PYGMIES AND FOREST NEGROES 



513 



would appear to be osteological. Outwardly there is no special likeness 

 between the two groups. Further evidence may show that the ape-like 

 type may crop up in any Negro race, 

 whereas there can be no doubt that 

 the forest Pygmies are a well-marked 

 and distinct type of Negro. 



Even before the Negro quitted 

 Arabia to invade and occupy the greater 

 part of Africa he may have developed 

 a Pygmy type, or have had a ten- 

 dency to generate races of stunted 

 stature. Kemains which have been 

 found ia Sicily, in Sardinia, and the 

 Pyrenees, including a curious little 

 statuette fashioned by men of the 

 ■Stone Age discovered in the last- 

 named locality, hint at the possibility 

 of men of this Pygmy Negro type 

 having spread over part of Europe : it 

 has been even hinted by more than 

 one anthropologist of authority that 

 a Dwarf negroid race may have, at 

 one time, existed in Northern Europe, 

 and by an exaggeration in legend and 

 story of their peculiar habits — habits 

 strangely recalling the characteristics 

 of the little Dwarf people of the Congo 

 of the present day — have given rise to 

 the stories of kobolds, elves, sprites, 

 gnomes, and fairies. Like some of the 

 Bushmen (who are, however, an inde- 

 pendent development or an arrested 

 type of Negro) who inhabited South 

 Africa when it was first discovered by " ape-like " negro from the verge 



,,, i i j-ii • j. • OF THE CONGO FOREST: MCBIRA OR 



Europeans, and who still exist in munande 



the south-western part of that con- 

 tinent, like the European and Asiatic races of the early Stone Age, 

 these Negro Dwarfs in bleak or poorly forested regions no doubt Lived 

 in caves and holes, and the rapid manner in which they disappeared into 

 these holes, together with their baboon-like adroitness in making themselves 

 invisible in squatting immobility — a faculty remarkably present in the 

 existing Dwarfs of the Congo Forest— they gave rise to the belief in the 



