human
was of Cyclopean or gigantic stature. All known evidence of a reliable character, however, condemns this hypothesis as untenable. The power of ignorance and rumour to magnify small facts into monstrous fictions is aptly illustrated by the story of the famous three black crows. The deeds of a man of uncommon stature, or extraordinary strength, would furnish, under certain circumstances, a sufficient modicum of truth to lay the foundation of a most extravagant myth. We have a modern illustration of the proneness of ignorant or superstitious persons to hyperbole in matters of this kind, in the statements of early voyagers anent the aborigines of Patagonia. Our early school geographies informed us that this then relatively unknown portion of South America was peopled by a race of giants. Indeed, I think it was even intimated that these colossi were most probably the _bonâ fide_ descendants of the supposed mythical monsters of the days of old. Some Spanish officers, in 1785, measured several of these Patagonian giants, and they reported that the greatest monster of the lot only reached seven feet one inch and a quarter! I can never remember England being without two or three exhibited giants, who would look with contempt upon such pretensions to the honours of the caravan, to say nothing of the
gpt
of such
human
as Chang, the Chinese Anak, Mons. Brice, or Captain Bates, with his colossal wife, _née_ Miss Swan. But Captain Wallis informs us that, on his carefully measuring several of these Patagonian prodigies, he found that the stature of the greater part of them ranged between five feet ten inches and six feet! The well-known regiment of grenadiers raised by Frederick William the First, of Prussia, would have completely dwarfed these once celebrated Patagonian Titans. One of them, a Swede, measured eight feet six inches.
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O'Brien, the Irish giant, who died in 1783, was eight feet four inches in height. His real name was Byrne. His skeleton is preserved in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, London. Chang, at nineteen years of age, was said to be seven feet nine and a half inches in height. He stated that a deceased sister was eight inches taller than himself! The proneness to exaggeration or hyperbole to which I have referred was shared in even by such men as Julius Cæsar and Tacitus; or, at the least, they dealt largely in the article at second-hand. They believed and recorded the then vulgar notion that the German
human
He likewise talks of a people who, having no heads, stand on their necks. These monsters were said to carry their eyes in their shoulders. He describes the Choromandæ as a savage people, without a distinct speech. Their bodies were rough and hairy. They gnashed their teeth and made a hideous noise. Their eyes were red, and their teeth of the canine order. This same India, according to Pliny, possessed a great variety of other monstrosities, such as men without noses, men with feet a cubit long, while those of their wives were so small that they were called