GIANT

GIANT, a person of extraordinary bulk and stature. The romances of all ages have furnished us with so many extravagant accounts of giants of incredible bulk and strength, that the existence of such people is now generally disbelieved. It is commonly thought that the stature of man has been the same in all ages; and some have even pretended to demonstrate mathematically the impossibility of the existence of giants. Of these our countryman MacLaurin has been the most explicit. "In general," says he, "it will easily appear, that the efforts tending to destroy the cohesion of beams arising from their own gravity only, increase in the quadruplicate ratio of their lengths; but that the opposite efforts, tending to preserve their cohesion, increase only in the triplicate proportion of the same lengths. From this it follows, that the greater beams must be in greater danger of breaking than the lesser similar ones; and that though a lesser beam may be firm and secure, yet a greater similar one may be made so long, that it will necessarily break by its own weight. Hence Galileo justly concludes, that what appears very firm and succeeds very well in models, may be very weak and infirm, or even fall to pieces by its own weight, when it comes to be executed in large dimensions according to the model. From the same principle he argues, that there are necessary limits in the operations of nature and art, which they cannot surpass in magnitude. Were trees of a very enormous size, their branches would fall by their own weight. Large animals have not strength in proportion to their size; and if there were any land animals much larger than those we know, they could hardly move, and would be perpetually subject to the most dangerous accidents. As to the animals of the sea, indeed, the case is different; for the gravity of the water in a great measure sustains those animals, and in fact these are known sometimes to be vastly larger than the greatest land animals. Nor does it avail against this doctrine to tell us, that bones have sometimes been found which were supposed to have belonged to giants of immense size, such as the skeletons mentioned by Strabo and Pliny, the former of which was sixty cubits high, and the latter forty-six; for naturalists have concluded on just grounds, that in some cases these bones had belonged to elephants; and that the larger ones were bones of whales, which had been brought to the places where they were found by the revolutions of nature that have happened in past times; though it must be owned that there appears no reason why there may not have been men who have exceeded by some feet in height the tallest we have seen." It will be easily seen, that arguments of this kind can never be held as conclusive, because, along with an increase of stature in any animal, we must always suppose a proportional increase in the cohesion of the parts of its body. Large works sometimes fail when constructed on the plan of models, because the cohesion of the materials of which the model is made, and of the large work, are the same; but a difference in this respect will produce a very remarkable difference in the result. Thus, suppose a model is made of fir-wood, the model may be strong and firm enough; but a large work made also of fir, when executed according to the plan of the model, may be so weak that it will fall to pieces by its own weight. If, however, we make use of iron for the large work instead of fir, the whole will be sufficiently strong, even though made exactly according to the plan of the model. The same thing may be said regarding large and small animals. If we could find an animal whose bones exceeded in hardness and strength the bones of other animals as much as iron exceeds fir, such an animal might be of a monstrous size, and yet be exceedingly strong. In like manner, if we suppose the flesh and bones of a giant to be greatly superior in strength and hardness to the flesh and bones of other men, the great size of his body will be no objection at all to his strength. The whole of the matter therefore concerning the existence of giants must rest upon the credibility of the accounts we have received from those who pretend to have seen them, and not on any arguments drawn a priori. In a memoir read before the Academy of Sciences at Rouen, M. Lecat gives the following account of giants who are said to have existed in different ages. "Profane historians have given seven feet of height to Hercules, their first hero; and in our days we have seen men eight feet high. The giant who was shown in Rouen in 1735 measured eight feet some inches. The Emperor Maximin was of that size; Shenkins and Platerus, physicians of the last century, saw several persons of that stature; and Goropius saw a girl who was ten feet high. The body of Orestes, according to the Greeks, was eleven feet and a half; the giant