Mites

IT'S A SMALL WORLD--Walter Bodin & Burnet Hershey--Coward-McCann ($3). In the 18th Century it was quite the thing to visit Bedlam, London's lunatic asylum, to have a hearty laugh at its mad inmates. Twentieth-Centuryites are more squeamish, but they still pay good money to circus sideshows to see grown men and women whose under-functioning pituitary glands have made midgets. For those who cannot or will not attend such freak shows, Authors Bodin & Hershey have written a book that answers all conceivable questions about these monstrous mites. Midgets are correctly proportioned miniature copies of adults, usually between three and four feet tall, though some (notably the one who was photographed on J. P. Morgan's lap during a Senate investigation last year) are as tiny as 1 ft. 9 in. Midgets bitterly resent being miscalled dwarfs, who are usually misshapen or deformed. Usually born normal, and of normal parents, midgets invariably produce normal children. Though many of the earth's 2,000 living midgets come from Austria, Hungary and Germany, about one-sixth of them are natives of the U. S. Midgets do not always marry each other; sometimes exercise a strange fascination over normal adults of the opposite sex. With lusty appetites, they eat and drink as much as men twice their height, thrice their weight. Putative reason: their abnormal energy.

Though most midgets who earn their own living do it by exhibiting themselves, Authors Bodin & Hershey list midget architects, realtors, brokers, restaurateurs, watchmakers, musicians, playwrights. Smallest midgets in the U. S.: Adele Ber, 9, of Yonkers, N. Y. (1 ft. 6); Lya Graf, 32, Ringling performer and Morgan lap-sitter (1 ft. 9); Clarence Chesterfield Howerton ("Major Mite"), 26, of Oregon (2 ft. 6). Best-known midget of all time: Charles Sherwood Stratton ("Tom Thumb''), who died in 1883, after marrying Midgetess Lavinia Warren. The New York Illustrated News gave his Manhattan wedding (1863) 23 columns; to news of the current Civil War, a grudging eight.

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