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 Palaeolithic 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 Palaeolithic period were big men, with
fine, high skulls, and even the earlier Palaeolithic 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 the