real an origin as the little people of Aïno legend, at any rate by those
who hold the realistic theory.

Any attempt to reconcile the pygmies of the classic writers with actual
dwarfs of flesh and blood is outside my province. Moreover, this has
been admirably, and, as it seems to me, successfully done quite recently
by M. Paul Monceaux, in an article in the _Revue Historique,_[18]
wherein he compares the traditional and historical descriptions with the
statements of modern travellers, and draws the inference that the
pygmies of the Greek and Roman writers, sculptors and painters, are all
derived from actual dwarfs seen by their forefathers in Africa and
India. (Still less doubt is there with regard to the dwarfs in Ancient
Egyptian paintings.) And whereas Strabo is, says M. Monceaux, the only
writer of antiquity who questions the existence of the dwarfs, all the
others are on the side of Aristotle, who says--"This is no fable; there
really exists in that region (the sources of the Nile), as people
relate, a race of little men, who have small horses and who live in
holes." And these little men were of course the ancestors of
Schweinfurth's and Stanley's dwarfs.

But although M. Monceaux confines his identification to equatorial
Africa and to India, he does not omit to state that Pliny and other
writers speak of dwarf tribes in other localities, and among these are
"the vague regions of the north, designated by the name of Thule." This
area, vague enough certainly, is the territory with which Fians and
Picts are both associated; as, also, of course, the Fairies of North
European tradition.

The attributes with which the "little people" of North Europe are
accredited cannot be given in detail here. It is enough to note that