each leg, or as many as four or five, whereas occasionally there is
but one on the right or left side. More rarely, as in some species of
Pallene, there are few very large eggs attached separately to the legs,
or the eggs may be carried in a single mass attached to the underside
of the body, as in some species of Pycnogonum. Cases have been
recorded of the females carrying their own eggs, as has been observed
in a specimen of Nymphon brevicaudatum, but this seems to be a rare
phenomenon.
The newly-hatched young frequently differs greatly from the adult. The body, which is oval, subquadrate and unsegmented, has the proboscis well developed, but bears only three pairs of appendages; those of the first pair are large, three jointed and chelate, the basal segment containing a large so-called byssus gland, the duct of which opens at the tip of a spiniform or setiform process; these appendages are the mandibles of the adult. The appendages of the next two pairs are simple and small, and are generally held to be the palpi and ovigerous legs. This first larval stage, sometimes called the protonymphon, may be free living or may be retained within the egg-shell. In the second stage, which may also be contained in the egg, two or three of the remaining pairs of appendages have appeared, those representing the first pair of ambulatory limbs of the adult being as a rule better developed than the next. In the third stage the fourth pair of ambulatory limbs and the abdomen of the adult have begun to develop and gradually increase in size until the adult form is attained. But even within the limits of a single genus, e.g. Nymphon, the stage at which the young emerges from the egg is subject to considerable specific variation.
Pycnogonida vary greatly in size, the span of legs when extended ranging from about 2 in. in Pycnogonum littorale to 2 ft. in Colossendeis gigas. They are wholly marine and occur at depths varying from only a few fathoms to over 2500 fathoms. One of the best known British species is Pycnogonum littorale, a stoutly built form with only four pairs of appendages in the female. It occurs between tide marks on British coasts, but recedes to considerable depths, and on the Atlantic coast of America has been dredged at a depth of 430 fathoms. It is also wide-ranging, and has been recorded even from the coast of Chile. As a rule, but by no means an invariable rule, deep-water species have smoother bodies and much longer and thinner legs than shallow-water forms. The latter also commonly have four distinct eyes, whereas the former met with at a depth of over 400 fathoms not uncommonly have the eyes obsolete. There are many exceptions, however, to these rules. The habits of all Pycnogonida appear to be very similar. They are not swimmers, but crawl slowly over the bottom of the sea or amongst the fronds of seaweed, and they have been met with in polar, temperate and tropical seas. (R. I. P.)
PYCNOSTYLE (Gr. πυκνός, close, compact, and στῦλος, column), the architectural term given by Vitruvius to the
intercolumniation of the columns of a temple, when this was equal to
112 diameters.
PYE, HENRY JAMES (1745–1813), English poet laureate, was born in London on the 20th of February 1745, and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. His father, a Berkshire landowner, died in 1766, leaving him a legacy of debt amounting to £50,000, and the burning of his home at Great Faringdon further increased his difficulties. In 1784 he was elected M.P. for Berkshire. He was obliged to sell the paternal estate, and, retiring from Parliament in 1790, became a police magistrate for Westminster. Although he had no command of language and was destitute of poetic feeling, his ambition was to obtain recognition as a poet, and he published many volumes of verse. Of all he wrote his prose Summary of the Duties of a Justice of the Peace out of Sessions (1808) is most worthy of record. He was made poet laureate in 1790, perhaps as a reward for his faithful support of Pitt in the House of Commons. The appointment was looked on as ridiculous, and his birthday odes were a continual source of contempt. His most elaborate poem was an epic, Alfred (1801). He was the first poet laureate to receive a fixed salary of £27 instead of the historic tierce of Canary wine. He died at Pinner, Middlesex, on the 11th of August 1813.
PYGMALION, in Greek mythology, son of Cilix, and grandson of Agenor, king of Cyprus. He fell in love with an ivory statue he had made; Aphrodite granted life to the image, and Pygmalion married the miraculously-born virgin (Ovid, Metam. x. 243). There is no ancient authority for the introduction of the name Galatea into the story. Pygmalion is also the name given in Virgil (Aeneid, i, 347) to a king of Tyre, who murdered Sychaeus, the husband of his sister Dido.
