but with ravens and kites and crows and vultures.” Falconry is known to have been practiced in India as early as B.C. 600 and may be a thousand years older there. From a people’s using birds of prey in hunting to themselves fighting against birds of prey is a step of inference easy to take.

There is, however, a more direct explanation. According to a tradition of the Indians, the Garuda, the bird of Vishnu, was hostile to the people of the Kirata, and the name of this people means “dwarfish.” While the sacred bird as pictured by the poets does not look like the crane, or any other known species, it may be near enough to account for the legend.

Herodotus was the first to give the pygmy tradition a historical quality. He heard of the little people while he was collecting materials for his books in Africa. His informants were natives of Cyrene who had been to the shrine of Ammon and talked with Etearchus the Ammonian king. The latter tells the story of the adventure of the five Nasamonian youths, which he had received from their Libyan countrymen and which Herodotus, therefore transcribes at third hand:

“The Nasamonians said there had grown up among them some wild young men, the sons of certain chiefs, who, when they came to man’s estate, indulged in all manner of extravagances, and among other things drew lots for five of their number to go and explore the desert parts of Libya, and try if they could not penetrate further than any had done previously. The young men, therefore, dispatched on this errand by their comrades with a plentiful supply of water and provision, traveled at first through the inhabited region, passing which they came to the wild beast tract, whence they finally entered upon the desert, which they proceeded to cross from east to west. After journeying for many days over a wide extent of sand, they came at last to a plain where they observed trees growing; approaching them, and seeing fruit on them, they proceeded to gather it.

“While they were thus engaged there came upon them some dwarfish men, under the middle height, who seized them and carried them off. The Nasamonians could not understand a word of their language, nor had they any acquaintance with the language of the Nasamonians. They were led across extensive marshes, and finally came to a town where all the men were of the height of their conductors, and black complexioned. A great river flowed by the town, running from west to east, and containing crocodiles.

“Here let me dismiss Etearchus, the Ammonian, and his story, only adding that he declared that the Nasamonians got safely back to their country and that the men whose city they had reached were a nation of sorcerers. With respect to the river which ran by their town, Etearchus conjectured it to be the Nile, and reason favors that view.”

Thus ends one of the most valuable records which have come down from ancient times. The river referred to is now believed to be the Niger, or perhaps an affluent of Lake Tchad. Herodotus has another story of a dwarfish people found in the west when Sataspes, the Carthaginian, undertook to sail around Libya.

Although Strabo doubted the existence of pygmy races, yet his keen mind brought him within reach of the truth. He finds in the wretched mode of life of the people he called the Ethiopians, an explanation of the reports of their dwarfish stature. They were naked and wandered from place to place, and their sheep, goats, oxen, and dogs were undersized like themselves. “It was perhaps from the diminutive size of these people,” he concludes, “that the story of the pygmies originated, whom no person worthy of credit has asserted that he himself has seen.” The Greek geographer seems to have had reliable information as to a fact that on its face is as hard to believe as the legends he discredits—that there was dwarfish live stock as well as a dwarfish people. Sir Samuel Baker found that the cows and ewes of the Bari, a tribe living in the same district with the forest pygmies, “have dimensions truly liliputian.”

Aristotle speaks with authority of the pygmies of Africa. “The storks,” he said, “pass from the plains of Scythia to the marsh of upper Egypt, toward the sources of the Nile. This is the district which the pygmies inhabit, whose existence is not a fable. There is really, as men say, a species of men of little stature, and their horses are little also. They pass their life in caverns.” Pliny speaks of the pygmies as dwelling in Thrace near the Black Sea, in the Carian district of Asia Minor, in India under the shadow of the Himalayas, and at the sources of the Nile. There is a valuable fact behind this apparently confused geography: the Roman was right in assuming there were several such races.

