"In the twenty-ninth year of the Emperor Yao, in spring, the chief of the
Tsiao-Yao, or dark pigmies, came to court and offered as tribute feathers
from the Mot." The Professor continues, "As shown by this entry, we begin
with the semi-historic times as recorded in the 'Annals of the Bamboo
Books,' and the date about 2048 B.C. The so-called feathers were simply
some sort of marine plant or seaweed with which the immigrant Chinese,
still an inland people, were yet unacquainted. The Mot water or river,
says the Shan-hai-king, or canonical book of hills and seas, was situated
in the south-east of the Tai-shan in Shan-tung. This gives a clue to the
localisation of the pigmies, and this localisation agrees with the
positive knowledge we possess of the small area which the Chinese dominion
covered at this time. Thus the Negritos were part of the native population
of China when, in the twenty-third century B.C., the civilised Bak tribes
came into the land." In Japan we have also evidence of their existence.
This country, now inhabited by the Niphonians, or Japanese, as we have
come to call them, was previously the home of the Ainu, a white, hairy
under-sized race, possibly, even probably, emigrants from Europe, and now
gradually dying out in Yezo and the Kurile Islands. Prior to the Ainu was
a Negrito race, whose connection with the former is a matter of much
dispute, whose remains in the shape of pit-dwellings, stone arrow-heads,
pottery, and other implements still exist, and will be found fully
described by Mr. Savage Landor in a recent most interesting work.[B] In
the Shan-hai-king, as Professor Schlegel[C] points out, their country is
spoken of as the Siao-jin-Kouo, or land of little men, in distinction, be
it noted, to the Peh-min-Kouo, or land of white people, identified by him
with the Ainu. These little men are spoken of by the Ainu as
Koro-puk-guru, _i.e._, according to Milne, men occupying excavations, or
pit-dwellers. According to Chamberlain, the name means dwellers under
burdocks, and is associated with the following legend. Before the time of
the Ainu, Yezo was inhabited by a race of dwarfs, said by some to be two