Of some of these abnormal forms we propose now to treat, and commence our chapter with some short reference to the pygmies. References to these are to be found in the works of many of the ancient writers, such as Homer, Pliny, Herodotus, Philostratus, Oppian, Juvenal and Aristotle. Strabo mentions them in his geography, but regards the belief in them as a mere fable, while some of the older authors suggest that very possibly exceptionally large monkeys[13] might have been mistaken for exceptionally small men. While most writers affirmed that such a race was to be met with in Africa—Aristotle, for instance, locating them at the head of the Nile—some authors placed them in the extreme north, where the rigour of the climate was held a sufficient explanation of their stunted growth. Philostratus assigned them a home on the banks of the Ganges, and Pliny gave them local habitation in Scythia. Shakespeare, not only the fount of countless stores of quotation, but also the storehouse of ancient and mediæval lore, mentions the pygmies, though he gives us no hint as to their home. “Will your Grace command me any service to the world’s end? I will go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on: I will fetch you a toothpicker now from the furthest inch of Asia; bring you the length of Prester John’s foot; fetch you a hair off the great Cham’s beard; do you any embassage to the Pygmies!” Homer, in the third book of the Iliad, refers to the conflicts between the pygmies and the cranes:— “When inclement winters vex the plain With piercing frosts, or thick-descending rain, To warmer seas the cranes embodied fly, With noise and order,[14] through the midway sky: To pygmy nations wounds and death they bring.” Our readers may possibly wonder, as we have done, why the cranes should bear the pygmies such ill-will, but Pliny in his seventh book supplies the justification for the feud, as it appears that in the spring-time the pygmies sally forth in great troops, riding upon goats, searching for and devouring the eggs of the cranes, a state of things that no creature of proper parental instincts could be expected to submit quietly to.