The pygmy races of Asia and Indonesia are cited in classic, Arabic, and Chinese geography, and in mediæval travel. “In the middle of India,” Ctesias says, “are found the swarthy men called pygmies, who speak the same language as the other Indians. They are very diminutive, the tallest but two cubits high, the majority only one and one-half. They let their hair grow very long—down to their knees and even lower. They have the largest beards anywhere to be seen, and when these have grown sufficiently long and copious, they no longer wear clothing, but let the hair of the head fall down their backs far below the knee, while in front are their beards trailing down to their very feet. When their hair has thus thickly enveloped their whole body they bind it round them with a zone and so make it serve for a garment. They are snub-nosed and otherwise ill-favored. Their sheep are of the size of our lambs, and their oxen and asses rather smaller than our rams. Three thousand men attend the king of the Indians on account of their great skill in archery. They are eminently just and have the same laws as the other Indians.”

This may be a description of the Kiratas, whose district is east of Bengal in the Himalaya foothills.

There were vague reports in the classic world of other pygmy peoples far to the southeast in Asia. The Chinese records make these more definite. The Hill and Sea Classic describes the Chiau Yau, a tribe of cap-wearing pygmies three cubits (3 feet 3 inches) high whose country was east of the country of the Three-headed Men. This is perhaps the country now inhabited by the Yau tribes, who are short of stature and may be this long-sought-for pygmy race. Individuals of the Chiau Yau tribe, “diminutive black slaves,” were sent to the Chinese court from the coasts of Indo-China in the reign of Ming Tu (A.D. 58-76). There was also a pygmy people whom the Annamese called the Phong. They were only two cubits, or twenty-six inches, high, and although they were cave dwellers a fragrant perfume emanated from their skins. As hunters they paid their dues to the state in camphor, rhinoceros horns, and elephant tusks. Both of these races Gerini locates in “the mysterious country of the pygmies” in French Indo-China, between the Mekong and the Black rivers, under the twenty-first parallel of north latitude. North of this district on the Red River dwell the dark, dwarfish Pu-lu tribes which seem to be the remnants of a once widely spread pygmy race. The Santom aborigines of Yun-nan and Laos are also of inferior stature, with flat faces and black skins. In China itself ancient writings speak of the black dwarfs of Shantung province as early as the twenty-third century B.C.

Perhaps the first record of the Aetas, or Philippine negritos, appears in Chao Fu-Kua, a Chinese author of the early thirteenth century, who told of a tribe of small black men with frizzly hair, round yellow eyes, and teeth that showed through their lips, who lived in remote valleys of the archipelago. A Chinese work on novelties, published in 1636, has several passages on the black dwarfs of Cochin-China. Anywhere from Annam to Siam, it says, “there are pygmies whose stature is not over three feet seven inches, who are regarded as of animal origin, who sell themselves for longer or shorter periods to dealers in aloes. When engaged they are provisioned, supplied with hatchets and saws, and sent into the mountains. These dwarfs are very submissive and servile.”

Ibn Khordadbeh and Idrisi tell of the Rami, a pygmy race of Sumatra, who go naked, find shelter in thickets, avoid intercourse with other people, and use a hissing speech. They are swift runners and adept tree climbers. They have red frizzly hair and a stature of but three feet. Curled hair of this color had been ascribed from the seventh century A.D. to the clawed negrito savages on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, and a traveler of the last generation reports hairy dwarfs on the southwest coast of Sumatra. Dunashki (about A.D. 1300) has this note: “When ships approach Volcano Island at the beginning of a squall, tiny black dwarfs, five spans (nearly four feet) or less in stature, resembling negroes, appear and climb aboard, without harming anyone.” All three of these travel notes may be reflected in the incident in the third voyage of Sindbad, when his ship, driven by a storm amid strange islands, is boarded by “an innumerable multitude of frightful savages about two feet high, covered all over with red hair,” who compel the crew to follow them to the palace of a giant cannibal.

