Pygmy

“ In the above-described warfare, if a Pygmy chanced to pluck out a crane's tail feather, it proved a very great feather in his cap. Once or twice, if you will believe me, a little man was made chief ruler of the nation for no other merit in the world than bringing home such a feather.
But I have now said enough to let you see what a gallant little people these were, and how happily they and their forefathers, for nobody knows how many generations, had lived with the immeasurable Giant Antaeus. ”

“ The Pygmy Shrew in Kent!! The Pygmy Shrew in Rutlandshire!!!
Thus fame is garlanded round mystery.
Man's kingdom is brick-built and parchment guarded. The beasties have a nobler heritage. Fence your broad acres as you please, yet they shall quietly share them, paying you naught, and taking what they will. Water and air and land are theirs by prior, nay primeval, right. So shall you bend before their quality, and, for their lineage, you shall respect them.
{302} Something had brushed across the Pygmy's nose. He shook off three days' sleep in three half-seconds. Where was his tail? ”

“ So saying, this valiant Pygmy drew out his weapon (which was terrible to behold, being as long as the blade of a penknife) , and sent the scabbard whirling over the heads of the multitude. His speech was followed by an uproar of applause, as its patriotism and self-devotion unquestionably deserved; and the shouts and clapping of hands would have been greatly prolonged had they not been rendered quite inaudible by a deep respiration, vulgarly called a snore, from the sleeping Hercules. ”

“ If this View be correct, it seems probable that the members of the pygmy races are the existing human beings which most closely resemble primitive man. On the other hand, there are those who regard the pygmies as a retrograde and degenerative type of the negro race and therefore of comparatively recent growth. ”

“ The Mafulu Mountain People of British New Guinea, 1912.
[365] Nova Guinea, VII. 1913, 1915.
[366] A. C. Haddon, "The Pygmy Question," Appendix B to A. F. R. Wollaston's Pygmies and Papuans, 1912, pp. 314-9.
[367] It is not certain however that this method is known to the Semang, and it occurs among peoples who are not Negrito, such as the Kayan of Sarawak, and in other places where a Negrito element has not yet been recorded.
[368] The term pygmy is usually applied to a people whose stature does not exceed 1.5 m. (4 ft. 11 in.) . ”

“ The intellect seemed to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence." This is very probably the case with the Pygmies, who similarly reach a mental limit beyond which they cannot advance; but this limit is set in the adult period. In other words, the adult Pygmy is on the mental level of the negro child. If the African Pygmy is as short lived as his Eastern congener, he does not survive, as a rule, many years beyond the age of adolescence, and continues in a stage of childhood, mentally considered, until death. ”

“ But when one finds within one area, as in the East Indian region, distinct peoples of medium, short and pygmy stature, living under conditions which appear to be very similar, one is inclined to suspect a racial difference between them, and the suspicion becomes confirmed if we find other characters associated with pygmy stature. ”

“ He is not half so bright as we are, to be sure; and, for that reason, he needs us to look after his comfort and happiness. Let us be kind to the old fellow. Why, if Mother Earth had not been very kind to ourselves, we might all have been Giants too."
On all their holidays, the Pygmies had excellent sport with Antaeus. He often stretched himself out at full length on the ground, where he looked like the long ridge of a hill; and it was a good hour's walk, no doubt, for a short-legged Pygmy to journey from head to foot of the Giant. ”

“ There is not a Giant on earth for whom I would take the trouble to get up."
But the Pygmy looked again, and now perceived that the stranger was coming directly towards the prostrate form of Antæus. With every step he looked less like a blue mountain, and more like an immensely large man. ”

“ Pygmy mice (Genus Baiomys) are the smallest cricetine rodents in North America. They occur from Nicaragua in Central America into the southwestern United States. The principal part of the geographic range of the pygmy mice lies in the Republic of México. They are notably common in central México, but are only locally common to the north and to the south, and then only in certain seasons.
Pygmy mice were first brought to the attention of biologists in 1887 when Oldfield Thomas described a diminutive species of cricetine rodent, Hesperomys (Vesperimus) taylori. ”

