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somewhat proficient in music. In their habits they resembled children, being sensitive and impulsive, fond of play, and very quick in their motions. Their readiness in gaining the elements of education is in accord with experience in the case of other savages. It is when studies requiring abstruse thought are reached that the facility in acquisition of the savage races comes to an end. With this consideration of the characteristics and habitat of the Pygmies we may proceed to a review of their habits. The weapons which they seem to have developed during their long upward progress, and to which their supremacy over the wild beasts of the forest is probably due, consist of two, the bow and arrow and the spear. The bow and arrow are small and insignificant in appearance, and would be of little value but for the poison which the Pygmies have somehow learned how to obtain, and which makes them dreaded, not only by beasts, but by men. Wherever found, from the deserts of the south to the forest of the Welle and Aruwimi on the north, the poisoned arrow is a mark of affinity as decided in its way as their physical resemblance. Its wide distribution goes to indicate that it was the general weapon of the Pygmies ages ago, when, presumably, they had all Africa for their own, and ruled supreme over the animal world in that continent. It is true, indeed, that the use of the poisoned arrow is not peculiar to them, but is a somewhat common possession of savage tribes in all parts of the earth. This makes it quite possible that it was not original with the Pygmies, but was derived by them from other tribes. On the other hand, in view of its great value in giving them supremacy over the lower animals, it may well have been a primeval Pygmy invention, and these tribes the original source of its existing wide distribution. They possess more than one poison; one being a dark substance of the color and consistence of pitch, which is supposed to be made out of a species of arum. It is laid in the splints of their wooden arrows, or spread thickly upon their iron arrowheads, when they possess these. Another poison is of a pale glue color, which is supposed by Stanley to be made of crushed red ants. When fresh these poisons are deadly, producing excessive faintness, palpitation of the heart, nausea, and deep pallor, soon followed by death. In Stanley's experience one man died within a minute, from a mere pin prick in the breast. Others lived
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