Accounts of several other travelers bring the pygmy tradition down to the era of modern disbelief. Odoric, the fourteenth-century missionary monk, reports that the Yangste Kiang waters the Country of the Pygmies, whom he describes as an innumerable folk, three spans high, and foremost of all cotton workers. Their city of Chatan is one of the fairest of places. Æthicus of Istria declares that he sailed northwest from Ceylon and passed, among other islands in the Northern Sea, Bridinno, the land of dwarfs. Marco Polo tells how pygmies were fabricated from monkeys in Sumatra and sold to curio collectors.

Maundeville makes the pygmies subject to “the great Chan.” “The River Dalay,” he says, “goeth through the land of Pygmies, where that the Folk be of little Stature, and be but three Span long, and they be right fair and gentle. And they marry them when they be half a Year of Age and get Children. And they live not but six Year or seven at the most; and he that liveth eight Year, Men hold him there right passing old. These Men be workers of Gold, Silver, Cotton, Silk and of all such Things, the best of any other that be in the World.” Men of larger size work their lands and mines for them.

In another passage Sir John populates an isle with “Little Folk,” who have no mouths and only an adder speech. Pigafetta, who went with the Magellan expedition around the world and wrote its story, reports two races of dwarfs in the Philippines, one with gigantic ears. The latter were shaven, naked, shrill-voiced troglodytes, whose food was the sago tree.

Ludovico Varthema, an Italian Mohammedan, a contemporary of Columbus and a wide-ranging traveler, tells an incident of his pilgrimage to Mecca, which may or may not shed light on the moot question of the Middle Ages and since, as to what became of the lost Ten Tribes. There was a mountain in the Hedjaz, he said, inhabited by pygmy Jews, color black, who skipped from crag to crag like goats—he watched them from a distance—and when they caught a Moslem skinned him alive.

In Madagascar in 1770 the French naturalist Commerson, who accompanied Bougainville in his voyage around the world, found evidences of a pygmy tribe with an average stature of three and a half feet, all traces of which vanished in the following century. His report was corroborated by Count de Modave, governor of Fort Dauphin. The men of this tribe wore long beards and were workers in iron and steel, of which they made lances and assagais. They were brave pacifists. When from their mountain homes they saw a formidable force approaching on the plains below, they drove down such cattle as they could spare to the entrances of their defiles to purchase immunity from invasion. If, however, the enemy entered these defiles, the little folk savagely attacked them.

Near to the country of the warrior women in South America, said the Spaniards, was pygmy land. Peru has traditions of a race not over two cubits high. California Indians tell of a witch-like little people in the redwood forest. The Arapahoes tell of dark-skinned, pot-bellied, cannibal dwarfs who were only three feet high but strongly made, and skillful trackers. They could carry buffaloes on their backs, so the Crows said of the small folk that once roved Montana. In the Gila Canyon in New Mexico there have been exhumed the mummies of a true pygmy people, some of them scarcely three feet long, with cerements of woven cloth, sandals of yucca fiber and ornaments of hummingbird feathers; legend speaks of thievish dwarfs who lived in underground houses and sometimes came to the cities for supplies. D’Orbigny described, in 1831, the so-called Chiquitos, or Little Folk, who inhabit the heights on the divide between the Mamore and Paraguay rivers. The men he measured averaged only four feet ten inches, which brings them within strict pygmy requirements—not over four feet eleven inches. They are a broad-shouldered, robust Indian people, hospitable, sociable, musical. D’Orbigny estimated their number at about twenty thousand. No recent traces have been found of the Ayamanes whom Friedemann met in the northern Andes regions and who, he said, were no more than “five empans,” or three feet four inches, high.

There is a Chinese legend that in the remote northern mountains of the old empire there has lived for seventeen centuries a race of hairy dwarfs. Inscriptions on the Great Wall are said to recite that whenever one of the millions of laborers who were building it was found to have made a mistake in his work, he was imbedded alive in the wall at the place of his error. About A.D. 210, the story continues, a body of workmen rebelled at the custom, and with their families fled to distant forests where their descendants still live. The hardships of their journey and their rude surroundings brought these people down to the pygmy level.

