om
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