More Science from an Easy Chair

by Sir E. Ray Lankester

Whether we regard the pygmies as one race or as the result of local modification of larger races, it is noteworthy that they are of lighter tint than the black races close to or among whom they live. Some, both of the African and Asiatic pygmies, are very dark brown—practically black—but many are of a paler and yellowish tint. We must not forget that the babies and quite young children of negroes are nearly "white." The Asiatic pygmies, notably the Andamanese, are darker than their African fellows. It must necessarily be difficult in studying such a race to make due allowance not merely for admixture of blood from surrounding populations, but to estimate correctly what the little people have learnt in the way of art and habit from their neighbours and what is their own. The Andaman Islanders, though provided with metal by trading, still use the sharp-edged splinters of volcanic glass-stone to shave their heads, which they keep entirely bald!

It is one of the merits of the showman's enterprise in modern times that he brings to a great city like London groups of interesting savages, without imposture and without ill-treatment, and enables us to see and talk with them almost as though we had travelled to their remote native forests. It would certainly be a successful and worthy enterprise on the part of the Anthropological Society of London to start a garden and houses such as those maintained by the Zoological Society, but arranged so as to receive some five or six groups of interesting "savages." The society would be responsible for careful and humane treatment of their guests, and return them after a sojourn, say, of a couple years, to their native country and replace them by specimens of other races. Under the auspices of showmen I have seen Zulu Kaffirs, Guiana Indians, North American Indians, Kalmuck Tartars, South African bushmen, and Congo pygmies in London, besides many hundreds of African negroes of various tribes. Farini's bushmen and Harrison's Congo pygmies were perfect samples of the dwarf race about which I am writing. But I also saw and examined carefully, in 1872, at Naples, with my friend Professor Panceri, the two African pygmies, Tebo and Chairallah, who were the first to reach Europe. They were subsequently adopted by and lived for some years under the care of Count Miniscalchi Erizzo. They were very intelligent, and learnt to read and to write well, and to play difficult music on the piano, with feeling and appreciation. We were especially concerned to determine by the stage of growth of their teeth and other indications whether they were merely ordinary young negroes, as some anthropologists supposed, or really representatives of the dwarf race as asserted by the traveller Miani, who bought them, in exchange for a dog and a calf, in the country of the Mombootoos, south of the Welle River, and west of the Albert Nyanza. They were still young and growing when we examined them, but Tebo ceased growth when he had reached a stature of 4 ft. 8 in. We had no difficulty in coming to the conclusion that they were, when we saw them, really of exceptionally small stature for their age as indicated by the teeth which were in place in their jaws.

Fig. 23.—Copy of a figure from a group drawn on a Greek vase (dating from 300 b.c.), representing a number of the pygmies of the remote Upper Nile engaged in battle. The resemblance of the peaked cap and of the beard to those of the little figures carved by Black Forest peasants and intended to represent the mythical "gnomes" or dwarf mining-elves is noteworthy. (From Saglio and Derenberg's "Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecs et Romaines.")

The Akkas living near the sources of the Nile were known to the ancient Egyptians, and were the foundation of stories and fabulous exaggerations among the ancient Greeks. Even before Homer these stories existed, and the little people were called "pygmies," which means "of the length of the forearm" (Greek, pugmé). Homer refers to the wars of these pygmies with the cranes, and as a matter of fact the African pygmies do wage a kind of war upon the great cranes which swarm in the marsh-land of their country. Naturally enough the really small size of the African pygmies (they are about 4 ft. in height, some two or three inches less, some as much as eight inches more) was exaggerated by report and tradition, just as the really big eggs of the great extinct ostrich-like bird of Madagascar were represented in the story of Sindbad, in the "Arabian Nights," as being as large as the dome of a temple, and the bird large in proportion. The Egyptians, as we have seen, knew the pygmy Akkas, and Egyptian fact was ever the romance of the Greeks.

Herodotus mentions the African pygmies from beyond the Libyan desert, citing, as is his wont, the accounts of certain travellers with whom he had conversed, and a later Greek writer tells of a pygmy race in India, a statement which our present knowledge confirms. It is a curious fact that Swift's Lilliputians are thus traceable to the Central African dwarf race, for Greek legend related that Hercules visited the country of the pygmies, where on waking from sleep he found one division of the army guarding his right leg, another his left, and others his arms. Hercules got up, swept them all into the lion's skin which he used as a cloak, and went on his way, shaking out his small tormentors from their prison as though they were so many ants. It seems fairly certain that Swift derived the initial scene in his story of Gulliver's adventures among the Lilliputians from this legend.