PYGMY, or Pigmy (Gr. πυγμαῖος, from πυγμή, a Greek measure of length corresponding to “the distance between the elbow and knuckles” of a man of average size), a term for a diminutive human being. We owe the word to Homer, who in the Iliad (iii. 6) uses it to describe a race of tiny folk dwelling in a far southern land, whither the cranes fly when inclement winters and piercing frosts visit the northern shores. Fierce battles were often mentioned by later writers as occurring between the pygmies and cranes, and were even represented on their vases. On these the pygmies were depicted as dwarfs with large heads, negro features, close, curly hair, and sometimes armed with lances. Aristotle firmly believed in the existence of these pygmies, whom he characterized as a race of men of small stature inhabiting the marshes of upper Egypt towards the sources of the Nile. That their existence was a matter of common knowledge and speculation is indicated by the fact that Philostratus describes the sleeping Hercules beset by swarms of pygmies. Herodotus (ii. 32), relying apparently on authentic information, describes graphically how a party of live Nasamonians, while journeying through the African desert, came at last to a plain where fruit-trees grew. While gathering the fruit they were seized by some dwarfish men of strange speech, who led them across forest marshes to a town, where dwelt people of a similar appearance, and near which a great river flowed from west to east containing crocodiles. This river was probably the Niger, and the people referred to were no doubt the ancestors of the existing pygmies of equatorial Africa. Representations of these pygmies have been found sculptured on the tombs at Sakkarah, which are referred to the Vth Dynasty of Egypt, 3366 B.C. The pygmies depicted in bas-relief on these tombs faithfully reproduce the racial characteristics of the present race of pygmies inhabiting the Ituri and Semliki forests. They no doubt served in the households of the Egyptian kings, and figured both in Egyptian and Roman triumphs.
Various writers have localized pygmies in different portions of the earth's surface. Pliny makes mention of dwarfed races in both Asia and Africa. Reference is made to the Catizi dwarfs in Thrace, and toa similar race dwelling in Caria. Ctesias, a century after Herodotus, wrote of a race of pygmies in the heart of India, describing them as black and ugly, and only two pygmai in height. The Chinese author, Chao Fu-Kua, in the beginning of the 13th century, described a tribe of black pygmies dwelling in the Philippine Islands; in the depth of the valleys there lived, he said, a tribe of men called Hai-tan, small in size, with round, yellow eyes, curly hair, and with the teeth showing through their lips. These were no doubt the ancestors of the present Aëtas. Relics of a pygmy race are supposed to exist now in Sicily and Sardinia, i.e. along the high road between Pleistocene Africa and Europe. Near Schaffhausen, Dr Kollman found skeletal remains of small human beings, which have been regarded by some authorities as belonging to the European pygmies of the Neolithic period. Some anthropologists of authority, indeed—in spite of the absence of definite data in support of such a view—believe that a dwarf negroid race at one time existed in northern Europe, and may have given rise to the traditional tales of elves, goblins, gnomes and fairies.
At the present time the existing pygmy races may be subdivided into two main groups or sub-races: (a) the African pygmies (Negrilloes), (b) the Asiatic pygmies (Negritoes).
a. The African pygmies are dispersed over a large zone extending right across equatorial Africa, from Uganda to the Gaboon, the width of this zone being about six degrees, i.e. three degrees north and south of the equator. In Uganda they are now principally confined to a belt of forest lying to the east and west of the Semliki River, though many centuries ago these forest dwarfs must have been the principal inhabitants of the whole of the Uganda Protectorate. They are much more abundant in the forests of the Belgian Congo, being found as far south as the range of the Angola, and to the north and north-west as far as the Bahr-el-Ghazal and the German Cameroons. They are also found in the interior of the French Congo and in the Gaboon. They comprise the Akkas