It is asserted that there is a race of dwarfs in Morocco in the Atlas Mountains whose existence the Moors have kept secret for three thousand years because they are regarded as holy men, and great saints who bring good luck to towns. “Our Blessed Lord,” the people call a dwarf. “It is a sin to speak about them to you,” one Moor said to a traveler. The Moorish silence is declared to be the remnant of a superstition older than the Mohammedan religion.

These pygmy stories, of perhaps twenty-seven centuries so far as the record goes, of at least double that period if unwritten tradition be included, have been brought together here in order to assess the scientific reaction to them. Some of them on their face are completely fabulous, some have an admixture of truth, some are good enough history. To all except the very latest of them the scientific reaction was unfavorable until a deluge of facts made this attitude impossible.

Strabo among the ancients was in his rights when he complained that nobody had seen any pygmies, but his facts were incomplete, for long before his day civilized peoples had seen them. Browne summarizes in his stiff but elegant English the unbelief of the scholars of the Renaissance: “Julius Scaliger, a diligent enquirer, accounts thereof, but as a poetical fiction. Ulysses Aldrovandus, a most exact geographer, in an express discourse hereon, concludes the story fabulous and a poetical account of Homer. Albertus Magnus, a man ofttimes too credulous, herein was more than dubious; for he affirmeth if any such dwarfs were ever extant, they were surely some kind of apes; which is a conceit allowed by Cardan and not esteemed improbable by many others.” “There is as much reality,” concludes Browne, “in the pygmies of Paracelsus, that is, his non-adamical men, or middle natures betwixt men and spirits.”

Two towering names in natural history, Buffon and Cuvier, are ranged against the pygmy tradition. Here is Buffon’s conclusion: “Deceived by some optical illusion, the ancient historians gravely mention whole nations of pygmies as existing in remote quarters of the world. The more accurate observation of the moderns, however, convinces us that these accounts are entirely fabulous. The existence, therefore, of a pygmy race of mankind, being founded in error or in fable, we can expect to find men of diminutive stature only by accident, among men of the ordinary size.”

Buffon’s explanation of the fable that the pygmies war with the cranes is so plausible that men would accept it, as his own generation did, if they did not know that these little folk are human and not simian. Even so, there may be truth in the theory advanced. “One knows,” says Buffon, “that the monkeys, which go in large bands in Africa and India, carry on continual warfare against birds; they seek to surprise their nests, and without ceasing prepare ambushes for them. The storks defend themselves vigorously. But the monkeys, anxious to carry off the eggs and the young birds, return constantly, and in bands, to the combat; and as by their tricks, their feints and movements they seem to imitate human actions, they would appear to ignorant people to be a band of little men. Behold the origin and the history of these fables!”

Roulin was equally ingenious in his explanation of the pygmy populations and their campaigns against the birds. He noted the squat frames of the Lapps and Eskimos who dwell within, or not far from, the Arctic Circle. The pygmies, he decided, were a circumpolar population. Homer placed their home and their battles at the southern end of the crane path; Roulin placed them at the northern terminus, in that Scythia of misty boundaries one of which was supposed to be the boreal ocean. Pliny had told that every year the pygmies rode down to the seashore to destroy the eggs and young of the cranes. Very well, here was the story explained, for every year the Lapps and Eskimos come down to the sea and return to the interior, and these people partly subsist on the eggs of aquatic birds.

Cuvier is reproachful of Pliny. “I am not surprised,” he says, “at finding the pygmies in the works of Homer; but to find them in Pliny I am surprised indeed.” The great French naturalist has contributed more, perhaps, than any other man to find the basis of truth or the source of error in classic fables. His explanation of the pygmy legend, like that of Buffon, is more convincing almost than truth itself, but its teaching is error. He finds the source of a fable in a flattering convention of ancient sculpture: “The custom of exhibiting in the same sculpture, in bas-relief, men of very different heights—of making kings and conquerors gigantic while their subjects and vassals are represented as only one-fourth or one-fifth of their size—must have given rise to the fable of the pygmies.”

