may denote
a very marked difference in the two types.]

[Footnote 9: Scott again quotes this story, in fuller detail, in the
Appendix to _The Lady of the Lake_, Note 3 C.]

[Footnote 10: "Primitive Culture," vol. i. p. 385 (3rd edition).]

[Footnote 11: London, Macmillan and Co., 1873.]

[Footnote 12: London, Truebner and Co., 1883.]

[Footnote 13: London, David Nutt, 1891.]

[Footnote 14: _Asiatic Quarterly Review_, July 1892.]

[Footnote 15: For an exhaustive account of "The Pygmy Tribes of Africa,"
treated from the purely scientific and ethnological point of view see
Dr. Henry Schlichter's articles in _The Scottish Geographical Magazine_
of June and July 1892.]

[Footnote 16: _Memoirs_ of the Anthropological Society of London, vol.
iii. 1870, pp. 320, 321.]

[Footnote 17: Blackwood and Sons, 1888.]

FIANS, FAIRIES AND PICTS.

The general belief at the present day is that, of the three designations
here classed together, only that of the Picts is really historical. The
Fians are regarded as merely legendary--perhaps altogether mythical
beings; and the Fairies as absolutely unreal. On the other hand, there
are those who believe that the three terms all relate to historical
people, closely akin to each other, if not actually one people under
three names.

To those unacquainted with the views of the realists, or euhemerists, it
is necessary to explain that the popular definition of Fairies as
"little people" is one which that school is quite ready to accept. But
the conception of such "little people" as tiny beings of aerial and
ethereal nature, able to fly on a bat's back, or to sip honey from the
flowers "where the bee sucks," is regarded by the realists as simply
the outcome of the imagination, working upon a basis of fact. An
illustration of this position may be seen in the Far East. There is a
tradition among the Ainos of Northern Japan that they were preceded by a
race of "little people," only a few inches in height, whose
pit-dwellings they still point out. But the pottery and the skeletons
associated with these habitations show that not only were their
occupants of a stature to be measured by feet rather than by inches, but
also that, by reason of a certain anatomical peculiarity common to both,
the traditional dwarfs were very clearly the ancestors of the Ainos--a
race which, though now blended, was once most distinctly a race of
dwarfs, if one is to believe the earliest Japanese pictures