520 THE STATURE OF MAN AT VARIOUS EPOCHS. 



that of Minerva, who strikes him with her hmce, or that of Hercules, 

 who draws a bow" upon him. Moreover, the hugeness of the body is 

 itself a rare and exceptional feature in the representations of the 

 Greek artists, who quickly renounced this significant deformation, so 

 that in ancient art giants would not have been distinguished from 

 ordinary human beings if, after the archaic period, the custom had 

 not arisen of terminating their lower limbs in the bodies of serj^ents. 

 A beautiful cameo in the museum at Naples shows Jupiter crushing 

 under the wheels of his chariot some serpent -footed giants whom he 

 had alread}^ thrown to the ground w-ith his thunderbolt. 



Analagous legends have been transmitted to us by the historians of 

 all the peoples of antiquity. Scholars have collected many references; 

 to giants in the Scriptures and in the writings of profane authors. 

 Sometimes the huge beings form a whole people, or a tribe, or an 

 ethnic grou}), though most frequent]}^ they appear in history as excep- 

 tional individuals. A list of references would be too long to be 

 given here. It must suffice to mention a few sources of information, 

 as Etudes biologiques sur les geans (Masson, 190-ir), by P. E. Launois 

 and P. Roy. BuH'on in his work on the natural history of man gives 

 some information obtained from the Memoir of Lecat read in his 

 day at the academy of Rouen. Tt is there recalled that the Greeks 

 attributed to Orestes a height of 11^ feet, which Pliny consented to 

 reduce to 7 cubits or 10^ feet. He also mentions the skeletons of Sec- 

 ond ilia and of Pusio, preserved in the gardens of Sallust. These 

 could not have measured less than 10 feet. In our time Prof. C. 

 Taruffi, of Bologna, in his work (Milan, 1878) on gigantism — which 

 he calls macrosomy — collected a vast number of records wdiicli show 

 that the general belief has threaded history that modern man is the 

 dwindled, degenerate offsj)ring of. ancestors of gigantic stature. 

 From this point of view the isolated specimens of giants that appear 

 at long intervals would be accidental repetitions of a vanished type, 

 belated representatives of an extinct race. 



This universal, deeply rooted prejudice rests upon evidence so 

 manifold and so categoric that it might easily influence all but the 

 scientifically ecpiipped critic, and it is not until relatively recent 

 times that the man of science himself has been in a jjosition to discuss 

 the evidence and cast doubt upon the belief. It may be of some value 

 to recall that ideas upon the subject even in the nineteenth century 

 were still sufficiently indeterminate for Silberman to feel justified in 

 raising the question, in 1850, before the Academy of Sciences, as to 

 whether the liuuian body has varied in size wdthin liistoric times. 

 He answered the ((uestion in the negative. He affirmed that the stat- 

 ure of the Egyi)tians had not changed since the construction of the 

 pyramids; but some uncertainty attaches to the calculations made by 

 him for arriving at the height of the contemporaries of the king 



