The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-01-07

mics. and yet nobody believed in their existence It was only in comparatively modern times that ignorance had to yield to evidence when races of pygmies were found in Africa and in Asia In Europe popular myths gave an impor- tant role to dwarfs and pygmies in Eng land. Scotland and Ireland. In Den mark they were called Kobold: in Ger many, Niebelung; and they were re- ferred to in Russia and even in France as if the legends reflected the distant recollection of populations of little peo- pie who really lived in far-off ages. It is now proved conclusively that the an- cient popular belief was founded in fact It links the tradition to it's starting point. The race of little people existed almost everywhere.
 Numerous skeletons of dwarfs are found in Egyptian necropoli. in Greek and Roman statuary, in the frescoes of Pompeii and in some ornamental cera- mic vases of Roman Gaul. Numerous skeletons of pygmies. mingled with those of men of ordinary stature. have been found in number of prehistoric sepulchres. We should also mention the skeletons of pygmies found in the sep ulchres of the neolithic period at the time of the excavations in Switzerland under the direction of Miesch and Koll- mann. Then came the discoveries of NJ. Manourbrier and of Vacher de La- pouge in Herrault, and in the cases of the Cevennes, and more recently those of M. Thilemus in Siberia.
 It is certain that there existed in re- mote ages a race of dwarfs which re- mained as distinct race for a long time. Traces of them are found among the Romans and the Slavs. Accorading to Gulturam of Colmar, these races of | dwarfs peopled Switzerland and the whole of lower Alsace, while Miesch and Kollmann claim that they were the primitive people of Europe The as- sertion is also made that, inasmuch as traces of pygmies are found in many parts of the world, they probably were the advance guard of the present varie- ty of the human race, just as in the case of animals the big came from the little. It was toward the close of the < ninth century that all trace of them as collectivity was lost. Nevertheless, after that period isolated specimens of them were found from time to time. particularly in the different courts of Europe, where they were employed as testers.
 At the present time, as everybody knows, dwarfs still exist: but there are dwarfs and dwarfs. Dwarfism, or the diminution more or less remarkable of l the ordinary stature, has been of late the subject of important investigation. There is evidently pathological dwarf. That type has an ensemble of clinical signs, giving him place set apart for | himself. Professor Poneet O. the Uni- versity of Lyon and M Rene Leriche in very interesting communication to the !, Academy of Medicine, entitled "DWarfs of the Present Time and Dwarfs of Long Ago" have just brought up the 1 question whether among the pathologi- cal dwarfs there have not often been enormously included an important cat egory of dwarfs that should be separa- ted from them, because they belong to l nothing in pathology and because in re- I allty they are only very little men, rem nants of the ancient race of dwarfs. I These isolated specimens come down from prehistoric times. They present I the peculiarity of being an ethnical at 4 tribute and consequently hereditary while the only dwarfs considered in medical literature are creatures reduced in all their proportions and whose fun { damental character is their inaptness for reproduction.
 From this category M Poncet and M. Lericfe separate the ancestral ttwars-