1888.] on the Pygmy Baces of Men. 283 



and almost unexpected result of a careful examination of these 

 skeletons is that they conform in the relative proportions of the head, 

 trunk, and limb, not to dwarfs, but to full-sized people of other races, 

 and they are therefore strikingly unlike the stumpy, long-bodied, 

 short-limbed, large-headed pygmies so graphically represented fighting 

 with their lances against the cranes on ancient Greek vases. 



The other characters of these skeletons are Negroid to an intense 

 degree, and quite accord with what has been stated of their external 

 appearance. The form of the skull, too, has that sub-brachycephaly 

 which has been shown by Hamy to characterise all the small Negro 

 populations of Central Africa. It is quite unlike that of the 

 Andamanese, quite unlike that of the Bushmen. They are obviously 

 Negroes of a special type, to which Hamy has given the appropriate 

 term of Negrillo. They seem to have much the same relation to the 

 larger long-headed African Negroes that the small round-headed 

 Negritos of the Indian Ocean have to their larger long-headed 

 Melanesian neighbours. 



At all events, the fact now seems clearly demonstrated that at 

 various sj)ots across the great African continent, within a few degrees 

 north and south of the equator, extending from the Atlantic coast to 

 near the shores of the Albert Nyanza (30^ E. long.), and perhaps, from 

 some indications which time will not allow me to enter into now (but 

 which will be found in the writings of Hamy and Quatrefages), even 

 further to the east, south of the Galla land, are still surviving, in 

 scattered districts, communities of these small Negroes, all much 

 resembling each other in size, appearance, and habits, and dwelling 

 mostly apart from their larger neighbours, by whom they are every- 

 where surrounded. Our information about them is still very scanty, 

 and to obtain more would be a worthy object of ambition for the 

 anthroj)ological traveller. In many parts, especially at the west, they 

 are obviously holding their own with difficulty, if not actually dis- 

 appearing, and there is much about their condition of civilisation, and 

 the situations in which they are found, to induce us to look upon them, 

 as in the case of the Bushmen in the south and the Negritos in the 

 east, as the remains of a population which occupied the land before the 

 incoming of the present dominant races. If the account of the Nasa- 

 monians related by Herodotus be accepted as historical, the river they 

 came to, " flowing from west to east," must have been the Niger, and 

 the northward range of the dwarfish people far more extensive twenty- 

 three centuries ago than it is at the present time. 



This view opens a still larger question, and takes us back to the 

 neighbourhood of the south of India as the centre from which 

 the whole of the great Negro race spread, east over the African 

 continent, and west over the islands of the Pacific, and to our little 

 Andamanese fellow subjects as probably the least modified descendants 

 of the primitive members of the great branch of the human species 

 characterised by their black skins and frizzly hair. 



[W. H. F.] 

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