A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients

The author was a seventeenth-century writer and physician. He was interested in the classification of species and did some notable work on reptiles and amphibians. He traveled widely in Africa and Asia and there saw several tribes of people whom he called pygmies on account of their stature. He was unable to conclude that all the people he saw were human, but rather species of apes or monkeys.