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Updated: May 29, 2025


Besides, were the Condors to be taken for the Cranes, it would utterly spoil the Pygmæomachia; for where the Match is so very unequal, 'tis impossible for the Pygmies to make the least shew of a fight.

The Pygmies of the Congo region have medium heads; the Bushmen of South Africa, usually regarded as akin in race, have long heads. The American Indians, generally supposed to be all, or nearly all, of one racial type, show considerable differences of head-form; and so on. It need not be repeated that any race-mark is liable to deceive.

Tell me how you rescued our friends from the red pygmies," and Tom was obliged to relate that story, which I have told in detail elsewhere. Several days passed, and Tom and his friends spent a pleasant time in the African village with the missionaries.

This opinion had so fully obtained with me, that I never thought it worth the Enquiry, how they came to invent such Extravagant Stories: Nor should I now, but upon the Occasion of Dissecting this Animal: For observing that 'tis call'd even to this day in the Indian or Malabar Language, Orang-Outang, i.e. a Man of the Woods, or Wild-men; and being brought from Africa, that part of the World, where the Pygmies are said to inhabit; and it's present Stature likewise tallying so well with that of the Pygmies of the Ancients; these Considerations put me upon the search, to inform my self farther about them, and to examine, whether I could meet with any thing that might illustrate their History.

We afterwards tried to penetrate somewhat farther into the wood, in order to ascertain the nature and situation of the country, when, on coming to an open place, a number of tall savages, none of them less than eight feet high; came out from the brushwood as though to attack us. On the neck of each giant sat one of the pygmies, who directed him in the same way that a man would guide a charger.

I hurried home and arrived there in the night, wet as when I had started on my expedition. With regard to the pygmies I must not omit to mention the following experience. The fact that among them husband and wife live together, and that I had nowhere seen a man with two wives, made me suspect that this race was monogamous, as other pygmy races are.

For, pygmies though they were, they were as a rule perfectly formed; their colour was so light that it soon became scarcely noticeable; their expression was intelligent, and by no means unamiable, at least in the case of the women, while as for the latter, though real beauty might be rare it was certainly not entirely absent, and many of the younger ones were quite good-looking, if not actually pretty.

The general of the east and of the seas, far from standing on his defence against them, appeared not even to observe all the busy agitation, and to obtain his victories over the democracy as Herakles gained his over the Pygmies, without being himself aware of it.

Though later races, their probable descendants, have left the forest and set up new stages of development through new conflicts with adverse conditions, the Pygmies remain in their resting state, and, if left to themselves, might continue in this state for ages in the future as they have done for ages in the past.

It is a fact of great interest that the Pygmy race does not seem confined to Africa, for tribes of men resembling the Pygmies in stature and in various other particulars are found in widely removed localities, as in Malacca, the Andaman Islands, and the Philippine Archipelago, while there are indications that they once spread widely over this island region of the earth.

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