PYGMIES 





PYRAMID 



a statue of Galatea which he luul carved. So 

 great did this love become that Venus in re- 

 sponse to his prayers endowed the statue with 

 life, and the nymph then became Pygmalion's 

 wife. 



PYGMIES, pig'miz, a name applied to those 

 peoples who are far below normal in stature 

 and who exhibit this peculiarity as a racial 

 characteristic, not as an acquired defect. The 

 men of such races are, on an average. le>s than 

 11. In general, pygmies may be di- 

 vided into two groups the African, or Negril- 

 los, and the Asiatic, or Negritos. The Asiatic 

 are found chiefly in the Malay Peninsula and 

 in the Philippine and Andaman islands, and the 

 African in a region on the continent extending 

 about 200 miles north and the same distance 

 south of the equator. A Negrito tribe has also 

 liscovered in Dutch New Guinea. All 

 pygmies of unmixed blood, whether Asiatic or 

 African, have certain pronounced characteris- 

 These include, besides their short stature, 

 closely curling hair, flattened nose, huge mouth, 

 receding chin, an abundance of woolly hair on 

 the body, and arms long in proportion to the 

 legs. Generally speaking, pygmies resemble 

 apes. The skin of Negritos is dark brown or 

 black, while the Negrillos are of a reddish-yel- 

 low or chocolate-brown color. The Negrillos 

 are the shortest human beings on the globe, av- 

 eraging but four and one-half feet in height. 

 Unlike the Negritos, they have very prominent 

 abdomens. 



Pygmies have the customs and habits of a 

 primitive people. They wear little or no cloth- 

 ing, live in huts made of branches and foliage, 

 and obtain their food by hunting and fishing, 

 dd, however, that the Negrillos surpass 

 in intelligence the larger negro races of Africa. 

 They speak a corrupt form of the language 

 used by several neighboring tribes. The Malay 

 Peninsula pygmies have a language of their 

 own. 



The name pygmy, which is from the Greek 

 word for a measure of length corresponding to 

 the distance between the elbow and knuckles, 

 was first used by Homer in the Iliad. He ap- 

 plied it to a race of dwarfs whom he described 

 as living in a region far to the south. 



Consult Keane's Man: Past and Present. 



PYLE, pile, HOWARD (1853-1911), an Ameri- 

 can painter and author, one of the best illus- 

 trators his country ever produced. His illus- 

 trations for children, a line of work in which 

 he excelled, his pictures of old colonial days 



and his representations of life on the ma are 

 all characterized by vigor, simplicity and di- 

 rectness, and he was equally successful with 

 pen-and-ink work, wash drawings and oil paint- 

 ings. His first important picture, The Wn rh 

 in the Offing, was bought by Harper's Mont hit/ 

 for seventy-five dollars, and was the first of his 

 many contributions to that periodical. Pyle 

 was born in Wilmington, Del. His art studies 

 were pursued at a private Philadelphia school 

 and at the New York Art Students' League. 

 He taught for a time at the Drexel Institute in 

 Philadelphia, where he had as a pupil the tal- 

 ented Maxfield Parrish (which see). He died 

 in Florence, Italy. Among the books which he 

 wrote and illustrated are Merry Adventures oj 

 Robin Hood, Twilight Land, The Garden I' - 

 hind the Moon, The Story oj Sir Launcelot and 

 Stolen Treasure. 



PYM, pirn, JOHN (1584-1643), an Knglish 

 statesman who took an active part in opposing 

 the tyranny of Charles I. He belonged to tin 

 Puritan party (see PURITANS), and was one of 

 its most influential members. Pym was elected 

 to both the Short and Long Parliaments, and 

 while the latter was in session he led the move- 

 ment to impeach the Earl of Strafford 

 STRAFFORD). In 1642, the year before his death. 

 his arrest, together with that of four other 

 members, was sought by Charles I, who en- 

 tered the halls of Parliament in person to 

 apprehend them. They, however, had been fore- 

 warned, and when the king called for the un- 

 ruly members, particularly John Pym, he found 

 their places vacant. Pym's participation in the 

 civil war between king and Parliament ended 

 only with his death. 



PYORRHOEA, pi ore' a. See TEETH, subhead 

 Pyorrhoea. 



PYRAMID. A solid whose base is a polygon, 

 and whose faces are triangles all of which meet 

 at a common point, is called a pyramid. 



When the base of a pyramid is a regular 

 polygon, as a square, an equilateral triangle, 

 or a regular pentagon, and the faces are equal 

 isosceles triangles, the pyramid is called a regu- 

 lar pyramid, as Fig. 1. The point where the 

 faces meet (a in Fig. 1) is called the vertex. 

 The perpendicular distance from the vertex to 

 the base (a c in Fig. 1) is the altitude of the 

 pyramid. The distance from the vertex to the 

 middle ppint of any side of the base is the 

 slant height (a b in Fig. 1). 



Since each face is a triangle, its area is the 

 product of one side of the base and one-half 

 of the slant height. (The slant height is the 



