Leaving aside for the moment the Lapps, to whom I shall return, there does not appear to have been at any time a really pigmy race in Europe, so far as any discoveries which have been made up to the present time show. Professor Topinard, whose authority upon this point cannot be gainsaid, informs me that the smallest race known to him in Central Europe is that of the pre-historic people of the Lozère, who were Neolithic troglodytes, and are represented probably at the present day by some of the peoples of South Italy and Sardinia. Their average stature was about five feet two inches. This closely corresponds with what is known of the stature of the Platycnemic race of Denbighshire, the Perthi-Chwareu. Busk[A] says of them that they were of low stature, the mean height, deduced from the lengths of the long bones, being little more than five feet. As both sexes are considered together in this description, it is fair to give the male a stature of about five feet two inches,[B] It also corresponds with the stature assigned by Pitt-Rivers to a tribe occupying the borders of Wiltshire and Dorsetshire during the Roman occupation, the average height of whose males and females was five feet two and a half inches and four feet ten and three-quarter inches respectively. [Footnote A: _Jour. Ethn. Soc._, 1869-70, p. 455.] [Footnote B: Since these pages were printed, Prof. Kollmann, of Basle, has described a group of Neolithic pigmies as having existed at Schaffhausen. The adult interments consisted of the remains of full-grown European types and of small-sized people. These two races were found interred side by side under precisely similar conditions, from which he concludes that they lived peaceably together, notwithstanding racial difference. Their stature (about three feet six inches) may be compared with that of the Veddahs in Ceylon. Prof. Kollmann believes that they were a distinct species of mankind.] Dr. Rahon,[A] who has recently made a careful study of the bones of pre-historic and proto-historic races, with special reference to their stature, states that the skeletons attributed to the most ancient and to the Neolithic races are of a stature below the middle height, the average being a little over five feet three inches. The peoples who constructed the Megalithic remains of Roknia and of the Caucasus, were of a stature similar to our own. The diverse proto-historic populations, Gauls, Franks, Burgundians, and Merovingians, considered together, present a stature slightly superior to that of the French of the present day, but not so much so as the accounts of the historians would have led us to believe. [Footnote A: _Recherches sur les Ossements Humaines, Anciens et Préhistonques. Mém. de la Soc. d'Anthrop. de Paris_, Sér, ii. tom. iv. 403.]