THE STATURE OF MAN AT VARIOUS EPOCHS. 621 



Cheops in order to coini^ire their size with that, of tlie present 

 generation. 



The same nneertainty does not characterize the methods of modern 

 anthroi)onietrv. Only limited faith is phieed in the evidence of his- 

 torians, geographers, or voyagers, and none hnt scientiHc nieasnrenients 

 can be relied upon. The stature of vanished populations is ol)tained 

 directly by measuring theii- skeletons or parts of their skeletons, the 

 relations of which to the whole have been established by previous 

 study and careful research. No one has gone further than L. 

 Manouvriei" in determining i)recisely the relation, long ignored, that 

 exists between the various parts of a skeleton. For the use of 

 anthropologists he codified after a fashion the rules outlined of old 

 by Orfila and revised by To])inard and ¥j. Kollet in France, by 

 Humphry and J. Beddoe in England, and by Langer and Toldt in 

 Germany. He made a sort of chart for ready reckoning, by the aid of 

 which, from the dimensions of the fennn* or the tibia, we can deduce 

 the height and the size of the body itself. The degree of approxi- 

 mation of the results is known, flie extent of the extreme aberrations, 

 the causes of the aberrations, and all the conditions, in short, for 

 reducing the aberrations to a minimum. In these means of investi- 

 gation contemporaneous anthropology has weapons with which to 

 attack the prejudices that have long existed in regard to the gigantic 

 stature of our far-removed ancestors and in regard to the j)retended 

 diminution in size which the human figure has been progressively 

 undergoing. 



Errors and exaggerations such as these have been collected, trans- 

 mitted, and proi)agated by historians of all times. The first expres- 

 sion that they received is incontestably to be found in the Bible. 

 The Hebrew scriptures allude in various passages to enormous 

 men — as, for example, the population found by the spies of Moses 

 in the Promised Land. The prophet Amos compares these occu- 

 pants of Canaan to oaks for strength and to cedars for height. The 

 simile forcibly recalls almost the very words of the Poemes Barbares, 

 in which the hordes of })rimitive men are described as they issue from 

 dark woods and limitless deserts: 



More massive than the cedar, taller than the pine. 



In the Book of Kings the giant (Joliath is said to have been 11 

 feet 4 inches tall ; and Deuteronomy narrates that the iron bed of C)g, 

 the King of Bashan, was 9 cubits, or about 15 feet, long. All the 

 Jews, however, did not entertain blind faith in the accuracy of these 

 figures, and many of them questioned how gigantic races, so power- 

 fully built, could have completely disappeared. The prince of 

 scribes, Esdras, who edited the canonical books at the end of the 

 Babylonian exile and freed them of errors that had crept into them, 

 pleads the progressive debasement of the race. Succeeding gener- 



