o 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.

[Illustration: 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 Antiquites 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, pugme). 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 wh