THE CARDIFF GIANT, AND OTHER FRAUDS. 201 



tist and sculptor, declared that any man who called the giant a humbug 

 " simply declared himself a fool." On the 4th of February a number of 

 Solons visited the giant as an official body. They examined it long and 

 patiently ; the exterior was tried with acids ; the head bored into, and 

 the compass carried around it in search of iron. The conclusion arrived 

 at was very satisfactory, and undoubtedly true, as it was decided to be 

 a "piece of stratified gypsum, probably very old.'''' The subject in- 

 vaded the Boston clubs, and one whole evening was occupied by the 

 president of the " Thursday Evening Club " to prove that the giant was 

 modern, because its features were Napoleonic ! 



But a few weeks elapsed ere the proofs of the frauds perpetrated 

 became incontrovertible, and the Cardiff giant was consigned to popular 

 oblivion. 



The Colorado stone man proves to be a veritable brother of the 

 giant, having been begotten by the self-same father. Hull cleared 

 some 160,000 by the latter, with which he embarked in business in 

 Binghamton, New York, by which every dollar was lost. Of late he 

 has been given to the pursuit of experimental chemistry, and, taught by 

 the popular views of Darwin, as expounded by the public press, he be- 

 gan planning to again astonish the good people of the United States. 

 This seemed to take great hold upon his mind, and he frequently re- 

 marked that he would like to set the scientific men quarreling as to the 

 origin of man, and throw the religious world into a vortex of doubt and 

 controversy. 



Finally his ideas and experiments assumed a definite form, and he 

 proceeded to put them in execution. Forming a partnership with one 

 Case, who possessed the funds requisite for the enterprise, an hotel was 

 bought in Elkland, a little mountain-town in Northern Pennsylvania, 

 and, as a blind, it was announced was to be converted into a summer 

 resort and mountain sanitarium. In the rear of the hotel a brick build- 

 ing was erected, ostensibly as an ice-house ; but in reality as a kiln and 

 workshop. Here, one after the other, two figures were constructed, the 

 principal composition of which was ground stone, pulverized bones, clay, 

 plaster, blood, and dried eggs, the whole, when modeled, being baked 

 in the kiln for two weeks. The first was irretrievably broken in remov- 

 ing it from the furnace ; but the second proved more successful, greater 

 care having been taken in its construction. In it bones were inserted 

 in different localities, including fragments of skull in the head. Cox, 

 one of the confidants of the scheme, thus details the parturition of the 

 image, as communicated to him by Hull : 



" Cox, I would give a hundred dollars if you could have been with Case 

 and me the night we took him out. We had a rope around his neck, and 

 a pulley up there; and how we worked and tugged at the rope ! I went 

 through torture my whole existence hung by that rope. It seemed as 

 if I lived a thousand years while we were pulling him out ; and when he 

 hung up there by the neck, I tell you, he looked alive; he looked as if 



