THE HOME OF THE TROGLODYTES.* 
sy HE. T.. Bamy. 
The ancients had a vague knowledge of a people inhabiting certain 
districts of northern Africa, who were remarkable for the custom, 
which they had in commen, of making their habitations in the depths 
of the earth. These were the Troglodytes. 
A portion of the sea-coast of Krythreum Mare (Red Sea) owed the 
name of Troglodytic Ethiopia to certain of these barbarians; others 
occupied a territory adjacent to the mountains which rise in the south- 
ern part of Fezzan, while others, much farther to the west, inhabited 
an undulating region in which there is recognized the chain which sur- 
rounds the lower extremity of Little Syria. 
The accounts of these curious people, as given by ancient writers, 
always represent them as constructing their dwellings under ground; 
as being hunters of such activity and skill that they take their game 
while in pursuit, living for the most part however on the flesh of 
serpents and lizards. They are described as being poor and indifferent 
to their own interests, having no trade except in carbuncles, for which 
however they were merely agents. Their language differed entirely 
from that of any other people, it being compared by Herodotus to the 
strident cry of the bat. 
These summary accounts, incoherent and sometimes fantastic, have 
had the effect of rendering most modern historians of African geog- 
raphy incredulous as to their truth. These extraordinary beings have 
been ordinarily banished to a world of the imagination, the species of 
whom antiquity has so largely multiplied even to the confines of known 
countries. Reliable travellers came however in their turn to discover 
in the very same regions where the ancients had located their Troglo- 
dytes, important tribes, living like them in subterranean abodes, natural 
or artificial. 
The English Captain Lyons described in 1821, during a four days’ 
march to the southwest of Tripoli, through a district mentioned by 
*Read at the annual public meeting of the five Academies of the Institute of 
France, October 24, 1891. (From L’ Anthropologie, Sept.-Oct., 1891; vol. U, pp. 
529-536. ) 
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