“ Pygmy mice probably originated in that time, I judge in México, and moved northward and southward in [Pg 656] a grassland-savannah habitat that seemingly existed as far north as what is now Meade County, Kansas (where the Sawrock fauna lived) . Further evidence for occupancy of a grassland-savannah habitat by ancestral pygmy mice stems from the distribution of the living species, B. taylori, that at present occupies territory adjacent to parts of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts. B. taylori seems to be morphologically more specialized for life in an arid grassland than was B. sawrockensis. ”

“ In the State of Sinaloa, Hooper (1955b:13) obtained specimens in grass and among shrubs and vines bordering a fallow field. The northern pygmy mouse, in general, lives in situations more xerophytic and more grassy than does the southern pygmy mouse.
The northern pygmy mouse, as the southern pygmy mouse, is locally abundant in its geographic range. Stickel and Stickel (op. cit.: 145) pointed out that on the third night of live-trapping in Bexar County, Texas, there was a sudden increase in unmarked pygmy mice trapped. ”

“ On the basis of internal morphological characters studied (auditory ossicles, hyoid apparatus, and baculum) , Baiomys seems to be more closely related to a South American hesperomine, perhaps Calomys, than to any North American cricetine.
10. Pygmy mice were more widely distributed in the past than they are at present. Part of the ancestral stock of the pygmy mice may have emigrated from North America into South America in a brief period in the Pliocene; if so, it is easy to understand why certain South American hesperomines resemble Baiomys. ”

“ In the area where the two species of pygmy mice occur together, there seems to be a disparity in numbers between them. Hooper (1952a:91) has recorded the collection of both B. musculus and B. taylori in a single trap line. A series of pygmy mice collected from San Gabriel, Jalisco, contained one taylori and 33 musculus; another sample from La Resolana, Jalisco, had a ratio of 25 taylori to 6 musculus. The disparity in numbers where the two species occur together has been further substantiated by collections of the University of Kansas. ”

“ At birth, juveniles are pink, without pelage except for the mystacial vibrissae and a few hairs about the eye. Blair (op. cit.:381) recorded changes with age in color of the skin of new-born and suckling pygmy mice. Data obtained by me from three litters born in captivity agree with his findings. Pygmy mice are weaned when 17 to 24 days old. At that time, the mice possess a fine, but not dense, dusky-gray fur. ”

“ When the sun was too hot, he often sat himself down, and let his shadow fall over the kingdom, from one frontier to the other; and as for matters in general, he was wise enough to let them alone, and leave the Pygmies to manage their own affairs—which, after all, is about the best thing that great people can do for little ones.
In short, as I said before, Antaeus loved the Pygmies, and the Pygmies loved Antaeus. The Giant's life being as long as his body was large, while the lifetime of a Pygmy was but a span, this friendly intercourse had been going on for innumerable generations and ages. ”

“ They sell or trade the fur and skin and ivory for arrows and knives. They also get tobacco and potatoes for their furs and skins.
They are also very good at fishing. They can catch large fish with a piece of meat fastened to a string.
The pygmies do not dig the ground or plant or sow anything. Bananas grow in Africa, and the pygmies are very fond of them. Often they come out of the forests to get bananas from the trees on which they grow. If a pygmy sees a good bunch of bananas that he would like to have, he shoots his arrow into the stalk. ”

“ My data (see Figure 12) show pygmy mice from southwestern Nayarit, northwestern and central Jalisco, Colima, and parts of Michoacán to be significantly larger in certain cranial and external measurements than pygmy mice from Guerrero, Oaxaca, Morelos, and parts of Puebla. ”

