Pygmies exist, but they are not very small. That seems
to be the first deduction from the lecture on the subject given by Professor Flower on Thursday at the London Institution. The smallest known race, he says, are some Negroes living among the other Negroes of Central Africa, one tribe of whom, called Akkas, dwell on the west of Lake Nyanza. The men and women of this tribe, who have been seen by many travellers, are only four feet high. They live by themselves, in separate communities, and may very well be the Pygmies of the Greeks, who got their information from Plicenician sailors, given, like all Asiatics, to exaggeration. The Professor advises explorers to study carefully the habits, language, &c., of this race ; and he might have added that they should look out for the bones of fossil birds. The tradition about the cranes must have had a basis of some kind; and the gigantic bird, the roc of Arabian legend, which certainly existed in Madagascar within the historic period, may have retreated there from the continent. Or the Pygmies may have lived in the desert and hunted the ostrich, which fights furiously in dying.
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