Miani's pygmies were members of a tribe discovered by the distinguished traveller Schweinfurth, who, in 1870, was the first to visit the country of the Niam-Niam, to the west of the sources of the Nile, and had the honour of showing that the myths of the ancient Greeks as to a nation of pygmies were based on fact, and that the definite words of Aristotle as to the existence of these pygmy people on the upper reaches of the Nile were correct. Schweinfurth found to the south of the Niam-Niam country a tribe of full-statured negroes called the Mombootoos, whose chief, Moonza, kept close to the Royal residence a colony of pygmies who were called in that country by the name "Akkas." Schweinfurth ascertained that they are spread to the number of many thousands along the borders of the great Congo forest and form numerous tribes. They are very generally well treated by their more powerful neighbours, as by Moonza. Partly from fear of their poisoned arrows and their crafty methods of attack and subsequent disappearance into the forest, partly on account of a superstitious dread of them, the Congo pygmies are not only tolerated, but protected, by the larger people. They alone are at home in the steaming darkness of the immeasurable forest into which no other natives dare to enter.

It is a remarkable fact that the Egyptologist Mariette had, before these discoveries, found on an ancient Egyptian monument the portrait of a dwarf inscribed with the word "akka"—the identical name by which they are known at this day in the region where Schweinfurth found them.

Public interest in the pygmy race was rearoused three years ago by the announcement that the party of English naturalists at that time exploring the interior of New Guinea had come across a tribe of these little people in the mountains of that island. The existence of these pygmies in New Guinea was already well known, but fuller accounts of them will be valuable. The Italian traveller Beccari, in 1876, speaks of them as "Karonis," and states that they occupy a chain of mountains parallel to the north coast of the north-west peninsular of the island. D'Albertis, Lawes, and other travellers have seen and described individuals of the pygmy race of the mountains of New Guinea. It is interesting to find that they are described as having the body covered with fine, woolly hair, a feature which is recorded by Schweinfurth, by Stanley, and by an ancient Greek writer, in regard to the Congo pygmies of Africa, and led in former times to the notion that the old traditions and accounts of African pygmies referred, not to human beings, but to chimpanzees!

The Laplanders are the only very small-sized people in Europe, but they run from 5 ft. upwards, whereas the negrites and negrillos run from about 4 ft. to less than 5 ft. The Lapps (of whom there are about 25,000 in Finmark and Lapmark) are a thick-set, round-headed (brachycephalic), dark-yellow race, and have always been credited with powers of witchcraft and magic by their neighbours and by modern sailors. They live in immediate contact with the Finns (both are Mongolian races), who are very tall and have fair hair and blue eyes. Some writers have supposed that the Lapps are the remnants of a small race which was formerly spread over the whole of Europe, and was exterminated or driven out by the larger races. But we have no evidence in favour of this view and strong evidence against it, since we now know the skulls and skeletons of a great number of the prehistoric inhabitants of Europe belonging to the Bronze, to the Neolithic, and to the Palæolithic periods. None of these skeletons belong to an abnormally small-sized race, though the Bronze-age people were smaller than their predecessors and successors. The cave-dwellers of the "reindeer" epoch of the Palæolithic period were big men, with fine, high skulls, and even the earlier Palæolithic men of the glacial period, the man of the Neanderthal, the couple from Spy, and the three recently dug up near Perigueux (of whom I have written in another book),[8] were not diminutive men. It is true they were not tall—only about 5 ft. 4 in. in height—but they were very powerful and muscular, and totally different physically from the Lapps or from any of the tropical pygmy men. It is a remarkable fact that in one cave at Mentone, on the Riviera, explored by the Prince of Monaco, two skeletons have been found belonging to a shortish negro-like race (indicated by the form of the skull), and apparently a little later in date than the Neandermen. We must remember that at that remote date there was continuous land connection between Europe and Africa. There is, in fact, no reason to suppose that a pygmy race ever existed in Europe, though, of course, individuals of exceptionally small stature are often produced, and in some regions the whole population is shorter than it is in others.