Cuvier died in 1832. Chambers’ Journal in 1844 voiced with less reserve the unbelief of that period. In a scoffing article it declares that “the world has long been haunted with the idea that somewhere in Africa there is a nation of Tom Thumbs”; but “the grand difficulty about the African nation of dwarfs is the fact that not a single specimen has been seen either in Abyssinia or Egypt.” “The pygmy dream, one of the last lingering superstitions of travel, has been puffed away,” confidently asserts this periodical. These so-called pygmies were monkeys, not men.

In 1863 Paul du Chaillu explored the coast lands of West Africa and in 1871 published the results in The Country of the Dwarfs. The scientific skepticism of the ages delivered its last stroke in the attacks that met this book, for already, although the world did not know it, Schweinfurth, farther east in the equatorial region, had reviewed an entire pygmy army. The London Graphic wonders whether or not “Mr. du Chaillu means us to accept the book as a bona-fide narrative of what he has himself seen.” Thus cautiously this periodical registers its doubts: “The first part of the book reads very much like other descriptions of African exploration; but further on Mr. du Chaillu represents himself as having arrived at the country of the dwarfs, whom he considers to be identical with the supposed fabulous pygmies. This strange race, who average only from four feet to four feet seven inches high, live a perfectly wild life in the forests of equatorial Africa, feeding on snakes, rats, mice, and berries. They go entirely naked, and inhabit huts made by bending branches of trees in the shape of a bow. The height of the huts is just enough to keep the head of a man from touching the roof when he is seated. These dwarfs are very shy of being seen and hold no communion with the negro tribes about them, by whom they are called Obongos. Truly we have here a strange tale.”

Truly, there are not only lost arts, but lost records, forgotten histories. Forty-four centuries before du Chaillu was scoffed at for a true tale, an authentic pygmy testimony was set down in a letter which a king of Egypt wrote to a vassal chief, and which is still in existence. The world believed in pygmies then because sometimes it saw them; and their descendants still hunt the elephant in the forests of equatorial Africa.

To the Egyptians of that time the country beyond the Second Cataract of the Nile was the Land of Ghosts, whence the negroes brought to the markets of Assuan strange stories of shadowy folk who dwelt there. Into this land a prince of Elephantine named Herkhuf marched with a little force. An account of his journey has been written by Arthur E. P. Weigall, of the Department of Antiquities of Egypt.

In the country which Herkhuf penetrated he found pygmies dwelling, and one he secured. He sent word back to the boy Pharaoh, Pepy II, and had from him a letter believed to be the earliest example of a private communication. Yet life still throbs through its lines and the colors glow in the picture of an excited royal lad awaiting the coming of this wonder of the south, directing that his meals shall be ample, that his slumbers shall be guarded, and that on taking ship at Memphis there shall be men to see he does not fall into the water. The Pharaoh’s letter follows:

“You say in your letter that you have brought a dancing pygmy of the god from the Land of Ghosts, like the pygmy which the Treasurer Baurded brought from the Land of Pount in the time of Asesa. You say to my majesty, ‘Never before has one like him been brought by anyone who has visited Aam.’ Come northward, therefore, to the court immediately, and bring this pygmy with you, which you must bring living, prosperous, and healthy, from the Land of Ghosts, to dance for the King and to rejoice and gladden the heart of the King. When he goes down with you into the vessel, appoint trustworthy people to be beside him at either side of the vessel: take care that he does not fall into the water. When he sleeps at night, appoint trustworthy people who shall sleep beside him in his cabin; and make an inspection ten times each night. My majesty desires to see this pygmy more than the gifts of Sinai and of Pount. If you arrive at court, the pygmy being with you, alive, prosperous, and healthy, my majesty will do for you a greater thing than that which was done for the Treasurer Baurded in the time of Asesa, according to the heart’s desire of my majesty to see this pygmy. Orders have been sent to the chief of the New Towns to arrange that food shall be taken from every store-city and every temple (on the road) without stinting.”

