These combats between the pigmies and the cranes were also dwelt on by Oppian, Juvenal, and others; and what was, to quote an old writer, “only a pleasant figment in the fountain, became a solemn story in the stream.” Strabo in his Geography considered the belief as fabulous, and so also did another old writer, Julius Scaliger; and even Aldrovandus, though ready to accept almost anything, found a difficulty in crediting it. Albertus Magnus, another of the old and over-credulous writers, found as much difficulty as Aldrovandus, but suggested that probably the belief arose from some big species of monkey having been taken for a diminutive man. Even the home of the pigmies was a point quite open to dispute. Some writers placed them in the extreme north, where the growth of all nature was feeble and stunted, while Aristotle placed them at the head of the Nile; Philostratus affirmed that they were to be found on the banks of the Ganges, and Pliny placed them in Scythia. Even their size was open to question, for some would have us believe that the mounted men in their armies rode on partridges, while others placed them on the backs of rams. If the warrior and his steed bore any due proportion to each other, this seems to point to a considerable divergence of ideas as to the size of a pigmy. They were said to have been found by Hercules in the great desert, and to have assailed him with their bows and arrows as the Lilliputians did Gulliver. Their valour, however, in this case seems to have outrun discretion, as the smiling demi-god carried a number of them off in his lion’s skin. Ctesias says that they were negroes, and places a kingdom of them in the centre of India. Shakespeare mentions them, but gives no local habitation. “Will your Grace command me any service to the world’s end? I will go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on: I will fetch you a tooth-picker now from the farthest inch of Asia; bring you the length of Prester John’s foot; fetch you a hair off the great Cham’s beard; do you any embassage to the Pigmies!” Others of our poets have adopted the myth, though of course without committing themselves to an expression of their belief in it. In Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel,” for example, we find the lines—
“A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pygmy-body to decay,
And o’er informed the tenement of clay”—
and in Young’s “Night Thoughts” we read—
“Pygmies are pygmies still, though perched on Alps;
And pyramids are pyramids in vales.”
Another English writer whose book is before us does commit himself to an expression of belief, for his title runs as follows:—“Gerania, a New Discoverie of a Little Sort of People called Pygmies, with a Lively Description of their Stature, Habit, Manners and Customs.” The author was one Joshua Barnes, and his book is dated 1675.
Though spelt indifferently as pigmy and pygmy, the latter is the more correct, though perhaps a little pedantic-looking; the word is derived from the Greek name for them, the Pygmaioi.
Tennant in his work on “Ceylon” makes the following very just remark:—“We ought not to be too hasty in casting ridicule upon the narratives of ancient travellers. In a geographical point of view they possess great value, and if sometimes they contain statements which appear marvellous, the mystery is often explained away by a more careful and minute inquiry.” Against the statements of the geographers and historians of antiquity many modern critics have specially delighted to break a lance, condemning them as more or less fabulous and untrustworthy, though in some cases, as that of De Chaillu, the narratives of modern travellers have been almost as mercilessly analysed.
Probably the African race known at the present time as Bosjesmen or Bushmen are the modern representatives of the pigmies, for in their cave-dwelling, reptile-eating, and other peculiarities they agree entirely with those given by Pliny, Aristotle, and Herodotus. The tales of the battles fought with the cranes may have been but a satire on their diminutive size, or they may very possibly have been the records of actual facts. The Maori traditions tell of the contests with the moa and other gigantic birds which formerly inhabited the islands of New Zealand, while the Jesuit missionaries give accounts of enormous birds that were once found in Abyssinia, but are now, like the dodo, extinct. It is, therefore, quite possible that there is more truth in the story of these mannikins and their struggles with their feathered foes than we are at first prepared to admit, and that while many of the details of these old fables are evidently imaginative, there was in more cases than we at once realise a solid foundation of truth at the bottom of them.
Of giants, the opposite extreme in the scale, we need say but little. Probably in many cases the early peoples, who desired to honour their great champions, felt that the marvels they delighted to credit them with must have been the work of men of more than human power and parts. We see much the same feeling in the sculptures of antiquity, the monuments of Egypt and Assyria, where the monarch far outweighs even in mere physical bulk the subjects that surround him. Hence, like Goliath, the champions of old are generally giants; while at other times they themselves are of slender frame, striplings like David, and it is the foes they subdue that are gigantic in bulk. The struggles, for instance, of the gallant few against the crying and mighty wrong of human slavery would have in earlier times been handed down to posterity as a contest with an evil giant; and in the allegories of the Middle Ages we meet, in the same way, with Giant Pope, Giant Pagan, and Giant Despair.
Though in one’s earlier years we read the exploits of Jack the Giant-Killer with great complacency, and give him full meed of praise for his valour, on fuller reflection we cannot help seeing that the giants he encountered had intellects that bore no proportion to their bodily bulk, and that it was the easiest thing possible to outwit them; that according to the doctrine which by men of science is called “the survival of the fittest,” or in more popular parlance “the weakest going to the wall,” their destruction was strictly according to the inexorable laws of nature. While dwarfs have been accredited with a spiteful vindictiveness that served them in some sort as a defence, giants have ordinarily been considered as great good-natured fellows, fully bearing out Bacon’s remark about tall houses being often unfurnished in their upper story. Perhaps it is a merciful arrangement of nature that this should be so, for a combination of the maliciousness of the dwarf with the physical strength of the giant would be something altogether de trop.