266 Professor Floicer [April 13, 



WEEKLY EVEXIXG :\IEETIXG, 



Friday, AprQ 13, ISSS. 



Edwabd Woods, Esq. M.Iiist.C,E. Tic«-President, in tlie Chair. 



Pbofessob William HE^-EY Flower, C.B. LL.D. F.K.S. 



The Pygmy Paces of Meu. 



It is well known that the nations of antiquity entertained a wide- 

 spread belief in the existence of a race or races of human beings of 

 exceedingly diminutive stature, who dwelt in some of the remote and 

 unexplored regions of the earth. These were called Pygmies^ a word 

 said to be derived from Tn-z/xyj, which means a fist, and also a measure 

 of length, the distance from the elbow to the knuckles of an ordinary- 

 sized man, or rather more than 13 inches. 



In the opening of the third book of the Iliad, the Trojan hosts 

 are described as coming on with noise and shouting, " like the cranes 

 which flee from the coming of winter and sudden rain, and fly with 

 clamour towards the streams of ocean, bearing slaughter and fate to 

 the Pygmy men, and in early mom oflfer cruel battle," or, as Pope 



has it — 



*' So when inclement winters vex the plain, 

 "With piercing frosts, or thick descending rain, 

 To wanner seas the cranes embodied fly. 

 With noise and order throngh the midway sky. 

 To Pygmy nations wourds and d.ath they bring. 

 And 'aU the war descends upon the wing." 



The combats between the pygmies and the cranes are often alluded 

 to by later classical writers, and are not unfrequently depicted 

 upon Greek vases. In one of these in the Hope collection at Deep- 

 dene, in which the figures are represented with great spirit, the 

 pygmies are dwarfish-looking men with large heads, negro features, 

 and close woolly or frizzly hair. They are armed with lances. 

 Notices of a less poetical and apparently more scientific character of 

 the occurrence of races of very small human beings are met with in 

 Aristotle, Herodotus, Ctesias, Pliny, Pomponius Melo, and others. 

 Aristotle places his pygmies in Africa, near the sources of the Nile, 

 while Ctesias describes a race of dwarfs in the interior of India. The 

 account in Herodotus is so circumstantial, and has such an air of 

 truthfulness about it, especially in connection with recent discoveries, 

 that it is worth quoting in full.* 



" I did hear, indeed, what I will now relate, from certain natives 

 of Cyr4ne. Once up<>n a time, they said, they were on a visit to the 



* HexodotTis. Bc-cik II.. 32, Eawlinson's trarislation, p. 47. 