A Nubian Highway, so Weigall calls the ancient road down which the dancing pygmy came to civilization about B.C. 2500. In A. D. 1878 a little farther south, Stanley followed what he calls a Pygmy Highway, “along which quite a tribe must have passed. It was lined with amoma fruit skins, and shells of nuts, and the crimson rinds of phrynia berries. Our elephant and game track had brought us across another track leading easterly from Andari, and both joined presently, developing to a highway much patronized by the pygmy tribes. We could tell where they had stopped to light their pipes, and to crack nuts, and trap game, and halted to gossip. The twigs were broken three feet from the ground, showing that they were snapped by dwarfs. Where it was a little muddy the path showed high, delicate insteps, proving their ancient ancestry and aristocratic descent, and small feet not larger than those of young English misses of eight years old.” Later Stanley met individuals of this tribe.

These were the Akkas, or Mambuti, the same pygmy tribe, it would appear, whose sculptured reliefs on monuments of Egypt going back as far as B.C. 3366 were dwarfed, so Cuvier had thought, merely to make a conqueror seem larger than life and indicate their own inferior estate. When a regiment of several hundred of these little warriors marched behind Moummeri in 1870 to do homage to Munza, the East African negro monarch, the pygmy tradition marched with them out of the mists of fable across the border of geographical knowledge. For Schweinfurth, a European explorer, was there to behold these “grasshopper warriors,” as he called them.

The revolution in scientific opinion since that day appears in the statement that the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica prints one paragraph about the pygmies, nearly all of which is an exposition of myths and a statement of doubts, while the eleventh edition prints two full pages of ascertained facts.

Although science always balked at the name of pygmy and refused as long as it could to admit that the African forests concealed a race of tiny men, yet the world had long known something of the little peoples. The Spaniards rightly reported that pygmy Indians had lived in Peru, and they found negritos in the Philippines. Although Arab traders gave the Andamans a wide berth because, as they believed, these islands contained cannibals and no cocoanuts, yet they knew even before the Middle Ages that a dwarfish people dwelt there. The Dutch found the Bushmen when they settled South Africa, and hunted them for sport as if they were jackals; they found also the still smaller Vaalpens, or “dusty-bellies.” The Lapps of Russia and Scandinavia were known to mediæval travelers, who were terrified by their diminutive stature and witch repute. These mongoloid people, whose mean stature is only five feet, and their kinsmen, the Eskimos, who are a little taller, are, however, not classified among the true pygmies, a term which an arbitrary convention restricts to Little Black Men.

The pygmies of Asia and Oceania are called negritos, the pygmies of equatorial Africa negrillos. They vary by tribes in average height from four feet eight inches to five feet two inches, with the women smaller and many individuals only a little above four feet. A full-grown Akka adult, says Stanley, may weigh ninety pounds. Another explorer estimated the average weight of six of these adults at seventy-seven pounds and found that two of them weighed but fifty-three pounds apiece.

Wherever seen, the tribes of little people have certain things in common beside their stature. One of these is their discontinuous distribution. They do not adjoin each other in a continuous zone of population as the taller races do, but are dotted here and there across the earth like islands in a sea of alien populations. Always they occupy the less desirable districts. The Spaniards called the Philippine pygmies Negritos del Monte, for they had retired before the Malays to the mountain gorges. The Lapps rove the tundras of northern Europe. The Bushmen dwell in the deserts of South Africa. The Akkas inhabit the steaming forests of equatorial Africa, in parallels of latitude deadly to the white man. The Batwas live on volcanic uplands in the Tanganyika country. In the Malay Peninsula and New Guinea, one seeks in vain for littoral-dwelling negritos; they have been driven inland and to the mountain recesses.

Almost everywhere the little people somewhat resemble in feature the races that surround them. This is due to unions, temporary or otherwise, between the pygmy women and the men of the neighbor tribes, by which various streams of strange blood have poured into the veins of the lesser stock. Among the Lapps of earlier generations it almost seemed as if it were conscious tribal policy to promote a taller stature by encouraging women and girls to form irregular connections with men of other European races. There is Bushman blood in the Hottentots, or Hottentot blood in the Bushmen. In the so-called Bastards of the Kalahari Desert—a term whereof the wearers are proud because it concedes to them a Caucasian strain—the blood of the Bushmen meets the blood of the Boers in the halfway house of the Hottentot.