Galbara, brought from Arabia to Rome under Claudius Cæsar, was near ten feet; and the bones of Secundilla and Pusio, keepers of the gardens of Sallust, were but six inches shorter. Funnam, a Scotsman, who lived in the time of Eugene II. king of Scotland, measured eleven feet and a half; and Jacob Lemaire, in his voyage to the Straits of Magellan, reports, that on the 17th of December 1615, they found at Port Desiré several graves covered with stones; and having the curiosity to remove the stones, they discovered human skeletons of ten and eleven feet in length. The Chevalier Scory, in his voyage to the Peak of Teneriffe, says, that they found in one of the sepulchral caverns of that mountain the head of a Gauchó which had eighty teeth, and that the body was not less than fifteen feet in length. The giant Ferragus, slain by Orlando, nephew of Charlemagne, was eighteen feet in height. Rioland, a celebrated anatomist, who wrote in 1614, says, that, some years before, there was to be seen in the suburbs of St Germain the tomb of the giant Isoret, who was twenty feet in height. In Rouen, in 1509, whilst digging in the ditches near the Dominicans, they found a stone tomb containing a skeleton whose skull held a bushel of corn, and whose shin-bone reached up to the girdle of the tallest man there, being about four feet in length, and consequently the body must have been seventeen or eighteen feet in height. Upon the tomb was a plate of copper, on which was engraved, 'In this tomb lies the noble and puissant lord the Chevalier Ricon de Vallemont, and his bones.' Platerus, a famous physician, declares that he saw at Lucerne the true human bones of a subject which must have been at least nineteen feet high. Valence in Dauphiné boasts of possessing the bones of the giant Bucart, tyrant of the Vivaraïs, who was slain with an arrow by the Count de Cabillon, his vassal. The Dominicans had a part of the shinbone, with the articulation of the knee, and his figure painted in fresco, with an inscription, showing that this giant was twenty-two feet and a half in height, and that his bones were found in 1705, near the banks of the Morderi, a little river at the foot of the mountain of Crussol, upon which, according to tradition, the giant had his residence. "On the 11th January 1613, some masons digging near the ruins of a castle in Dauphiné, in a field which, by tradition, had long been called the giant's field, at the depth of eighteen feet discovered a brick tomb thirty feet long, twelve feet wide, and eight feet high; on which was a gray stone, with the words Theutobochus Rex cut thereon. When the tomb was opened, they found a human skeleton entire, twenty-five and a half feet long, ten feet wide across the shoulders, and five feet deep from the breast-bone to the back. The teeth were each about the size of an ox's foot, and the shin-bone measured four feet. Near Mazarino, in Sicily, in 1516, was found the skeleton of a giant thirty feet high; his head was the size of a hog's head, and each of his teeth weighed five ounces. Near Palermo, in the valley of Mazara, in Sicily, a skeleton of a giant thirty feet long was found, in the year 1548; and another of thirty-three feet high, in 1550. Many curious persons have preserved several of these gigantic bones. "The Athenians found near their city two famous skeletons, one of thirty-four and the other of thirty-six feet in height. At Totu, in Bohemia, there was found in 758 a skeleton, the head of which could scarcely be encompassed by the arms of two men together; whilst the legs, which they still keep in the castle of that city, were twenty-six feet long. The skull of the giant found in Macedonia in September 1691 contained two hundred and ten pounds of corn. The celebrated Sir Hans Sloane, who treated this matter very learnedly, does not doubt these facts, but thinks the bones were those of elephants, whales, or other enormous animals. Elephants' bones may be shown as those of giants; but they can never impose upon anatomists. Whales, which, by their immense bulk, are more proper to be substituted for the largest giants, have neither arms nor legs; and the head of that animal has not the least resemblance to that of a man. If it be true, therefore, that a great number of the gigantic bones which we have mentioned have been seen by anatomists, and by them have been reputed real human bones, the existence of giants is proved." With regard to the credibility of all or any of these accounts, it is difficult to determine any thing. If, in any castle of Bohemia, the bones of a man's leg twenty-six feet in length are preserved, we should have indeed a decisive proof of the existence of a giant, in comparison of whom most others would be but pignies. Nor could these bones be supposed to belong to an elephant; for an elephant itself would be but a dwarf in comparison of such an enormous monster.