Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/60

48 has deciphered his name, Akka (the name by which he is known to this day), written beside him.

The legend of the storks and the pygmies has been familiar to us since our earliest childhood, and I dare say many of us believed in it with a child's unhesitating belief for some years after we had escaped from the thralldom of the nursery. I know that I did, and whenever I would see cranes winging their way southward I would conjure up a mental picture of an army of little men mounted on rams and goats, and engaged in a sanguinary battle with myriads of cranes. I would then lift up my childish voice and shriek out the warning, "Beware of the pygmies!" to the birds flying high above my head. Homer is the first of the classical writers who makes mention of this legend, and he probably borrows from beliefs much older than his time. Says he in the Iliad, Book III, when speaking of the advancing Trojans, whom he likens to a cloud of birds:

 Thus by their leader's care, each martial band Moves into ranks, and stretches o'er the land; With shouts the Trojans, rushing from afar, Proclaim their motions, and provoke the war; So when inclement winters vex the plain With piercing frosts, or thick descending rain, To warmer seas the cranes embodied fly. With noise and order, through the midway sky: To pygmy nations wounds and death they bring, And all the war descends upon the wing.

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Although Homer does not mention the country of the pygmies in this passage, he does say that the cranes "fly over the ocean" (Pope takes advantage of a poet's license and does not give a literal translation); hence he must have located them unquestionably in Africa.

Aristotle, in his History of Animals, mentions these little men in his description of storks. After stating that these birds pass from Scythia to the marshes of Egypt,"toward the sources of the Nile," he declares that "this is the district that the pygmies inhabit, whose existence is not a fable." A hundred years before Aristotle, however, Herodotus had written of these homuncules, for he says that certain Nasamonians, five in number, had conceived the idea of exploring the deserts of Libya. After they had been traveling in the desert for several days they saw trees in the distance. They made toward these welcome objects, and when they had reached them, and while they were eating the fruit which grew on them in great abundance, they were suddenly surrounded and seized "by a large company of very small men who were much below the average height, and who dragged them