484 THE PYGMIES OF THE GREAT CONGO FOREST. 



or dawn, the little man will show himself grateful and will leave 

 behind him some night a return present of meat, or he will be found 

 to have cleared the plantation of weeds, to have set traps, to have 

 driven off apes, l)aboons, or elephants while his friends and hosts 

 were sleeping. Children, however, might be lured away from time' 

 to time to follow the dwarfs, and even mingle with their tribe, like 

 the children or men and women carried off' by the fairies. On the 

 other hand, it is sometimes related that when the negro mother awoke 

 in the morning her bonn}^, big, l)lack child had disappeared and its 

 place had been taken b}^ a frail, 3'ellow, wrinkled pygmy infant, the 

 changeling of our stories. Anyone who has seen as nmch of central 

 Africa as I have and has noted their merry, impish ways, their little 

 songs, their little dances, their mischievous pranks, unseen, spiteful 

 vengeance, quick gratitude, and prompt return for kindness can not 

 but be struck by their singular rescm})lance in character to the elves 

 and gnomes and sprites of our nursery stories. At the same time we 

 must be on our guard against reckless theorizing, and it may be too 

 much to assume that the negro species ever inhabited Europe in spite 

 of the resemblance between the stone implements of paleolithic man 

 and those of the modern Tasmanians, and the Tasmanians were negroid 

 if not negro. Paleolithic man in Europe may have been more like 

 the Veddah, the Australian, the Dravidian, the Ainu than the Bush- 

 man or Congo p.ygmy. Undoubtedly (to my thinking) most '-fairy" 

 m^^ths arose from the contemplation of the mysterious habits of dwarf 

 troglodyte races lingering on still in the crannies, caverns, forests, 

 and mountains of Europe after the invasion of neolithic man. But 

 we must not too widely assume that these extinct P3'giuy races were 

 negroes. They might well have been the dwarfed descendants of 

 earlier and less definite human species; they may have been primitive 

 Mongols or Eskimos. All the three species, or su))species, of IFoiiio 

 have developed separately, repeatedly, and concurrently dwarf and 

 giant races. Tall peoples have arisen inde[)endently one after the 

 other in Patagonia, in equatorial Africa, in north Africa, Syria, north- 

 ern P^urope, and Polynesia. Stunted races have been evolved in 

 several parts of Africa, in Scandinavia, Japan, the Andaman and 

 Philippine archipelagoes, or among the Eskimos. 



I am not inclined now to advocate the theory that the Congo pyg- 

 mies of equatorial Africa are necessarily connected in origin with the 

 South African Bushman. Some Bushmen tribes in southwest Africa, 

 where better food conditions prevail, are scarc(dy dwarfs. The Bush- 

 men and Hottentots are obviously closely interrelated in physical 

 structure, but I can see no physical features (other than dwarfishness) 

 which arc obviously peculiar to both Bushmen and Congo pygmies. 

 On the contrary, in the large and often protuburent eyes, the l)road, 

 flat nose with its exaggerated aloe, the long upper lip and but slight 



