And we may the less wonder to find that they call Brutes Men, since ’twas common for these Historians to give the Title of Men, not only to Brutes, but they were grown so wanton in their Inventions, as to describe several Nations of Monstrous Men, that had never any Being, but in their own Imagination, as I have instanced in several.  I therefore excuse Strabo, for denying the Pygmies, since he could not but be convinced, they could not be such Men, as these Historians have described them.  And the better to judge of the Reasons that some of the Moderns have given to prove the Being of Men Pygmies, I have laid down as Postulata’s, that hereby we must not understand Dwarfs, nor yet a Nation of Men, tho’ somewhat of a lesser size and stature than ordinary; but we must observe those two Characteristicks that Homer gives of them, that they are Cubitales and fight Cranes.

Having premised this, I have taken into consideration Caspar Bartholine Senior his Opusculum de Pygmaeis, and Jo.  Talentonius’s Dissertation about them:  and upon examination do find, that neither the Humane Authorities, nor Divine that they alledge, do any ways prove, as they pretend, the Being of Men Pygmies.  St. Austin, who is likewise quoted on their side, is so far from favouring this Opinion, that he doubts whether any such Creatures exist, and if they do, concludes them to be Apes or Monkeys; and censures those Indian Historians for imposing such Beasts upon us, as distinct Races of Men. Julius Caesar Scaliger, and Isaac Casaubon, and Adrian Spigelius utterly deny the Being of Pygmies, and look upon them as a Figment only of the Ancients, because such little Men as they describe them to be, are no where to be met with in all the World.  The Learned Bochartus tho’ he esteems the Geranomachia to be a Fable, and slights it, yet thinks that what might give the occasion to the Story of the Pygmies, might be the Nubae or Nobae; as Isaac Vossius conjectures that it was those Dwarfs beyond the Fountains of the Nile, that Dapper calls the Mimos, and tells us, they kill Elephants for to make a Traffick with their Teeth.  But Job Ludolphus alters the Scene, and instead of Cranes, substitutes his Condors, who do not fight the Pygmies, but fly away with them, and then devour them.

Now all these Conjectures do no ways account for Homer’s Pygmies and Cranes, they are too much forced and strain’d.  Truth is always easie and plain.  In our present Case therefore I think the Orang-Outang, or wild Man, may exactly supply the place of the Pygmies, and without any violence or injury to the Story, sufficiently account for the whole History of the Pygmies,