Page:Here and there in Yucatan - miscellanies (IA herethereinyucat00lepl 0).djvu/66

 tured to themselves these pygmies, getting the idea from certain inhabitants of Ethiopia, called Pechinies, who were very small; perhaps the ancestors of the Dokos of the present day. Swift made Gulliver find men six inches high in the Isle of Lilliput; but Cyrano de Bergerac, in his imaginary voyage to the sun, found people not bigger than his thumb.

Among the many ludicrous stories told of pygmies, is that of a certain King of Bavaria, who, at his wedding-feast, was served with a pie from which a tiny dwarf, armed with lance and sword, jumped out on to the table, to the great astonishment of all the guests.

Apart from such extravagant tales, there are proofs that very dwarfish people have lived and do live, in different places. Some years ago, on the banks of the river Merrimac, twenty miles from the Isle of St. Louis, a number of stone tombs were found arranged in symmetrical order; none of them were more than four feet long, and the human skeletons within them only measured three feet, though the teeth showed that they were adults; the skulls were out of proportion with the rest of the body.

Aristotle, who was a great naturalist, said that trustworthy witnesses testified to the existence of