Dwarf
a person much under the ordinary size. Dwarf means small; it does not mean misshapen. Dwarfs were known among the ancients. Aristotle and other writers held that a race of pygmies lived somewhere in Africa. This statement was verified by Paul Du Chaillu and Henry M. Stanley, who found a dwarf people in the interior of the Dark Continent. As compared with giants, who are seldom entirely healthy or long lived, dwarfs are usually well built and active. Some of them have been decidedly intellectual, and have lived to a good old age. Their children are not infrequently of ordinary size.
A number of dwarfs have been celebrated. Philetus of Cos, the tutor of Ptolemy, was so small that his facetious friends said he was obliged to carry stones in his pockets, to prevent himself from being blown away. Julia, the niece of the Roman Augustus, had a little handmaid named Andromeda, whose height was but twenty-eight inches. A French dwarf named Bebe lived in the Orleans family. He was but twenty-three inches in height. During the French Revolution he was made the carrier of dispatches. He was dressed in the clothing of an infant and carried in the arms of a nurse, thus escaping the search to which ordinary travelers were subjected. He died in Paris in 1858 at the age of ninety.
Among the legends connected with the court of King Arthur is one of a dwarf by the name of Tom Thumb. "In Arthur's court Tom Thumb did live," is the first line of an old English ballad. One of the most celebrated English dwarfs was Jeffery Hudson, whom Sir Walter Scott introduces, in his Peveril of the Peak. The Duke of Buckinghamshire, having invited Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria, to a feast, caused the crust of a huge meat pie to be cut, when out stepped Jeffery to the astonishment and amusement of those at table. The Duke presented Jeffery to the queen, in whose service he remained for many years. At the age of thirty, he was but eighteen inches in height. He then took a second growth, attaining a stature of three feet, nine inches. He appears to have been a peppery little chap, the butt of many teasing jokes. On one occasion, he challenged a Mr. Crofts to a duel. The latter, to carry on the jest, appeared armed only with a squirt gun; but the dwarf shot the unfortunate courtier dead. He was intrusted with several delicate missions to France. In Sir Jeffery's day the dwarf appears to have occupied a privileged place in European courts, not unlike that formerly held by the court fool. As late as the reign of Charles II, a court party is described as catching up a dwarf and tossing him from person to person, merely to enjoy his discomfiture.
The most celebrated American dwarf was Charles Stratton of Bridgeport, Connecticut. At the age of twenty-five he was but thirty-one inches in height. He married Miss Lavinia Warren, a woman of his own size. The pair were exhibited by P. T. Barnum, the American showman, both in this country and abroad. Queen Victoria is said to have taken a great interest in the little Charles, or General Tom Thumb, as he was popularly called. Scientists, who have sought for the physiological difference between dwarfs and other people, claim that the cells which compose the dwarf's body are of the usual size, but that for some reason there are not so many of them. In fact the fewer cells of a small body are apt to be of superior quality.