THE CARDIFF GIANT 1869-1870 479 



But all this pathetic eloquence was in vain. Hull, the 

 inventor of the statue, having realized more money from 

 it than he expected, and being sharp enough to see that 

 its day was done, was evidently bursting with the desire 

 to avert scorn from himself by bringing the laugh upon 

 others, and especially upon certain clergymen, whom, as 

 we shall see hereafter, he greatly disliked. He now ac 

 knowledged that the whole thing was a swindle, and gave 

 details of the way in which he came to embark in it. 

 He avowed that the idea was suggested to him by a dis 

 cussion with a Methodist revivalist in Iowa ; that, being 

 himself a skeptic in religious matters, he had flung at 

 his antagonist &quot; those remarkable stories in the Bible 

 about giants &quot;; that, observing how readily the revivalist 

 and those with him took up the cudgels for the giants, 

 it then and there occurred to him that, since so many 

 people found pleasure in believing such things, he would 

 have a statue carved out of stone which he had found 

 in Iowa and pass it off on them as a petrified giant. In 

 a later conversation he said that one thing which decided 

 him was that the stone had in it dark-colored bluish 

 streaks which resembled in appearance the veins of the 

 human body. The evolution of the whole affair thus be 

 came clear, simple, and natural. 



Up to this time, Hull s remarkable cunning had never 

 availed him much. He had made various petty inven 

 tions, but had realized very little from them; he had 

 then made some combinations as regarded the internal- 

 revenue laws referring to the manufacture and sale of to 

 bacco, and these had only brought him into trouble with 

 the courts; but now, when the boundless resources of 

 human credulity were suddenly revealed to him by the 

 revivalist, he determined to exploit them. This evolution 

 of his ideas strikingly resembles that through which the 

 mind of a worthless, shiftless, tricky creature in western 

 New York Joseph Smith must have passed forty years 

 before, when he dug up &quot;the golden plates &quot; of the &quot;Book 

 of Mormon/ and found plenty of excellent people who 