“ At first sight it seems to many people quite simple to account for "pygmies"; they will tell you that the poor creatures are half-starved and so unable to grow to full size. That explanation does not, however, meet the case, for the African and Asiatic pygmy races are just as well nourished as most of their neighbours. Also if we look a little further we find that the women of every race are smaller than the men, and often much smaller. ”

“ Be this as it may, this growth is the surest and most permanent characteristic of the Pygmy, or, as some prefer to call them, the Hottentot-Bushman race. [3]
The name of dwarfs, applied by some to these people, has be objected to as implying deformity or arrested growth, and therefore conveying a wrong impression. Nothing of the kind can be said of the African Pygmies, who, though of short stature, are well-shaped people of perfectly normal formation. It is true that the Hottentots and Bushmen show certain strange anatomical peculiarities ”

“ Increase in size from south to north is in keeping with Bergman's Rule that within a species, smaller individuals occur in warmer parts of its geographic range. Southern pygmy mice at high altitudes average larger than those from low elevations, except where the two species are sympatric. ”

“ Specimens of both species were segregated into five categories: Juveniles, young, subadults, adults, and old adults. Juvenal and young pygmy mice are readily separable from the other three categories; subadults are less easily distinguished from adults. In order to obtain an accurate understanding of geographic variation in these mice, only adults should be used in making taxonomic comparisons.
Juveniles.—Nestling mice yet unweaned; sutures in cranium incompletely closed; bony parts of skull fragile; M3 and m3 not erupted or only partly erupted and not protruding above margins of alveoli. ”

“ In other litters born in captivity, adult males did not harm the other mice.
I have noted, as Blair (loc. cit.) did, that B. taylori utters high-pitched squeals in a "singing" posture resembling that of the coyote, yet remains silent when being handled.
The northern pygmy mouse makes runways in the grass, in miniature resembling those of Microtus, and often uses runways constructed by Sigmodon. A small firm nest of finely shredded plant material (mostly grasses) is constructed in burrows or under logs, rocks, or fallen cactus plants. ”

“ The phyletic trends in the genus Baiomys have been from an ancestral stock that possessed relatively brachydont teeth having raised cingular ridges and orthodont to proödont incisors, to species having hypsodont teeth with reduced cingular ridges and retrodont incisors.
3. Reduction of cingular ridges in pygmy mice is associated with an existence in open grassland (more xeric than mesic) , whereas, the presence of cingular ridges is associated with an existence in a savannah habitat (more mesic than xeric) . ”

“ He speaks of the red and black Akka, and Sir Harry Johnston also describes the two types of pygmy, one being of a reddish-yellow colour, the other as black as the ordinary negro. In the yellow-skinned type there is a tendency on the part of the head hair to be reddish, more especially over the frontal part of the head. ”

“ There the Southern Pygmy Mouse is uniformly larger, regardless of altitude.
Osgood (1909:257, 259) suggested that degree of relative humidity might in some way control color of pelage in both B. taylori and B. musculus. In B. musculus, the darker subspecies, B. m. brunneus, B. m. nigrescens, and B. m. pullus, occur in zones of rather constant high relative humidity, whereas the paler subspecies infernatis, musculus, handleyi, and to a less extent grisescens and pallidus, occur in zones of lower relative humidity. ”

“ So far as our present knowledge teaches us, there never was a really Pygmy race inhabiting the northern parts of Scotland; (2) the mounds with which the tales of little people are associated have not, in many cases, been habitations, but were natural or sepulchral in their nature; (3) little people are not by any means associated entirely with mounds; (4) the association of giants and dwarfs in traditions confuses the theory; (5) there are fairies where no pygmies ever were, as, for example, in North America ”

“ Such similarities of crania between Calomys and Baiomys may reflect convergence, but the total of internal and external morphological characters shared, I think reflects true relationships.
Peromyscus has a large number of living and extinct species and exhibits a wide range of morphological variation, whereas Baiomys has a small number (7) of species and exhibits a narrow range of morphological variation. The small number of known species of pygmy mice suggests their conservatism in elaboration of morphological characters. ”