PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 7 



probably, of a small breed that belonged to these dwarfs, and that were shipped 

 with them to America. Strange to say, their name is " Teki horses." 



Dr. Weir's interesting article in the Popular Science Monthly for June, 1896, 

 on " The Pygmy in the United States " (which, however, does not refer to these 

 small horses), will well repay a perusal. 



I invite the attention, not only of anthropologists, but also of zoologists, to this 

 subject : Are these little breeds the original stock and have domestic animals 

 gradually become larger and stronger, just as cultivated plants have ; or have 

 scores of thousands of years of privation dwarfed them and their pygmy owners ? 



It is very desirable that zoologists should carefully study and apply the investi- 

 gations of Yale naturalists and palaeontologists as to the origin of the horse in 

 America, which would seem to indicate that the ordinary horse had an even smaller 

 prototype than the little " drinkers of the wind " of the Sahara, in a fox-like animal 

 with five toes, developing in later ages into a larger, horse-like animal with a cloven 

 foot. " After that the deluge " — some catastrophe that put a final stop to horse- 

 raising in America in primordial times. 



I also suggest a point which zoologists may follow up with good results. 



Mr. Cunninghame Graham, three or four years ago, in an article on Argentina, 

 says that the horse of the Pampas differs from the ordinary horse, the lumbar 

 vertebrae of which are one more in number than those of the Pampas horses. This, 

 he says, also applies to Barbs, and he thinks that the Spaniards must have brought 

 out Moorish horses with them to Argentina. I tried, when last in Morocco, to 

 get a skeleton of a Barbary horse examined by a veterinary surgeon, but did not 

 succeed. 



If the Barb differs also from ordinary horses, it probably got its peculiarity 

 from the little breed of ponies in the Sahara. 



It is also very important to ascertain whether the latest type of fossil horses in 

 America resembled the Barbs or the common horse in this respect. 



Henceforth we have immensely improved chances of solving the problems of 

 the origins of small breeds of domestic animals, and of pygmy races of men — for 

 what will explain the one, will also settle the other. 



As respects the latter, the tendency of scientific thought is to regard dwarf 

 races of men as having been the original and earliest specimens of humanity on the 

 earth, and to yield to them the place so long occupied by a supposed " missing 

 link." The latest traveller in Africa, Professor Donaldson Smith, writing last 

 summer to The World an account of Abyssinian dwarfs discovered by him, says : 

 " Although they live among other native tribes, they differ totally from them as 

 respects their principal ethnological features. This fact strengthens the theory that 

 the African pygmies are not degenerate specimens of the tribes among whom they 

 live, but are the remnants of the first and original population of the Dark 

 Continent." 



Mgr. Lerey, Papal Nuncio to East Africa, says the same thing, and asserts that 

 the dwarfs think so, too, and despise all the larger races as parvenus. They claim 

 to be the first, and oldest, and noblest inhabitants of Africa. 



* (Note) — After this paper was written it was found that the fossil horse 

 resembled the Barb in this respect. It may be worthy of mention, that a review of 

 the latest book on Anthropology. Hutchinson's " Prehistoric Man and Beast " (Ap- 

 pletons, N.Y.), says : "Certain analogies lend weight to the idea that possibly Stone- 

 henge was erected by the dwarfs or fairies, who, in a previous chapter, are shown to 

 have been a real people. Various writers have come to the conclusion that a dwarf 

 population akin to the Lapps were the actual inhabitants of the " fairy knowes," 

 or underground megalithic structures, and became in time the elves and fairies of 

 folk lore." 



