THE CARDIFF GIANT- 1869-1870 483 



great statue, brought in a ship of Tarshish across the 

 sea of Atl, was lightly covered with twigs and flowers, 

 and these with gravel.&quot; The deliberations of the Pick 

 wick Club over &quot;Bill Stubbs, His Mark&quot; pale before 

 this; and Dickens in his most expansive moods never 

 conceived anything more funny than the long, solemn 

 discussion between the erratic Hebrew scholar and the 

 eminent medical professor at New Haven over the 

 &quot;pores&quot; of the statue, which one of them thought &quot;the 

 work of minute animals, which the other thought i elab 

 orate Phenician workmanship,&quot; which both thought ex 

 quisite, and which the maker of the statue had already 

 confessed that he had made by rudely striking the statue 

 with a mallet faced with needles. 



Mr. McWhorter s new theory made no great stir in 

 the United States, though some, doubtless, took comfort 

 in it; but it found one very eminent convert across the 

 ocean, and in a place where we might least have expected 

 him. Some ten years after the events above sketched, 

 while residing at Berlin as minister of the United States, 

 I one day received from an American student at the 

 University of Halle a letter stating that he had been re 

 quested by no less a personage than the eminent Dr. 

 Schlottmann, instructor in Hebrew in the theological 

 school of that university, the successor of Gesenius in 

 that branch of instruction, to write me for information 

 regarding the Phenician statue described by the Rev. 

 Alexander McWhorter. 



In reply, I detailed to him the main points in the his 

 tory of the case, as it has been given in this chapter, 

 adding, as against the Phenician theory, that nothing in 

 the nature of Phenician remains had ever been found 

 within the borders of the United States, and that if they 

 had been found, this remote valley, three hundred miles 

 from the sea, barred from the coast by mountain-ranges, 

 forests, and savage tribes, could never have been the 

 place chosen by Phenician navigators for such a deposit ; 

 that the figure itself was clearly not a work of early art, 



