FIANS, FAIRIES AND PICTS.


The general belief at the present day is that, of the three designations
here classed together, only that of the Picts is really historical. The
Fians are regarded as merely legendary--perhaps altogether mythical
beings; and the Fairies as absolutely unreal. On the other hand, there
are those who believe that the three terms all relate to historical
people, closely akin to each other, if not actually one people under
three names.

To those unacquainted with the views of the realists, or euhemerists, it
is necessary to explain that the popular definition of Fairies as
"little people" is one which that school is quite ready to accept. But
the conception of such "little people" as tiny beings of aërial and
ethereal nature, able to fly on a bat's back, or to sip honey from the
flowers "where the bee sucks," is regarded by the realists as simply
the outcome of the imagination, working upon a basis of fact. An
illustration of this position may be seen in the Far East. There is a
tradition among the Aïnos of Northern Japan that they were preceded by a
race of "little people," only a few inches in height, whose
pit-dwellings they still point out. But the pottery and the skeletons
associated with these habitations show that not only were their
occupants of a stature to be measured by feet rather than by inches, but
also that, by reason of a certain anatomical peculiarity common to both,
the traditional dwarfs were very clearly the ancestors of the Aïnos--a
race which, though now blended, was once most distinctly a race of
dwarfs, if one is to believe the earliest Japanese pictures of them.
Similarly, the dwarfs of European tradition are believed to have had as