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.