Herbert Long, who spent six years in Central Africa with an expedition from the American Museum of Natural History, notes in its Journal for 1919 the fact that the pygmy men he saw were often much taller than their mates, and gives a reason, that may explain the same phenomenon in related tribes. Comely pygmy girls enter the harems of the chiefs of the tall negro tribes. Their half-breed sons are sent back to their own people. Since women are valuable chattels, the daughters are retained by the father’s tribe. The custom increases pygmy prestige; but the little men must not wed the women of their tall friends.

The small black folk of the forest have thus won a right to the marked regional resemblance they bear to the larger black folk of the yam and breadfruit clearings, whom they serve as scouts against the approach of an enemy and as allies in forest warfare. “In western Africa, as in the Philippines and in the two Gangetic peninsulas,” asserts Quatrefages, “the pygmies have played an ethnological rôle, at times important, in crossing with superior races and in giving birth to half-breed populations.” The Pandavas, or heroes of the oldest Indian times, set the example of these unions with lower races.

The Dravidians of southern India, Quatrefages declares, occupy the territory formerly populated by the negritos—and carry their blood. He also thinks that the blood of these little blacks shows itself in the skin and stature of natives in parts of Japan. Relics of a pygmy race are supposed to exist in Sicily and Sardinia, “along the highroad between Pleistocene Africa and Europe”; fifteen per cent of the men of South Italy and Sardinia are rejected for military service because less than sixty-one and one half inches high. South of Salamanca in western Spain, the valley called Las Jurdes is peopled by men and women said to be little more than three feet high, whose shrunken stature is attributed to unwholesome surroundings.

No true pygmy race has developed a pronounced nose bridge, and only the lozenge-faced Bushmen have salient chins. Among nearly all of the tribes there is a deficiency in the fatty tissues which affect the skin, so that, even before old age comes, they present a wrinkled appearance as if the skin fitted too loosely. This is true even of the Lapps. The countenances of these northern dwarfs are mongoloid, but without the slanting eyes of the Chinese and Tartars, and their heads are the roundest of any race of men. The negrito and negrillo tribes have rounder heads than the tall negroes. The bodies of many of the little people in Central Africa and New Guinea are covered with a downy growth. Pygmy complexions show olive in the Lapps, light yellow in the Bushmen, yellow brown in the Indonesians, dark brown in the negritos of the Andamans and Philippines, and among the Akkas, as Schweinfurth puts it, the color of coffee slightly roasted.

Small hands and in some cases small feet characterize these tribes, and grown girls of the Bushmen show, under measurement, feet but little more than four inches long. Their bodies are long in proportion to their legs, and the legs are slim. The mid-point of the body is above the navel instead of below, as it is in the tall races. The pygmies of Africa are pot-bellied; this is due to diet, and is corrected by regular and wholesome food.

In other respects the pygmies differ from the rest of mankind chiefly in what they lack. Save in the case of the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula they may have no separate language; and they use always the speech of their taller neighbors. There is no pygmy state, or king, and often no tribal organization; even among the Lapps there was a nomad tribe called the “twice and thrice tributary Lapps,” because its members paid tribute to two, sometimes to three states—Russia, Denmark, and Sweden. The Andaman negritos and the Akkas of the West African Rain Forest are the only races that never devised a means of making fire, though both know its use. The Andamanese are also the only people that never made a musical instrument and the only people that never domesticated a food animal or cultivated a plant.

