Bishop Jordanus, in his “Mirabilia descripta,” tells of pygmies in “an exceeding great island what is called Jaua,” which our readers who are at all used to the substitution of the letter u for v, will at once recognize as Java, “where are many world’s wonders. Among which, beside the finest aromatic spices, this is one, to wit, that there be found pygmy men of the size of a boy of three or four years old, all shaggy like a goat.” He adds that they dwell in the woods, and we may not unreasonably conclude that these hirsute arboreals were a species of ape. [Illustration: FIG. 3.] In the conflict of testimony, some affirming and some denying the existence of such a people, Marco Polo, writing it will be remembered in the thirteenth century, warns us that we must beware of counterfeits that are palmed off on the unwary as the real thing. “It should be known,” says he, “that what is reported respecting the dried bodies of diminutive human creatures or pigmies, brought from India, is an idle tale, such pretended men being manufactured in the following manner. The country produces a species of monkey of a tolerable size, and having a countenance resembling that of a man. Those persons who make it their business to catch them shave off the hair, leaving it only about the chin and those other parts where it naturally grows on the human body. They then dry and preserve them with camphor and other drugs, and having prepared them in such a mode that they have exactly the appearance of little men, they put them into wooden boxes and sell them to trading people, who carry them to all parts of the world. But this is an imposition, and neither in India nor in any other country, however wild or little known, have pigmies been found of a form so diminutive as these exhibited.” It will be noted that the very fact of a counterfeit implies a something to be counterfeited, and Marco Polo is clearly quite prepared to give in his adhesion to the affirmative side. The belief in a pygmy race, first declared centuries before the Christian era, was held most fully in mediæval days; and modern travel and research has amply proved that—various elements of the marvelous stripped away—the belief was a sound one. Du Chaillu in Western Equatorial Africa met with a diminutive race of which the average height of the individuals who would submit to measurement was four feet five inches; and readers of Stanley’s books will recall his experiences with a similar people. On the authority of Dr. Parke, the Mikaba average four feet one inch, the Batwas four feet three inches, and the Akkas four feet six inches. Related to them in shortness of stature are the Bushmen of Southern Africa, averaging about four feet seven inches in height; and elsewhere, the Lapps, the Fuegians, the Ainos of Japan, and the Veddahs—all people of notoriously short stature.