Excerpt from Proceedings of the Canadian Institute, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint)
For years I have enjoyed the honour Of being a corresponding member of the. Institute, but up to the present I have contributed nothing to its Transactions. If I have not Shared the fate of the proverbial unproductive fig tree, it is due to the forbearance of the Institute, and their charitable hope that, if spared by them, I might do better in future.
It is, therefore, with great pleasure that I offer my first instalment, a paper of interest, not on account of the way it is dealt with, but because it Opens up for the first time an untrodden field of science that is likely, in proper hands, to yield important results. Whatever will hereafter account for the diminutive size of the domestic animals of pygmies will also explain the origin of the dwarf races of men;' and, possibly, this may be true vice versa.
Before dealing with these little animals I must explain that, when my paper on.
Dwarfs and Dwarf Worship was read at the Congress of Orientalists at London, 1891, the subject of pygmy races was considered to belong rather to myths and marvels than to science. A quarter of a century ago Schweinfurth revealed the then incredible fact of the existence of little tribes of hunters and warriors, not, much exceeding four feet high, and dwelling near the great lakes of equatorial Africa: At first he was discredited and ridiculed; but Stanley and others have since that more than confirmed his statements. But to reluctantly admit that this was the case in that remote region was the limit of endurance of incredulous scientists. When, therefore, I Openly claimed that the very same race of dwarfs were to be found in the Great and the Saharan Atlas, some of them only a few hundred miles from the Mediterranean, there was a howl of indignant incredulity. My paper, which created an unexpected amount of public interest -in London,' and was reported in full in The Times, was denounced by it, The Standard and other papers in abusive and personal editorial critiques rarely seen in the press. I was called a Munchausen, and an inventor of Gulliver narratives; my Moorish servant and I must have been in league with the sixty or seventy natives who had testified to impose pygmies on the simplicity of the scientific world.