Justin Croft : Rare & Fine Antiquarian Books - Specialist in antiquarian books, especially in the field of literature, history, social sciences, religion, art and architecture, science and medicine

First edition: the first book in English on pygmies. It's author was a contemporary of Milton's at Cambridge and became a prominent Hellenist. Although pure fantasy, Gerania was influential and is believed to have influenced Swift's invention of Lilliput: "[Swift] may have read Joshua Barnes's description of a race of "Pygmies" in his Gerania of 1675" (Ency. Brit.)Gerania is one of the best examples of English seventeenth-century utopian literature. Linking history, classical antiquity and pseudo-ethnology, Barnes gives a fanciful account of an expedition to the head of the Ganges to find the 'blameless pygmies' mentioned in Homer's Iliad, painting a delightful, if idealised, vision of their Eden-like existence: "Their Habit was of the woolly Moss of Trees, most artificially cemented with Gum, and interspersed with delectable Posies; about their Necks they wore pleasant chains of odiferous Flower, the smell of which was their chiefest aliment…" "Barnes... leapt into the project of connecting classical and biblical antiquity, beginning with Gerania (1675), an English prose account of an expedition to visit the 'blameless pygmies' mentioned in Homer's Iliad. Their harmonious community resembled Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, but its laws had been established by Homer himself, a wandering sage versed in Greek, Persian, and Hebrew philosophy, as well as Christianity avant la lettre" (Haugen in ODNB).