“So when inclement winters vex the plain
  With piercing frosts or thick-descending rain,
  To warmer seas the cranes embodied fly,
  With noise and order, through the midway sky;
  To Pigmy nations wounds and death they bring,
  And all the war descends upon the wing.”

Attention may here be drawn to Tyson’s quotation (p. 78) from Vossius as to the trade driven by the Pigmies in elephants’ tusks, since, as we have seen, this corresponds with what we now know as to the habits of the Akkas.

The account which Herodotus gives of the expedition of the Nasamonians is well known.  Five men, chosen by lot from amongst their fellows, crossed the desert of Lybia, and, having marched several days in deep sand, perceived trees growing in the midst of the plain.  They approached and commenced to eat the fruit which they bore.  Scarcely had they begun to taste it, when they were surprised by a great number of men of a stature much inferior to the middle height, who seized them and carried them off.  They were eventually taken to a city, the inhabitants of which were black.  Near this city ran a considerable river whose course was from west to east, and in which crocodiles were found.  In his account of the Akkas, Mr. Stanley believed that he had discovered the representatives of the Pigmies mentioned in this history.  Speaking of one of these, he says,[A] “Twenty-six centuries ago his ancestors captured the five young Nasamonian explorers, and made merry with them at their villages on the banks of the Niger.”  It may be correct to say that, at the period alluded to, the dwarf races of Africa were in more continuous occupancy of the land than is now the case, but such an identification as that just mentioned gives a false idea of the position of the Pigmies of Herodotus.  De Quatrefages, after a most careful examination of the question in all its aspects, finds himself obliged to conclude, either that the Pigmy race seen by the Nasamonians still exists on the north of the Niger, which has been identified with the river alluded to by Herodotus, but has not, up to the present, been discovered; or that it has disappeared from those regions.

[Footnote A:  Op. supra cit., ii. 40.]

Pomponius Mela has also his account of African Pigmies.  Beyond the Arabian Gulf, and at the bottom of an indentation of the Red Sea, he places the Panchaeans, also called Ophiophagi, on account of the fact that they fed upon serpents.  More within the Arabian bay than the Panchaeans are the Pigmies, a minute race, which became exterminated in the wars which it was compelled to wage with the Cranes for the preservation of its fruits.  The region indicated somewhat corresponds with that which is assigned to the Dokos by their describer.  In this district, too, other dwarf races have been reported.  The French writer whom I have so often cited says, “The tradition of Eastern African Pigmies has never been lost by the Arabs.  At