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It will be noticed that we have in this instance a form of headstone differing materially from those of later times, and wherever we find the rude incised figure we nearly always have the stone of this shape. Such homely memorials are distinguished in nearly every instance by dwarfishness and clumsiness.
When comes, poking in his head and shoulders into your room, as if to feel his entry, you think, surely you have now got him to yourself what a three hours' chat we shall have! but, ever in the haunch of him, and before his diffident body is well disclosed in your apartment, appears the haunting shadow of the cousin, over-peering his modest kinsman, and sure to over-lay the expected good talk with his insufferable procerity of stature, and uncorresponding dwarfishness of observation.
Science explains this dwarfishness produced by great abstraction of heat; showing that, food and other things being equal, it unavoidably results. For, as before pointed out, to make up for that cooling by radiation which the body is ever undergoing, there must be a constant oxidation of certain matters forming part of the food.
If the cold of winter were to continue unmitigated from year to year, without the genial influence of summer, the human race, as is apparent in polar regions and upland mountainous districts, would degenerate into dwarfishness. If the heat of summer were continually maintained the whole year round, a tendency to degeneracy of the race would be also observed, as we see in tropical latitudes.
You stuff the little rosy foot of a Chinese young lady of fashion into a slipper that is about the size of a salt-cruet, and keep the poor little toes there imprisoned and twisted up so long that the dwarfishness becomes irremediable. Later, the foot would not expand to the natural size were you to give her a washing-tub for a shoe and for all her life she has little feet, and is a cripple.
No other explanation seems to have been offered by science for the extreme dwarfishness in stature of this curious race of people.
In countries where the nobility are destitute of public employment, they naturally degenerate become the victims of the diseases of indolence and profligacy, transmit their decrepitude to their descendants, and bequeath dwarfishness and deformity to their name. But in France, the young noble was destined for soldiership from his cradle.
I photographed one group of trees to illustrate their dainty elfish dwarfishness, but realising that no one could guess the height without a scale, I took a second of the same with a small Indian sitting next it. Weeso is a kind old soul; so far as I could see he took no part in the various seditions, but he was not an inspiring guide.
In Suetonius and Florus we already see the pioneers of a pigmy race; in Gellius, Fronto, and Apuleius, they are present in all their uncouth dwarfishness. Meanwhile the clamours of the world for guidance grow louder and louder, and there is no one great enough or bold enough to respond to them.
It is necessary to keep clearly in view the upper limit which can justly be assigned to dwarfishness, and with this object it may be advisable to commence with a statement as to the average heights reached by various representative peoples. According to Topinard, the races of the world may be classified, in respect to their stature, in the following manner: Tall 5 ft. 8 in. and upwards.
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