ON PYGMIES.
3
To warmer seas the cranes embody'd fly,With noise and order, through the mid-way sky,To Pygmy nations wounds and death they bringAnd all the war descends upon the wing.[1]
Hesiod, likewise, had mentioned the Pygmies, in some work now lost, as we learn from Strabo.[2]
[Birds] in the spring-time, says Aristotle, betake themselves from a warm country to a cold one, out of fear of heat to come, as the cranes do, which come from the Scythian fields to the higher marshes, whence the Nile flows, in which place they are said to fight with the Pygmies. For that is not a fable, but, certainly, the genus as well of the men, as, also, of the horses is little (as it is said) and dwell in caves, whence they have received the name Troglodytes, from those coming near them.[3]
Herodotus, indeed, speaks "of a little people,
- ↑ Homers Iliad, B. 3, v. 3, in the lines of Pope.
- ↑ B. 1. p. 43; B. 7, p. 299. "But, for, to Hesiod no one would object ignorance, naming Half-dogs, Longicipites, and Pygmies. Neither, truly, that, concerning Homer, to be wonderful, when, also, by much, of those who come after, many things both have been ignorant of and, monstrously, feigned: as Hesiod, Half-dogs, Joltheads, Pygmies."
- ↑ Of the history of animals, B. 8, c. 12. "Of the Pygmies, that is, of dwarfs, dandiprats and little men and women, the generation is alike: for, of those, also, whose members and sizes are spoiled in the womb and are, even as, pigs and mules." (Aristotle, of the generation of animals, B. 2, c. 8.)
