NA TURE 



25 



THURSDAY, .MAY 9, 1895. 



THE PYGMIES. 



The Pygmies. By A. de Quatrefages. Translated by 

 Frederick Starr. (London and New Y'ork : Macmillan 

 and Co., 1895.) 



SOME surprise was expressed when Prof, de Quatre- 

 fages was appointed, in 1855, to the chair of 

 Anthropology in the .Museum of Natural History at 

 Paris. He was then forty-five years of age, and had 

 acquired a considerable reputation as a zoologist, but his 

 published original researches related only to the lower 

 marine forms of animal life. Thenceforward, however, he 

 devoted himself with great energy and success to the 

 cultivation of the subject under his special charge, and 

 the great development of the collections in the Museum 

 and the numerous contributions to the literature of the 

 natural history of man, which he continued to make 

 .ilniost up to the tunc of his death, three years ago, at the 

 .i:.;e of eighty-two, abundantly justified his selection for 

 the post. It is true, that during the greater part of this 

 tune he had the advantage of the assistance and har- 

 monious co-operation in much of his work of M. E. T. 

 1 1 amy, who has naturally succeeded to the chair. 



The work now under notice, which has just appeared 



1 .in English form, was originally published in 1887, as 

 one of the " Bibliotheque scientifique contemporaine," and 

 is essentially popular in its character. It commences by 

 giving an account of the wide-spread belief among the 

 more cultivated nations of antiquity in the e.\istence of a 

 race or races of human beings of e.\ceedingly diminutive 

 stature, who dwelt in some of the more remote and un- 

 explored regions of the earth. The scattered notices of 

 these people, called Pygmies by the Greeks, found 

 in the writings of Homer, ."Xristotle, Herodotus, Ctesias, 

 Pliny, Poniponius Melo, and others, are cited and com- 

 mented upon. ,\ristotle places his pygmies in .Africa, 

 near the sources of the Nile, and Herodotus gives 

 a circumstantial account of their existence near a 

 river now generally identified with the Niger, while 

 Ctesias describes a race of dwarfs in the interior 

 of India. Whether these legends were merely the 

 offspring of a fertile imagination, or whether they had 

 a solid foundation in fact, may be still an open question. 

 Our author is convinced that the latter view is correct, 

 and devotes the greater part of the work to the task of 

 collecting all the reliable information upon the existing 

 races of people of diminutive stature who inhabit the 

 regions of the earth in which the pygmies of the ancients 

 were supposed to dwell, and to the endeavour to har- 

 monise the scanty notices of those old writers with the 

 facts as now shown by scientific investigation. 



A considerable portion of the book is given to an 

 account of the characteristics and culture of that singu- 

 larly interesting race, the natives of the Andaman Islands, 

 which is naturally taken mainly from the observations of 

 Mr. E. H. Man. These people Quatrefages persists in 

 calling "Mincopies," although it has long been shown 

 that the name is quite unknow n in their own language. .\ 

 chapter is then devoted to showing that people having the 

 general physical characters (small stature, black colour, 

 NO. 1332, VOL. 52] 



frizzly hair, and roundish heads) and many of the habits 

 and customs (especially the dexterous use of the bow) of 

 the .Andamanese, form a groundwork of the native popu- 

 lation of many of the islands of the Malay .\rchipelago, 

 living mostly in the mountainous regions of the interior. 

 To this race, Quatrefages has given the name of " Negrito." 

 Hut it is not only in the islands that the .Negrito race 

 dwell. Traces of them are found also on the mainland of 

 .\sia, but everywhere under the same conditions ; in 

 scattered tribes, occupying the more inaccessible moun- 

 tainous regions of countries otherwise mainly inhabited 

 by other races, and generally in a condition more or 

 less of degradation and barbarism, resulting from the 

 oppressive treatment they have received from their 

 invading conquerors ; often, moreover, so much mixed 

 that their original characters are scarcely recognisable. 

 The Semangs of the interior of the Malay Peninsula, the 

 Sakays from Perak, the Moys from .Annam — all show- 

 traces of Negrito blood. In India proper, especially 

 among the lowest and least civilised tribes, not only of the 

 central and southern districts, but almost to the foot of 

 the Himalayas, in the Punjab, and even to the west side 

 of the Indus, according to Quatrefages, frizzly hair, negro 

 features, and small stature, are so common that a strong 

 argument can be based on them for the belief in a Negrito 

 race forming the foundation of the whole pre-Aryan or 

 Dravidian, as it is generally called, population of the 

 peninsula. The crossing which has taken place with 

 other races has, doubtless, greatly altered the physical 

 characters of this people, and the evidences of this alter- 

 ation manifest themselves in many ways ; sometimes the 

 curliness of the hair is lost by the admixture with straight- 

 haired races, while the black complexion and small stature 

 remain ; sometimes the stature is increased, but the 

 colour, which seems to be one of the most persistent of 

 characteristics, remains. The localities in which the 

 Negrito people are found in their greatest purity, either in 

 almost inaccessible islands, as were the Andamans till in 

 comparatively recent times, or elsewhere in the moun- 

 tainous ranges of the interior only, and their social con- 

 ditions and traditions wherever they exist — all point to the 

 fact that they were the earliest inhabitants ; and that the 

 Mongolian and the Malay races on the east, and the 

 .'\ryans on the w-est, which are now so rapidly extermin- 

 ating and replacing them, are later comers into the land. 

 VVe now see what constitutes the great interest of the 

 .Andamanese natives to the student of the ethnological 

 history of the Eastern world. Their long isolation has 

 made them a remarkably homogeneous race, stamping 

 them all with a common resemblance not seen in the 

 mi.xed races generally met with in continental areas. 

 They are the least modified representatives of the people 

 who were, so far as we know, the primitive inhabitants of 

 a large portion of the earth's surface, but who are now 

 verging on extinction. 



The next portion of the book is devoted to an exam- 

 ination of the so-called " pygmy " races of the African 

 continent. These are the well-know n Bushmen or " San' 

 of South .Africa, to whose religious beliefs a whole 

 chapter, derived mainly from the observations of Hahn, is 

 devoted, and another race to which Hamy has given the 

 name of "Negrillos," about which far less is known at 

 present, who seem to hold the same relation to the larger 



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