PREFACE. This little book is designed to meet the child's natural desire to learn or hear of other people than those living in the part of the world about him. It has been thoroughly proved in our newer pedagogical practice that the child in the first school year is much interested in descriptions of the Indian and the Eskimo. Whenever descriptions of the Indian and the Eskimo have been given him, they have not only fulfilled their purpose in furnishing material for reading and the interrelation of several activities of expression, but they have revealed to him the fact that there are other people in the world, who differ very much from those he has seen. His interest in different peoples at this time is in their physical appearance, their dress, their ways of living, their customs, their manners, and it arises chiefly from the contrast which descriptions of these afford to familiar customs, conditions, and physical characteristics. The child is not interested, at that stage of his intellectual development which falls in the first or the second school year, in the situation of countries. It does not matter to him exactly where, geographically, the people about whom he reads live. He is satisfied if some general statement is made to the effect that they live far away to the north, where the cold countries are, or in the south, where it is warm and sometimes hot, or on the other side of the world. His desire, at this period, for new impressions and ideas gained from descriptions and accompanying pictures is as keen as his desire for sense impressions gained from the world of nature and activity about him. This wider range of information and ideas, it is believed, he may in some measure gain from this little book. DRESDEN, July 15, 1899. *** an excerpt from the chapter entitled: THE PYGMIES. Perhaps you have read in fairy tales of very little people called dwarfs. There are old stories which tell us about very small men who lived a long time ago in Africa. They were called pygmies. They were only one foot high, and they built their houses with eggshells. They lived in holes in the ground. They had goats and sheep which were much smaller than themselves, and they had corn which they cut down with axes, as we cut down trees. This is what we are told about them; but, of course, those stories are fables. There never were men so small as one foot high. But there are real people in Africa called pygmies. They are very small. The men and women look as if they were boys and girls. The men are about four feet high. There are a great many large forests in Africa. It is in the forests that the pygmies live. The forests are so dark in many places that one could not see to read at noonday. Only a few white men have been in the land of the pygmies and seen them. They are shy, like children, and hide their faces when spoken to. Some of the pygmies are black and some are red. They do not wear much clothing. They do not need much, for the weather is always very warm in the country in which they live. The men and boys wear only a strip of cloth around their loins. Many of the pygmies have no houses. They wander from place to place, and sleep on the ground under a bush. But some of them have little houses, or huts, built in the shape of beehives and about four feet high. They are covered over with long leaves. The door is only about a foot and a half high, just high enough for the pygmies to creep in. Their beds are made of sticks stuck in the ground with other sticks across them. The pygmies live by hunting. They do not shoot with guns, as we do. They use bows and arrows, and they are very quick and clever at shooting. A pygmy will shoot off three or four arrows one after the other so quickly that the last is flying away before the first has hit the mark. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.