Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/74

52 Scric Finnia), was reported to be inhabited by veritable pigmies. "Several trustworthy witnesses have reported," he says, "that beyond the country of the Lapps in the twilight region between the Northwest and the North (of Scandinavia) pigmies are to be met with." He adds that their adults are scarcely taller than Italian boys of ten; and refers to the timorousness and general inferiority of the race. These statements would not have much weight if they depended solely upon the assertions of Jovius, himself a very unreliable author. Jovius, however, is now only repeating here the accounts of earlier writers, but very similar evidence is given in the following century by the Dutch scholar, Vossius, who is cited in this connection by his contemporary. Professor Scheffer of Upsala—"It is almost peculiar to this people to be all of them of low stature," says the writer last named, speaking of the Lapps, "which is attested by the general suffrage of those writers who have described this country. Hence the learned Isaac Vossius observes that Pygmies are said to inhabit here." These two scholars, therefore, Vossius and Scheffer, both residents of seventeenth-century Sweden, had no doubt as to the identity of the Northern Pygmies and the Lapps, or a race occupying the same territory that is now Lapland. But it is to be observed that Jovius and other early writers tend to corroborate the Lapp traditional belief, that they are partly descended from a race of smaller stature, now quite lost in the great Lapp population.

This appears to me all the more probable because, while the Eskimoid tribes that stretch half way round the Arctic Circle declare themselves to be the kinsmen of those Skroelings, Lapps or Trolls whom the early Norsemen encountered in America, yet there is another race which, in several