One or two things, however, may be said for the culture of the little folk. There are no pygmy cannibals. Although the Bushman houses, mere mats suspended on stakes, are the most primitive known, yet these are the most skilled artists in South Africa, and some of their figures suggest that they may have known hieroglyphic writing. All the little peoples treat their women kindly, and reverence gray hairs. The Andamanese are monogamous and believe in an omniscient deity. On the other hand, the highest religious concept among the polygamous Akkas is of a pygmy devil. The Bushmen live in a state approaching sexual promiscuity; it used to be the custom, when a man wished a temporary mate, to kidnap a small child, and the mother would follow the child into his home. The Andamanese have the peculiar custom of manifesting joy by weeping, and it is said the Veddahs never laugh.

No certain statements may be made as to the aggregate numbers of the dwarf nations. There are about 50,000 Bushmen, 27,000 Lapps, 20,000 Aetas, 2,000 Mincoupies, 2,000 Veddahs. It may be that the equatorial pygmies are half as numerous as the Aetas. Everywhere the number of these people is diminishing.

As to their origin and the cause of their shrunken stature, there is no agreement among ethnologists. The small blacks may have come into existence in South India and spread thence east and west, peopling Melanesia and Africa. Once they formed a belt of population clear across equatorial Africa. On the evidences of crania which he examined, Professor Kollman believes that, about b.c. 5000, they dwelt as far down the Nile Valley as the Thebaid. The Oriental branch of the race, pure or mixed, extends, says Quatrefages, from the extreme southeast of New Guinea to the archipelago of the Andamans and from the Sunda Islands to Japan, and on the Asiatic continent from Annam and the peninsula of Malacca to the western Ghauts, and from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas. This grandiose geography is challenged by later scholarship.

Yet over all these wide spaces, and over the Dark Continent, pygmies may have been the first settlers. Once it was surmised that the tall negritoes sprang from them; but this is a moot point. To accept it would be to assert that short stature is a primitive trait, and that all the tall races are in this respect abnormal. British anthropologists hold that the Bushmen are a distinct people, but that the Congo pygmies, though of livelier intelligence than the tall blacks, are yet special groups of the Nilotic or Bantu negroes, arrested or degenerated by the inhospitable forest. Their diminished stature, Stanley urges, is the result of “three thousand years of isolation, intermarriage, and a precarious diet of fungi, wild fruit, lean fibrous meat of animals, and dried insects; in a word, of the utter absence of sunshine and the lack of gluten and saccharine bodies in their food.”

Handicapping conditions may have produced the Lapps of the Arctic Circle, the vanished Indian dwarfs of the Andes, the enigmatic Bushmen, and the little black men of Africa, the Malay Peninsula, and various isles of the eastern sea. But in old fables pygmyland is hard by the country of the giants. It happens that the diminutive Lapp is neighbor to the tall Karelian, the Bushman and Akka to the stalwart Bantu. There are little people of the frigid zone, the tropics, and the south temperate. There were dwarfs of rich ocean littorals as well as of the tundra, the mountain glen, the desert, and the equatorial forest.

“I believe mankind was originally a dwarf,” says Leland. Churchward, in his Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man, holds that paleolithic man was a pygmy, “the first little earth man or red man,” and that he was evolved near the Nile springs, and thence overspread the earth. Sign language and articulate sounds, the Masonic writer thinks, were worked out by these little folk. After talking with representatives of their race, he concludes that they have a monosyllabic speech, and words with the same sounds as the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The resemblance of living pygmies to the long-armed, short-legged, paunchy dwarf-gods of Egypt and Phœnicia, and notably to Bes, has been remarked. These squat divinities may have owed their being to ancient fear of small men, the elder brothers of historic man. Sir Harry Johnston thinks it possible that the little blacks once overspread Europe and, by their prankish good nature and curious power of becoming invisible in herbage and behind rocks, gave rise to folk-tales of gnomes, kobolds, and fairies. Kollman, the Basle anatomist, contends that the pygmies were the child race of mankind, and that each tall race was preceded by a small one. The common opinion, that healthy dwarf tribes have been produced by degeneration from men of larger mold, is not fully satisfying. Yet the oldest human skeletons found thus far are of men of normal size.

There are pygmies, but why? The one riddle succeeds the other.