[Footnote A:  Strabo Geograph. lib. 17. p.m. 565.]

As to our Ape Pygmies or Orang-Outang fighting the Cranes, this, I think, may be easily enough made out, by what I have already observed; for this wild Man I dissected was Carnivorous, and it may be Omnivorous, at least as much as Man is; for it would eat any thing that was brought to the Table.  And if it was not their Hunger that drove them to it, their Wantonness, it may be, would make them apt enough to rob the Cranes Nests; and if they did so, no doubt but the Cranes would noise enough about it, and endeavour what they could to beat them off, which a Poet might easily make a Fight:  Tho’ Homer only makes use of it as a Simile, in comparing the great Shouts of the Trojans to the Noise of the Cranes, and the Silence of the Greeks to that of the Pygmies when they are going to Engage, which is natural enough, and very just, and contains nothing, but what may easily be believed; tho’ upon this account he is commonly exposed, and derided, as the Inventor of this Fable; and that there was nothing of Truth in it, but that ’twas wholly a Fiction of his own.

Those Pygmies that Paulus Jovius[A] describes, tho’ they dwell at a great distance from Africa, and he calls them Men, yet are so like Apes, that I cannot think them any thing else.  I will give you his own words:  Ultra Lapones (saith he) in Regione inter Corum & Aquilonem perpetua oppressa Caligine Pygmaeos reperiri, aliqui eximiae fidei testes retulerunt; qui postquam ad summum adoleverint, nostratis Pueri denum annorum Mensuram vix excedunt.  Meticulosum genus hominum, & garritu Sermonem exprimens, adeo ut tam Simiae propinqui, quam Statura ac sensibus ab justae Proceritatis homine remoti videantur.  Now there is this Advantage in our Hypothesis, it will take in all the Pygmies, in any part of the World; or wherever they are to be met with, without supposing, as some have done, that ’twas the Cranes that forced them to quit their Quarters; and upon this account several Authors have described them in different places:  For unless we suppose the Cranes so kind to them, as to waft them over, how came we to find them often in Islands?  But this is more than can be reasonably expected from so great Enemies.

[Footnote A:  Paul.  Jovij de Legatione Muschovitar. lib. p.m. 489.]

I shall conclude by observing to you, that this having been the Common Error of the Age, in believing the Pygmies to be a sort of little Men, and it having been handed down from so great Antiquity, what might contribute farther to the confirming of this Mistake, might be, the Imposture of the Navigators, who failing to Parts where these Apes are, they have embalmed their Bodies, and brought them home, and then made the People believe that they were the