48 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



lias deciphered his name, AhJca (the name by which he is known 

 to this day), written beside him. 



The legend of the storks and the pygmies has been familiar 

 to us since our earliest childhood, and I dare say many of us 

 believed in it with a child's unhesitating belief for some years 

 after we had escaped from the thralldom of the nursery. I know 

 that I did, and whenever I would see cranes winging their way 

 southward I would conjure up a mental picture of an army of 

 little men mounted on rams and goats, and engaged in a san- 

 guinary battle with myriads of cranes. I would then lift up my 

 childish voice and shriek out the warning, " Beware of the pyg- 

 mies ! " to the birds flying high above my head. Homer is the 

 first of the classical writers who makes mention of this legend, 

 and he probably borrows from beliefs much older than his time. 

 Says he in the Iliad, Book III, when speaking of the advancing 

 Trojans, whom he likens to a cloud of birds : 



Thus by their leader's care, each martial band 

 Moves into ranks, and stretches o'er the land ; 

 With shouts the Trojans, rushing from afar, 

 Proclaim their motions, and provoke the war ; 

 So when inclement winters vex the plain 

 With piercing frosts, or thick descending rain, 

 To warmer seas the cranes embodied fly. 

 With noise and order, through the midway sky: 

 To pygmy nations wounds and death they bring, 

 And all the war descends upon the wing. 



Pope. 



Although Homer does not mention the country of the pyg- 

 mies in this passage, he does say that the cranes " fly over the 

 ocean'' (Pope takes advantage of a poet's license and does not 

 give a literal translation) ; hence he must have located them un- 

 questionably in Africa. 



Aristotle, in his History of Animals, mentions these little men 

 in his description of storks. After stating that these birds pass 

 from Scythia to the marshes of Egypt, "toward the sources of 

 the Nile," he declares that " this is the district that the pygmies 

 inhabit, whose existence is not a fable." A hundred years before 

 Aristotle, however, Herodotus had written of these homuncules, 

 for he says that certain Nasamonians, five in number, had con- 

 ceived the idea of exploring the deserts of Libya. After they 

 had been traveling in the desert for several days they saw trees 

 in the distance. They made toward these welcome objects, and 

 when they had reached them, and while they were eating the 

 fruit which grew on them in great abundance, they were sudden- 

 ly surrounded and seized " by a large company of very small men 

 who were much below the average height, and who dragged them 



